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FinnKuhn 45 minutes ago [-]
I moderate r/selfhosted and we tried to enforce this rule almost 1:1, so let me predict on how this is going to go based on my experience.
1. You try to ban low quality vibe-coded projects, but try to not ban high quality projects that made use of AI. The goal is to send a message on what you deem acceptable.
2. Anyone creating what you deem a low quality vibe-coded project sees their project as belong to the second kind of project and therefore insists that their project is allowed. So how do you make sure what category a project belongs to? You might use scripts to identify classic trades of vibe-coded projects, look at the users history, etc. None of that is going to be bulletproof though and it is a lot of work.
3. You stop trying to enforce this rule as it is a "fight" you can't win and dealing with this takes more effort than dealing with the issues the low quality vibe-coded projects caused in the first place.
We ended up settling on restricting new projects instead as the majority of projects that fall into the first category don't last long. So step 4 would be to introduce some other kind of proxy for this kind of project that can actually be enforced.
GabeIsko 1 minutes ago [-]
It's different for codeberg, because they have a lot of infrastructure they have to maintain, and are ideologically motivated to be a libre option to share peoples code. It's an entirely different motivation than promoting a subreddit that runs on reddit's infrastructure. They are really constrained on the infrastructure cost side, and stability is a constant struggle. They don't have the bandwidth to sort through the AI slop - they would probably rather ban potentially good useful projects at the expense of making codeberg a more restrictive place that people who use AI in a smart way avoid to ensure that they can provide infrastructure for libre software. I kind of see where they are coming from.
It's not just AI stuff btw. I recently evalutated hosting a static site on codeberg for a project I am working on. It is a cool project, and although it is commercial now (it's a video game) I would like it to be open source one day. It would have been a great contribution to codeberg (in my opinion)! Maybe my game can't be open source software right now; sharing open source art is a mess. But I would love to make the blog for it libre!
However, I came to the conclusion that the static page feature of codeberg simply isn't appropriate for this use case. The codeberg staff really only maintains it so that codeberg can be feature complete with other publicly available git forge hosts (github, gitlab, etc.,). It actually is a huge infrastructure burden that contributes to their instability. They have made it explicit in the past - that feature is so that libre software projects hosted there can have a static page if it would make the project better, and they don't care about any other use case. I don't need that - I want a stable platform that will host my small static website blog at a very low cost, with high stability and uptime, no questions asked. We simply don't have goals that align, and that is okay. I don't take it personally. The whole point of making my blog a static site was to build it locally and be host agnostic. The hosting privilege ultimately is going to Cloudflare workers.
I think that is a much healthier way to think of this sort of. The great AI deluge of code (slop) IS disrupting a lot of assumptions we made about the internet that were based on creating code that works is hard. Now creating code is easy. Creating good code may still be hard, but I think it will be healthy to re-evaulate everyone's goals and agenda's, trust in the people that act in good faith and have the best attentions in mind, and respect everyone's limitations.
This is what I love about selfhosting btw - I am a really active participant on that sub and I actually appreciate the balance you guys are trying to achieve between allowing people to share projects they think are helpful (even if some LLM code was involved) vs. not letting it be entirely overrun by crappy AI slop app spam (which opens up a lot of supply chain risk anyway). I love self hosting my software, and I have gotten a lot of use out of my self hosted Qwen model - notes only, no code generation though. Selfhosted is honestly the solution out of this mess. Empowering individuals to run the computing they need to use every day off of their own computers that they own, bringing computing to the masses. I hope we can move past this RAM market cornering BS and get back to that mission.
KingOfCoders 6 hours ago [-]
What is a vibe coded project? Where does it start? Cursor autocomplete? One shot Github project copies?
"7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5)."
Whatever "mostly" means. If you autocomplete a lot, and the code written is "mostly" written by AI by autocomplete - it seems you fall under this.
I wonder what the ratio needs to be. And I wonder if auto-refactoring in Intellij is also included, because Intellij created the code and then also has "unclear copyright status" if we follow the logic.
Together this opens up more questions to me than it answers.
cwillu 6 hours ago [-]
“You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex).”
Seems pretty clear to me?
KingOfCoders 6 hours ago [-]
What is mostly? >50%? >75%?
What does "written by generative AI" means? Autocomplete? IDE-with-AI-normal-classname-completion? Everything not typed by a human.
I personally don't find this clear at all and see many unhappy discussions in the future for Codeberg.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
It means if the guy running Codeberg doesn't like it. This is his fiefdom, not a public square. Make your own fiefdom for AI coding. You could call it Vibeberg.
badsectoracula 24 minutes ago [-]
You're mistaken, Codeberg isn't ran by some guy, it is a non-profit organization with ~1200 members (not to be confused with users - there are ~200k users), ~780 members of which have voting rights.
oneeyedpigeon 6 hours ago [-]
I think it's reasonable to assume >50% by default, unless the source clarifies what they mean by "mostly".
jazzypants 1 hours ago [-]
How would anyone ever be able to arbitrate this? It's an unenforceable policy if you actually care about fairness.
