We in the Handmade community have been, shall we say, slow adopters of AI. In a Discord post early this year, I wrote that the community has generally responded to AI with apathy—we like programming, so why automate the thing we enjoy? Some people use it, some people don’t, many people find value in it without compromising their programming values. But as time goes on, and more new members join the community, we are concerned about the erosion of community values, and long-time members are growing frustrated at the frequent appearance of outright slop in #project-showcase.

We feel it is time to clearly define what we see as acceptable and unacceptable use of AI in this community. We are not opening the floodgates nor banning it outright, but we are clearly defining some practices that we feel are unacceptable. The Handmade Network feels different from other programming communities; our goal with this policy is simply to keep it that way.

You can read the full policy in detail at https://handmade.network/ai-policy. In short, there are four new rules:

  1. No vibe coding (i.e. you must at least read the code)
  2. No AI prose, ever
  3. All projects now require an AI disclosure
  4. All #project-showcase posts must have zero AI codegen (with narrow exceptions for AI search and deterministic / mechanical output)

Our goal is for these rules to be relatively permissive. We don’t want to stand in the way of people using AI responsibly, and as the community’s perspective on AI evolves, we want to allow community members to use their best judgment. But we do want to clearly signal to newcomers that we actually care about what the computer is doing, and that we enjoy knowing what the computer is doing. If you’re going to share a project in this community, reading the code and being a human is really the bare minimum.

The #project-showcase rule is significantly more restrictive, however. We gave this decision a lot of thought, but ultimately decided it was important to be strict. The showcase is where the community goes for inspiration, and it should be the clearest expression of our community values. When people look at #project-showcase, they should know with confidence that the work was produced entirely by a human who cares about Handmade programming. That’s what makes the channel inspiring, far more than the level of polish on display.

We know that this policy will reject some good projects. In fact, I want to drive this point home very strongly: despite our rules, we do NOT believe that it is impossible to create high-quality software using AI tools. There may well be 100% vibe-coded software that members of the Handmade community find useful and pleasant. But we are not a home for “all good software”; we are a home for Handmade software. (This should not be a surprise—for example, many games made in Unity are incredibly high-quality but nonetheless not “Handmade”.)

Our goal is to foster a culture of programmers who love programming, care deeply about what the computer is doing, and use that knowledge to produce great software. No matter what happens in the software industry, we’re not going to let AI change any of that.

-Ben

P.S. We also made some small updates to our manifesto, values page, and conduct rules, and added a new privacy policy to increase transparency about how we use data. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.