tainted-software

Free/Open Source Software tainted by LLM developers/developed by genAI boosters, along with alternatives.

The intention of this list is to raise awareness of this technology's usage in popular software, as well as give people informed alternatives that they can reach for when they want to make decisions for themselves. This is not a list created so you can go and give these projects trouble for their decision. If you want to file a complaint about it with them, we consider that acceptable but ask that it be done respectfully and constructively.

For more information on why we think this list matters, please see Why not LLMs?.

Contributing

To contribute to this list, file a pull request adding it to the appropriate category, along with any known alternatives. The pull request must include links to evidence of such (social media posts, screenshots, commit history, links to CLAUDE.md, etc). Title the pull request "Add <software-name>" or such.

Criteria

The criteria for being included in this repository are any of:

1. One or more core/prominent developers openly use LLMs in any level of supportive capacity to develop this software specifically. Accepting drive-by or minor contributions that happen to use LLMs is NOT qualifying. This may change in the future.
2. The software itself integrates genAI features of any kind, internally or externally.

Removal

Any project here may be removed as long as the following become true, even if prior LLM-authored code remains:

1. The project establishes a "No genAI" policy, where the core developers commit to no longer using LLMs for developing that project in particular and no longer accepting obvious LLM-authored contributions, and state the policy prominently in their repo.
2. Any genAI functionality of the project itself is removed in its entirety. "Kill switches" are insufficient.

Tainted Software

Developer Tools

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
cargo-nextest	Just use cargo test	CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md in repository
.NET	Any other programming language	.NET Runtime PRs, .NET SDK PRs
jujutsu	continue using git itself	Various core devs openly use LLMs, (Discord link)
nushell	fish shell	Integrated MCP server, core developer sets Claude as a co-author
yash	dash shell, but there are no other major shells fully targeting POSIX	Assigns and auto-reviews MRs with LLMs

Editors

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
Zed	Lapce, other popular editors like neovim, emacs, etc	They prominently advertise genAI features as a core part of their product. See their website.	There's a killswitch to disable genAI features entirely, but it's likely the code itself is still heavily LLM-authored.
VS Code	VS Codium* removes the AI features from VS Code	It's literally their main advertising tagline, and they publicly use LLMs in their public repository. Most AI "features" are enabled by default, and some cannot be disabled.	*VS Codium is still written with LLMs since Microsoft owns it

Libraries

Rust

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence	Notes
facet	Plain ol' serde	@fasterthanlime is a pretty open and prominent LLM user and booster	It's pretty safe to assume any other software/libraries by @fasterthanlime are similarly tainted.

Game Engines

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
UPBGE 0.5	UPBGE 0.36.1 seems to be slop-free	0.5 release notes state the use of AI in plain language

Services

Name	Alternative(s)	Evidence
Calibre 8.16.2	BookLore Clbre, a Calibre fork without AI Arcalibre, a Calibre hard-fork from before AI features	Added "Discuss selected book(s) with AI" feature

Why not LLMs?

tktk. Could use some help writing this with concrete receipts on environmental, social, political, and economic/labor harms.