Orygin 6 hours ago [-]
It's reasonable not to assume what they meant. They have a clear stance on the subject instead of letting us guess
KingOfCoders 6 hours ago [-]
To me majority != mostly.
oneeyedpigeon 6 hours ago [-]
I agree that they have different connotations. However, in the absence of other information, I don't see how we could ever collectively agree on a better value. The least subjective option, as far as I'm concerned, is "more than 50%". If a is 50.001 and b is 49.999, then a is the one with the most, not b.
cassianoleal 4 hours ago [-]
>50% of words? Characters? LoC? Files?
oneeyedpigeon 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, this is the bit where it really falls down, regardless of how you define "mostly"!
derdi 5 hours ago [-]
> What is mostly? >50%? >75%?
1. Don't ask us, ask the Codeberg people in the thread above.
2. If you're not sure you can meet Codeberg's terms of service, do what others are claiming to do: Take your repositories elsewhere.
3. I'll just hypothesize that you don't have Codeberg repositories and are only arguing here for argument's sake.
lelanthran 3 hours ago [-]
So much this!
Here's what I cannot understand - the spirit behind this update is clear: to carve out a space for human-written projects.
Now we have a bunch of people nit-picking what "human-written" means, with a bunch of snide "Hah! Gotcha!" thrown in for good measure...
"What about if it autocompletes - that's not written by a human!!! Lusers!!!"
"Hey, I used LLMs to rubberduck this; that's not fully written by a human even though I typed it!!!"
"Hey, I used a _KEYBOARD_ to type it in; that's the computer and keyboard firmware that /akshually/ wrote the code!!!"
Face it, if you need to know how close to the line you can go without going over it, then Codeberg is probably not for you anyway - there's no need to nitpick the wording.
If you, in your own words, "write your own code", you don't really care where the line is because you're so far from it anyway.
There is no scenario where you'd want to nitpick the wording...
badsectoracula 30 minutes ago [-]
> the spirit behind this update is clear: to carve out a space for human-written projects.
It is not that clear though.
I use the Lazarus IDE for Free Pascal. Free Pascal is kinda verbose and the LCL framework Lazarus uses has a bunch of boilerplate and its design is biased towards tool-assisted development. As such, Lazarus itself writes a lot of code for you and you fill in the "blanks" that provide what you want to do. It also provides a lot of functionality for code completion where you provide something basic like a magic word or a very partial/incomplete declaration and it automatically fills in the rest, often adding functions and such.
To me, despite Lazarus writing a bunch of code itself, the projects i made using it are "human-written".
And to me many uses LLM also fall under the same category - e.g. i often use some small local LLM as "awk that can think" to transform text/code in ways that would be either cumbersome or sometimes impossible with actual awk (or similar). If i give an LLM a few C function prototypes and ask it to write the boilerplate C code for exposing them as a native module i do not see as any less "human-written" than if i used a script that parsed the C prototypes and generated the code or some similar tool: in both cases i had a few functions i wrote myself and had my computer generate code for exposing them as a native Python module.
So from my perspective, projects doing any of the above would still be a fit for "human-written" spaces.
lelanthran 3 hours ago [-]
> I personally don't find this clear at all and see many unhappy discussions in the future for Codeberg.
You don't understand their goal in doing this?
Frequently (much more than we'd like to admit) actual contracts leave loopholes in, said loopholes which go against the spirit of the contract. It is not unusual to have a concrete contract that allows more (or less) than the spirit the contract was signed in.
Rather than nitpicking the contract (the TOU), why do you think they need this updated contract in the first place?
jorisw 6 hours ago [-]
If 'mostly' means over 50% you could call this clear.
Otherwise I don't think this is clear at all.
Otherwise, what is mostly?
Mostly at the outset, or at any given time? Must the project move out when it goes from 49% to 51% AI-assisted code?
KingOfCoders 6 hours ago [-]
"Mostly at any given time?"
Yes, old project with 1M LOC of pre-AI code + 100% AI 100k LOC generated coded for the last three months, is that mostly?
rdsubhas 5 hours ago [-]
Noone can discuss in good faith if the argument is: "If generated in bulk by vibe code" >> "what if I generate word by word with autocomplete".
This is IMHO the reason why we can't have sanity, because there are people ready to hack it.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
That's why terms and laws are written vaguely. If you're obviously on one side of the line then you're obviously on one side of the line. If you're straddling the line, your punishment depends upon how the judge feels that day. So it would be wise not to risk it.
tempfile 5 hours ago [-]
I don't think this is a bad-faith response. Someone might fully retain copyright while using heavy autocomplete. I don't think such a person would be banned by the codeberg policy. This is at least a little bit unintuitive.
noosphr 6 hours ago [-]
If you have to ask then the answer is no.
akmarinov 6 hours ago [-]
I mean Codeberg will pretty soon start having to ask. How do they determine that and who'll be in charge to find violations there?
