In a move that has turned heads and brought out the ire of users everywhere, one of the biggest subreddits for all things open source has banned artificial intelligence (AI) projects as well as users who do not speak English. A post made on the subreddit on October 24, 2026, entitled “Your tokens aren’t valuable: No more AI,” added four new main rules:

• Projects advertised here must be all of: 1 year old (not just age, but actively maintained), with significant Reddit contributions, have multiple contributors (subjectively 3+), not be a common capstone project (school projects, such as note-taking, PDF viewers, cli music players, etc), not be intended for AI (such as MCPs), and have an existing community […].
• If it's obvious you're using AI in your project, we don't want it […].
• If you don't speak English, you need to find a different community […].
• Temporary bans are only for community members that made temporary lapses in judgement, such as when getting agitated. If you post (or comment) things we don't want, such as the result of your LLM output tokens, you will never be welcome back.

Commenters are furious about these new rules, even those concerning AI. But not every comment is about AI and LLMs. One user, bikes-n-math, brought up an important point: "So my project/package I've actively maintained for nine years, has 300+ stars on github, resolved dozens of issues for, and uses exactly zero AI is no longer welcome here because I am the only contributor?"

There are a lot of single contributor open source projects, none of which would be allowed under the new rules.

One commenter, TuringTestTwister, brought up an important point: "This is orthogonal to open source. It's OK to not like AI but it doesn't change whether something is open source or not. I guess Linux is no longer allowed here? Linus uses AI for kernel development now."

Would r/opensource dare ban Linus Torvalds?