AFAIK this was always the plan, they were just getting bombarded in so much Slop that they made a full pause on all AI assisted work. There still is this part of the policy:

Reviewers may reject a submission, including without further review, based on the extent or role of generated material or concerns about its review, quality, or maintainability.

which is intended to get rid of the completely vibecoded slop. Flathub is taking a similar stance to it as to proprietary software: They allow it but don't support it

It's difficult to police and enforce. It requires manual review of entire code bases. Not doable for them. Not the point of the project either, you use flathub when you don't want the package system and get something directly from the dev that just works.

Yeah. As long as you're forced to disclose everyone wins really.

It also benefits devs who don't use it

Flathub may not want the extra burden of hosting garbage that no one will actually use

flathub is just a software repository, you can easily install flatpak software that isn't hosted on flathub

I spent today working with AI to improve some bash scripts I use each year for extra life. It was super productive because I got to do exactly what I wanted and was able to improve some basic things in a way that made sense to me because it built off of what I knew and made last year. It was great, and it explained why things I was doing were not as good because of spawning extra processes or backing up some changes so if the script fails it returns my back to the beginning. It also let me combine a few scripts. I can imagine that someone who is even half decent at programming could make some really neat things with AI assistance.

I used Google Gemini and it was free. I could have learned it all on my own, but I have a lot going on in my life and this worked well.