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
It isn't a public service. It is one person offering his resources to help FOSS. He decides if you align with his mission.
badsectoracula 25 minutes ago [-]
Codeberg isn't one person, it is a non-profit organization with ~1200 members (not to be confused with users - there are ~200k users), ~780 members of which have voting rights. The decisions aren't taken arbitrarily but they are proposed and voted for in an internal forum.
childintime 6 hours ago [-]
They could have tagged these projects with "AI" or "MixedAI", and they'd be removed from the default views. It should also make clear that such projects may have a dubious legal status. Though within businesses no one cares?
inigyou 2 hours ago [-]
They are also opinionated about what they host. FOSS only. Now updated to: unvibecoded FOSS.
Mashimo 6 hours ago [-]
> projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools
I guess if you auto complete line by line and actually read the code it should be gucci.
Edit: Oh, you found it as well now. Disregard my post.
KingOfCoders 6 hours ago [-]
"I guess if you auto complete line by line and actually read the code it should be gucci."
Not from their wording.
tempfile 5 hours ago [-]
If this opens more questions than it answers, then you are simply discovering that you don't understand copyright (which is ok, but not the fault of the Codeberg policy).
> You must not share projects that mostly consist [of LLM-generated code]
> Such projects having an unclear copyright status
There is no bright-line threshold at which a code contribution becomes copyrightable (and therefore relevant). It is a legal question determined by courts. However, nobody in practice has any difficulty determining whether their code is copyrightable.
Codeberg is essentially asking/demanding that "your code" coincides with "code you hold the copyright for". This responsibility can be delegated to other humans, but not to LLMs.
graemep 5 hours ago [-]
That is not what their wording says. They could have said "code that is mostly covered by copyright under German law", but they chose to say 'mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools'.
Also, if you are a non-German user of Codeberg and there is a wide difference between what is covered by copyright in your country and Germany (e.g. if you are British) this might make Codeberg less of a suitable choice for you. What copyright laws matter to a particular user? Their country, the US because of its dominance and reach, or some sort of global safe/effective compromise?
This has the feel of being done by people who do not understand how to work things to be clear legally, nor of an understanding of the consequences.
frabcus 6 hours ago [-]
Germany copyright law feels like the relevant thing here - Codeberg is a non-profit based in Germany.
It looks like Codeberg want only copyrighted material in their service, so it is reliable in the future that e.g. licenses must be followed (e.g. GPL), and copyright doesn't suddenly get declared as being of the model owner, and it isn't a copy of something else.
That is a cautious reasonable position - in early days of LLM coding (3 years ago!) indemnity from model companies was a major issue globally because of the lack of clarity of the law around this. The US specifically has settled on it being (effectively?) public domain. But I don't think that is fully settled, and it certainly isn't settled in international copyright law.
The goal of the vague "mostly" in the Codeberg change is to ensure there is enough human input to the code they host, to be reasonably sure under German copyright law it is copyright of the person sharing it.
graemep 5 hours ago [-]
> copyright doesn't suddenly get declared as being of the model owner
That does not seem to be likely. The article you link indicates it is the prompter and provider of any other inputs (in the case discussed the photographer who took the photo the LLM modified) who might have claims.
> The US specifically has settled on it being (effectively?) public domain.
My understanding is that sufficient human input makes it copyright. This is not greatly different from German law.
In both cases something that is vibe coded in the strict sense of having only vague prompts will not be covered by copyright, something with real human input will.
That leads to a problem with "mostly" there. Does it mean mostly vibe coded, or mostly AI written? AI written under close guidance is covered by copyright so should be fine.
This does make it important to keep prompt history and record human edits of generated code as that is what will prove sufficient human input.
Also, its not just German law that matters to users. For many users law in their jurisdiction is what matters.
FinnKuhn 55 minutes ago [-]
German copyright works a bit different from US copyright, as it requires a "personal intellectual creation", but there have already been multiple court cases that decided AI generated content is not protected by German copyright as it doesn't meet this requirement. You can find the original (German) verdict here as it goes into some more legal details on this: https://www.gesetze-bayern.de/Content/Document/Y-300-Z-BECKR...
So from an open source perspective I don't see any legal risk here as the worst that could happen is that there is no legal protection of the code, which would only give users more and not less rights. Also not sure what they mean by "unclear" copyright status. At least from what I can tell it seems pretty clear that there is generally no copyright on AI output.
frabcus 6 hours ago [-]
Given a German court talked about not having the prompt logs making it hard in a specific case to prove it had sufficient human input, maybe someone could do an open source hosting service where the Claude Code logs were fully uploaded with each commit, so that could be later proven? It would be cool anyway to have such a service, so people could learn how to do LLM coding better from the examples.
veeti 6 hours ago [-]
Once you look at how German anti-nuclear lobbying set Europe back decades on its energy independence and made us dependent on authoritarian hellholes of the world, it all makes sense. They just want to do the same with AI.
andor 6 hours ago [-]
It’s probably pointless to argue, but there was never a lot of nuclear power in Germany to begin with. This is just turning energy policy into culture war.
kalessin 6 hours ago [-]
Not a lot is inaccurate given the carbon intensity of coal and its importance in Germany's energy mix. Anyway, I think the nuclear debate is quite off-topic here.
veeti 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, when you spend decades arguing "nuclear bad" (or "AI bad"), it turns out you get left in the past as Jurassic Park.
