Pith Number

pith:43UO5627

pith:2026:43UO5627NWRWBNBQ2GPEXLAN6O

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

AI Slop and the Software Commons

Christoph Treude, Marc Cheong, Sebastian Baltes

AI slop is creating a tragedy of the commons in software by externalizing review and integrity costs onto the community.

arxiv:2604.16754 v2 · 2026-04-17 · cs.SE

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{43UO5627NWRWBNBQ2GPEXLAN6O}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

AI slop is cheap to generate and expensive to review, and the review layer is already thin. Commons problems are not solved by individual restraint.

C2weakest assumption

That the externalized costs on reviewer capacity, codebase integrity, and trust are large enough and persistent enough to constitute a genuine tragedy of the commons rather than a manageable side effect.

C3one line summary

AI slop in software externalizes review and integrity costs onto the commons, requiring institutional responses drawn from Ostrom's design principles.

Cited by

1 paper in Pith

AI Policy, Disclosure, and Human in the Loop: How Are Contribution Guidelines Adapting to GenAI?

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-09T02:07:26.451634Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

e6e8eefb5f6da360b430d19e4bac0df3b011ac8209c89e23d13f77dac1e66663

Aliases

arxiv: 2604.16754 · arxiv_version: 2604.16754v2 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2604.16754 · pith_short_12: 43UO5627NWRW · pith_short_16: 43UO5627NWRWBNBQ · pith_short_8: 43UO5627

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/43UO5627NWRWBNBQ2GPEXLAN6O \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: e6e8eefb5f6da360b430d19e4bac0df3b011ac8209c89e23d13f77dac1e66663

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "567f3091638f4af4ea8d8623231a1c6f6e18c2e782cb9d90da5ebbb3a180460b",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.SE",
    "submitted_at": "2026-04-17T23:57:53Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "661488a179e3afb867ae2dd1c82e69478fb15bae7f973afcee0d15a3788568ba"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2604.16754",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 2
  }
}