InsideOutSanta 6 hours ago [-]
Jurassic Park is science fiction, though.
veeti 6 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately the truth is far worse, and some of us have to share a union with these fools ;)
flohofwoe 6 hours ago [-]
> user: veeti
> about: Just trolling.
Well, at least you're upfront about it ;)
lionkor 6 hours ago [-]
Open source code that is AI authored is worthless. If I need an LLM authored, idk, terminal emulator, I will simply ask my AI or use one of the tens of thousands out there.
veeti 3 hours ago [-]
I use Linux every day, where AI coauthored analysis and code has already contributed to harden its security. Like it or not, any project that categorically rejects AI contributions or engages in vague activist type purity spiral testing over "vibe coding" seems like a security liability at best.
graemep 5 hours ago [-]
It depends what you mean by "AI authored". If you mean one-shotted vide code, then yes. If you mean someone providing detailed instructions for architecture and functionality and reviewing the code, then it does have a lot of value.
brainless 6 hours ago [-]
This is good and I am saying this as someone using coding agents full on.
I am a software engineer and I do use coding agents and I do believe that there can be spaces which do not encourage or allow projects built by generative AI.
Detection may become harder as time passes by but that aside, I think the massive generation abilities of multiple LLM providers will simply make it tough for code hosts. But it is also a choice - there should be spaces where people post projects that they actually write by hand (or with minimal assistance of agents).
I am personally and professionally very much on the "generate code" side of the situation simply because I can deliver things faster. But I know that LLMs are basically large word prediction systems that have been built on existing knowledge. They remix very well but I do not think they create brand new algorithms. For someone like me who is focused solely on building ramen-profitable products or services, LLMs are great but I know that I am not going to spend time/effort in any new research. I am not saying that every hand-written project is going to innovate but we should encourage spaces to maintain the barrier, else we may even become complacent.
33 minutes ago [-]
yomismoaqui 3 hours ago [-]
They are free to limit what they allow in their service and we are free to host our own code:
However, they do this because of copyright status and harmful code:
"7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5). "
jorisw 6 hours ago [-]
So 'mostly' is the clearest they get here. Meaning more than 50% of lines of code? At any given time?
lionkor 6 hours ago [-]
This makes sense from a copyright perspective -- as long as you maintain 50% or more actual human authorship, in case of a conflict with future copyright laws around LLM generated code, you can at least claim that a majority of the code is human-authored.
tempfile 5 hours ago [-]
They are unable to be more clear, because the law is unclear. The safe assumption would be "if the code would be copyrightable, had it been written by a human, then it must have been written by a human". It is impossible to be more clear than this, because "copyrightable" is a legal term of art decided by judges.
marginalia_nu 6 hours ago [-]
Surprising to find a comment thread full of vibe coders being extremely defensive.
lionkor 6 hours ago [-]
Unsurprising given that a large amount of posts on the front page are about or in support of projects that are entirely vibecoded with near zero human input beyond "hm it feels kind of slow, make faster?".
AI is used to launder a lack of care and skill, and people really love not caring and not having to put in any work.
marginalia_nu 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah could argue that's why it grates so much with people who enjoy the work and care about it.
jeroenhd 6 hours ago [-]
One has to wonder how many of these vibe coding accounts are being defensive themselves, rather than having their LLMs be defensive for them.
Antibabelic 6 hours ago [-]
Sarcasm?
uncircle 5 hours ago [-]
No, not at all.
jjgreen 6 hours ago [-]
Depressing rather than surprising.
lionkor 6 hours ago [-]
Why are all the vibe coders so upset? Places that have mostly non-polluted projects will be fantastic for future model training. Codeberg doing this will mean that it will be scraped and part of all future models' learning input, surely? They have never cared and will never care about anyone's rights.
dvdkon 2 hours ago [-]
I'm upset because I strongly prefer rules to be unambiguous and enforceable. This is neither.
throw310822 5 hours ago [-]
Because it's either plainly stupid virtue signalling aimed at the current strawman (AI bad!) or- if the legal justification stands- it's another symptom of European death by over-regulation, which should be judged as tragic.
jmye 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
marginalia_nu 6 hours ago [-]
I think AI has enabled a sort of inverse impostor syndrome, where many charlatans now beleive they are peers with people who actually understand and care about programming.
A policy like this threatens this delusion.
6 hours ago [-]
witx 6 hours ago [-]
Vibecoders are implictly in favour of stealing content (code, art, books) so they get bothered by others taking a stance against that
olalonde 6 hours ago [-]
It would be cool if they just admitted that this is ideologically motivated rather than hide behind pragmatic excuses.
1) "unclear copyright status"
Even if the copyright concern was legitimate (highly doubt so), Codeberg would be fully protected under safe harbor laws.
2) "little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code"
Inclusion of harmful code is no more likely than human-extruded code (probably less actually).
marginalia_nu 5 hours ago [-]
> Even if the copyright concern was legitimate (highly doubt so), Codeberg would be fully protected under safe harbor laws.
If their mission is Free Software in some Stallman-adjacent interpretation of the idea, then it is actually quite a legitimate concern. The problem isn't that the code is illegal to possess, but that it's not Free Software, since that is entirely based on a licensing copyrighted code, and since there is legal precedent saying LLM outputs can't be copyrighted in many jurisdictions, it's highly debatable if it can be given a Free Software license.
olalonde 4 hours ago [-]
Agreed that it would potentially be a bigger concern but it seems they support both "Free Software" and "Open Source". See my other reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49004912
lionkor 6 hours ago [-]
> fully protected under safe harbor laws
Well, not quite, it would still have to deal with handling and moderating copyright claims under German law. So while it's not a legal issue, it's definitely overhead for a nonprofit.
> Inclusion of harmful code is no more likely than human-extruded code (probably less actually).
Based on what? So if I set up a markov chain and generate a couple ten thousand lines of python code, and somehow got it to run, you'd say it's safer than human code? What about low quality local LLMs? Where is the line that says that automatically (not quite "randomly") generated code has less issues than human-generated code?
Harmful code does not mean purposefully harmful, it could simply be accidental (like when an agent goes "hm, an instance is already running, let's ensure that doesn't happen" and adds a `pkill -9 myprogram` invocation to a script, unknowingly killing all processes that contain the word `myprogram`). It could also be code that claims to do one thing, but does another, or one that ends up logging auth keys, etc.
I have had SOTA models do all of the above. Not sure about more or less likely than human code, but since LLMs can generate thousands of lines per hour, that tips the scales.
olalonde 5 hours ago [-]
> Well, not quite, it would still have to deal with handling and moderating copyright claims under German law. So while it's not a legal issue, it's definitely overhead for a nonprofit.
Who is sending all those takedown requests on vibe coded repos? My guess is that this is absolutely not an issue that they actually have.
> Based on what?
LLMs produce buggy code. Humans do too. Like you mentioned, it's difficult to say one is categorically worse than the other since both humans and LLMs vary so much. By "less likely" I was just thinking about the fact that LLMs often refuse to intentionally produce harmful code.
Anyways, my point was that this is just a pretext. If by some objective measure they discovered that vibe coded repos were less likely to contain "harmful code", do you really think they would enact the opposite policy (e.g. ban non vibe coded projects)? Don't think so.
QuixoticNap 2 hours ago [-]
I have mixed feelings about this. However, if this is due to ideological reasons against LLMs then they'd have no reason to hide it considering their community. I think the copyright concern is genuine, especially since Codeberg is European.
surgical_fire 6 hours ago [-]
They are ideologically motivated towards open source software.
That means that they are ideologically motivated about the open source license being enforceable.
Just because you have ulterior motives, it doesn't mean others do. Codeberg is pretty clear on their stance.
> Inclusion of harmful code is no more likely than human-extruded code (probably less actually).
Right now this is unclear, based on personal experience.
I am totally fine with using AI tools, but I do review every line of code it spits out.
It's fair to take a safe approach and favor human oversight.
olalonde 5 hours ago [-]
I don't think they have ulterior motives because I do, I think that because of the loaded language they use (e.g. "taking a stand against AI", "LLM-extrusions") and the dubious reasons they came up with.
It's been decided pretty much everywhere that LLM output is not copyrighted by the LLM vendor. The only realistic risk here is for vibecoded code to be considered public domain, if too little human input was involved, but public domain is functionally equivalent to a very permissive open source license (e.g. MIT minus attribution).
surgical_fire 4 hours ago [-]
> The only realistic risk here is for vibecoded code to be considered public domain, if too little human input was involved, but public domain is functionally equivalent to a very permissive open source license (e.g. MIT minus attribution).
I don't think that's settled. For the time being it's fair to be on the safe side.
Either way, if it irks you that they chose this stance, you can just not use Codeberg. They are not the only game in town.
batuhandumani 6 hours ago [-]
Codeberg was never really intended as a place for small scale or one person teams to host vibe coded projects. It is more of a platform for opensource projects, medium and large teams, and people who take this work seriously. Many users also moved there after Github began pushing AI features so aggressively.
I created my account two years ago, but I have barely used it. I am gonna deleting it so that i do not take up space unnecessarily. Still, one thing should not be forgotten, those who fail to adapt eventually fall behind.
Another issue is what stance they would have taken if the vote had yielded the exact opposite result. I sense a whiff of a long-term self-serving approach in Codeberg’s stance. Who can guarantee that a platform with open-source, human-written code won’t eventually make that code available for use in models?
ducktective 4 hours ago [-]
>Still, one thing should not be forgotten, those who fail to adapt eventually fall behind.
Adapt to what? Current LLM endgame is "wished-spec => code". Where do you fit in this? You are fighting for the last 10%, 1%, 0.1% contribution in this march of the 9s game.
sajithdilshan 6 hours ago [-]
In a way it make sense. I don't think they have the capability/money to scale out the system to support a plethora of vibe coded project like Github does.
serchinastico 6 hours ago [-]
Especially being a non-profit, and a free product.
countWSS 5 hours ago [-]
The copyright/Anti-ai angle is likely an excuse and they're running
out of money for hosting, hence errors and anti-scraping blocks.
Its completely absurd to think they somehow waited years to ban AI for copyright, while deleting
anything they deem as copyright infringing.
Looks like those vibe-powered opensource projects will mighrate
to somewhere else.
uncircle 5 hours ago [-]
> Looks like those vibe-powered opensource projects will mighrate to somewhere else.
You say this as if it’s a big loss.
countWSS 5 hours ago [-]
Okay, lets imagine it get enforced and every project is
scanned for compliance, with some false positives
and inability to prevent people from sneaking in AI code.\
Do you agree with it now?
sirnicolaz 6 hours ago [-]
vibe-coders should be pretty happy about the fact that places like this exist, given that's it's ultimately thanks to non-vibe-coded OSS that LLM can improve.
aniviacat 4 hours ago [-]
I think that's a bad move. I've recently started to move my repos to Codeberg, and fortunately none of them fall under this ban.
But in the future, I will at some point experiment more with vibe coding projects. Apparently I'll have to host those projects on Github.
Maintaining two accounts is needlessly tedious, and might result in me fully moving back to Github.
Perhaps the same will hold true for many others.
5 hours ago [-]
saidnooneever 7 hours ago [-]
i wonder how they will detect it though. is there some good tool to tell them if code files someone submit were outputs or altered by LLMs?
OleksandrC 6 hours ago [-]
Claude-written code is quite easy to spot - because it has this particular style of overly verbose "walls of text" comments, that 1. repeat verbatim what the code just below does, 2. include "list of things" that quickly go stale, 3. talk about "how things used to be before we changed it here" (useless to anyone reading the code now), 4. "talk to reviewer" in comments. And many other comment sins.
And even if you tell it to make it leaner, it'll maybe trim a little, but it'll still be a wall of text. Claude really likes to write its opuses and fables in comments.
And commit messages suffer from the same verbose prose.
And all of that happens even if you explicitly instruct in CLAUDE.md to keep things lean/concise. It's a disease.
skeledrew 2 hours ago [-]
> And many other comment sins.
I find that it helps Claude when it's updating that code again (it's a kind of out-of-session memory). A few times it's come across a past decision I gave it, and notified or asked me to clarify where an update would be conflicting. I'm not reading the code but I sure know when those "sins" help to prevent a regression or otherwise undesired behavioral change.
themgt 6 hours ago [-]
Claude-written code is quite easy to spot - because it has this particular style of overly verbose "walls of text" comments, that 1. repeat verbatim what the code just below does, 2. include "list of things" that quickly go stale, 3. talk about "how things used to be before we changed it here" (useless to anyone reading the code now), 4. "talk to reviewer" in comments. And many other comment sins.
"quite easy to spot" this style in what sense? To a human? To an LLM? To a deterministic code scanner you wrote by hand yourself, per Codeberg policy?
timjver 6 hours ago [-]
That doesn't really answer the question of how they're going to detect it at scale. Ban repositories with long comments?
OleksandrC 6 hours ago [-]
They could, for example:
1. Rely on users flagging suspected repos (with human moderators reviewing afterwards).
2. Deploying AI agents to evaluate repos against known AI-generated-code patterns (also with human moderators afterwards). Of course, the irony of the situation - using slop machines to fight slop.
ande-mnoc 6 hours ago [-]
It’s very poetic that codes written without human efforts can be efficiently dealt without human efforts.
roundabout-host 4 hours ago [-]
Non-generative AI is not slop.
guessmyname 7 hours ago [-]
Most people leave the “Co-authored-by: <name>” lines in their Git commits [1]. I’m not sure why exactly, but I suppose it's either laziness or a lack of care. Regardless, if I were Codeberg, that would be the first thing I’d detect, and then I might use a Random Forest Classifier to identify the rest.
As other have mentioned, and I'm the same. Leaving "Co-Authored by:" feels like open disclosure of how the project was created.
That way if a consumer does not want to use LLM generated/assisted software, it's easy for them to do that without having to search around in the codebase for "AI Tells".
Removing those would feel like I was mis-representing my coding abilities (LLMs are better at most coding than I am) :)
K0nserv 7 hours ago [-]
I feel it's a faux pas to pass off work entirely or partially done with AI as your own. I make sure I leave those lines in specifically for that reason.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
Me too, whenever I check in something compiled by a compiler. I always make sure to credit GCC!
K0nserv 2 hours ago [-]
I don't usually check in compiled artifacts myself.
skeledrew 3 hours ago [-]
I expressly leave them there for transparency and potential future analysis. I'm even working on a coauthor attribution format for work done with Pi agent, as well as when there are multiple models collaborating. If Codeberg wants to gatekeep on AI-generated code, I'll leave them to their tiny niche.
prennert 7 hours ago [-]
honesty?
applfanboysbgon 7 hours ago [-]
AGENTS.MD and CLAUDE.MD also provide easy detection avenues. Trivial measures will probably catch 70-80% or more. You don't need a 100% enforcement rate for a rule to exist, indeed there are basically no rules anywhere in the world that achieve that.
Trung0246 4 hours ago [-]
At that point just use whitelist-based approach. I already used gitignore like that. It also easier to avoid committing temp file and secret through whitelist because those file are never in gitignore in the first place.
graemep 5 hours ago [-]
It does not prove anything. Some could not commit those files to avoid detection, and those files exist in projects in which only some code is AI generated. I have them in projects where, for example, LLMs were used to generate tests and for a few fixes/additions in the rest of the code.
mattashii 6 hours ago [-]
Whilst they may provide a strong signal, I wouldn't call it a guarantee. If I wanted to avoid vibe-coded contributions I might add such files, but with instructions for the agents that they're not allowed to read or touch any of the files in the repository.
Mashimo 6 hours ago [-]
But that just means they probably used AI to help code, not that it is vibe coded, no?
ramon156 7 hours ago [-]
Then the linux repo is also banned. I don't think that's a good way to detect "vibe coding"
adisguy 7 hours ago [-]
It's rare to see terms of use that are all actively enforced. I think it makes sense to state the outlines to justify e.g. banning a user, or in potential legal matters (IANAL, just assuming).
flohofwoe 6 hours ago [-]
I'd guess that it only matters once shit hits the fan (e.g. a copyright dispute or license violation). E.g. when the project owner claims that he wasn't aware of the violation because LLMs wrote all the code, Codeberg can simply point to the terms of use before deleting the project, which from their point of view is a quick and clean solution to the problem.
winstonwinston 6 hours ago [-]
For starters they (those who submit) should not hide the fact. If they do, it is quite obvious to spot LLM generated code for anyone competent.
Vivek-KY 7 hours ago [-]
even i wonder,its hard to detect it.
lilerjee 6 hours ago [-]
Good job
But how to check which projects are vibe coded?
code-blooded 6 hours ago [-]
I've actually been thinking it'd be nice to have something like GitHub, but only for hand-written code. If anything, for now I'd like to learn primarily from and perhaps contribute to projects that have human involved at all stages.
But I don't think it will be easy to detect AI written code especially with frequent releases of new models.
voidUpdate 6 hours ago [-]
It also creates a perfect set of training data for future LLMs
code-blooded 6 hours ago [-]
It does and it's unfortunate. Perhaps Codeberg might try to block AI crawlers access to the entire website. I know it's all jazz nowadays, but I'm not in favor of using other's people work to train AI without explicit consent.
surgical_fire 5 hours ago [-]
I think the idea is that they can point to their terms of service in case of issues.
If a project is found to be violating their terms of service they can terminate the account without much fuss.
lilerjee 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe this is their point
uncircle 5 hours ago [-]
I know it when I see it.
AyanamiKaine 6 hours ago [-]
It seems the conflict between LLM/AI and programmers is getting hotter and hotter by the week. I wonder where all of this will lead. Our times are uncertain. Many people believe with certainity the future. But only one will come true.
potsandpans 25 minutes ago [-]
My prediction:
A couple of cool and interesting projects maintained by modern day trappist monks. A couple of insular communities that are intolerant to views that don't align with their own.
Majority of the world will move on and acquiesce to the new ways of working, which is writing code primarily through the use of llms.
There will be plenty of witch hunts and public stonings along the way.
flohofwoe 6 hours ago [-]
> But only one will come true.
Eh, if this would be true than we would have arrived at a single religion, a single language, a single economic system or a single political ideology. Reality is the opposite, ideas tend to diverge instead of converge.
E.g. the 'agentic engineering believers' will just be another tribe in the jungle.
AyanamiKaine 5 hours ago [-]
I know what you mean, but its not about if a certain ideology is right. Its about reality. Reality will not diverge it will stay as one. Like the future it cannot diverge there will only be one future. I didnt want to imply that only one purposed future can be true.
I wanted to say that it does not matter in which future the different camps believe in. There will only be one future and no one knows how it will look like.
flohofwoe 5 hours ago [-]
I would argue that reality is what those different tribes perceive as "the truth", and from that pov there can indeed be different realities existing side by side ;) I wish that everybody could agree on the same objective truth, but that seems to a pipe dream, especially in the "information age".
I'm tired of SlopHub but at the same time how do you realistically ban vibe coding? This will cause a bunch of infighting with people accusing each other.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
You just delete the account of anyone caught vibe coding until they get the message.
cedws 1 hours ago [-]
I think you missed the point. How do you reliably identify and prove vibe coding? You accuse them of vibe coding, they say no I wrote it by hand. Or they say no, I only used a little bit of AI. At what point is it vibe coding? Is there going to be a Codeberg Stasi hunting down suspects and making them explain themselves?
jdw64 4 hours ago [-]
I understand that as a non-profit, they don't accept vibe code, and there are also server load issues. But once you start using Gen AI code, as you'd know if you've tried it, you can't stop the entire codebase from becoming Gen AI generated, because the machine's abstraction and my abstraction are different.
After receiving Gen AI code, if you try to modify it all and integrate it into your codebase, it can sometimes take longer than just writing the code yourself.
6 hours ago [-]
trentor 6 hours ago [-]
Maybe a bit petty but I am fine with it their infrastructure really struggled in the last few months.
peter_retief 6 hours ago [-]
wow this is murky water, I love the abstraction of AI, I feel like the director of an orchestra creating beautiful music in code.
I always resented having to write the same code over and over, now automated by AI
but also support free and open software, as all knowledge should be
flohofwoe 6 hours ago [-]
> I always resented having to write the same code over and over,
Those problems had been solved in the 1970s and don't need LLMs. One solution is called 'copy-paste', another 'software libraries/components' ;)
peter_retief 6 hours ago [-]
Neither really solved the problem, reality is too nuanced, AI fills the gap.
flohofwoe 6 hours ago [-]
Not sure if a non-deterministic copy-paste is really filling a gap ;)
But yeah, there are areas in software development where AI assistence is actually useful, I just see code-generation as one of the less useful areas, since tbh this isn't a problem that needs urgent solving. IMHO LLMs are much more useful for passively analyzing/bugscanning code bases (or data in general).
lionkor 6 hours ago [-]
> I love the abstraction of AI
Careful with that wording. LLMs are not an abstraction, they do not provide an abstraction, not in the software sense, as they are completely non-deterministic the way they are used today. Saying "write me a function that does xyz" is not an abstraction layer ontop of writing it yourself.
peter_retief 6 hours ago [-]
It is a really interesting debate, it seems to be a type of abstraction at least,
with an interface as a natural language instead of a typed schema.
surgical_fire 5 hours ago [-]
> I love the abstraction of AI, I feel like the director of an orchestra creating beautiful music in code.
You can host your projects elsewhere you know? Codeberg is not the only public git service available.
m4xp 3 hours ago [-]
Mmm, actually the composer is the one that creates music.
A director simply translates music to something human can experience and enjoy, similar to a compiler.
Get your slop machine to write you better analogies.
jeroenhd 6 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised it took them this long. Good on them.
I don't think this should have much impact either. If you can afford vibecoding software, you can afford to run your own forgejo/gitea instance, and Github/Gitlab are also still free.
Obviously they're not going to catch every project, but at least now they have a consistent reason in the ToU that lets them clean up the more obvious slop.
mmoustafa 6 hours ago [-]
How do you define vibecoding? Is using LLM-assisted autocomplete vibecoding? Is editing single files via an LLM vibecoding? When do we cross the threshold?
Just saying mostly written by generative AI is extremely broad as that can happen even with “human written” codebases via AI-assisted tools.
feverzsj 6 hours ago [-]
GOOD! Now I'm seriously considering moving to coderberg. Their website is also 10 times faster than github already.
witx 6 hours ago [-]
I already did move everything there. The responsiveness is great.
I only keep github as a front to showcase projects I want for CV reasons but I host no code there
LtWorf 6 hours ago [-]
I marked all my project on github as closed and added a link to the codeberg one.
After years google will still link to github anyway.
I had thought of just keeping them open and sync them, but I thought in that case people would presume the project is actually active on github and try to interact creating issues and pull requests and getting frustrated.
I must say codeberg's reliability isn't the best, but with all the scrapers that hit them it's a miracle they do seem to manage. And at work things on our private network without scrapers aren't more reliable.
allthetime 5 hours ago [-]
All my active repos have both codeberg and github remotes now. Unfortunately codeberg can be very slow or even impossible to push/pull from sometimes which is the only reason I’m still maintaining GitHub repos.
iepathos 6 hours ago [-]
This seems like a wild basis for a hosting policy. It doesn't ban code shown to be infringing, malicious, insecure, or unmaintained. It bans code based on how Codeberg believes it was produced or some individuals at Codeberg believe it was produced.
How would they establish that a project "mostly" consists of AI-written code? Lines, commits, tokens, or architectural importance? There is no reliable detector, and metadata only catches people who honestly disclose their tool use. In practice, this only creates an incentive to conceal AI usage.
Authorship is also a poor proxy for quality. Human-written codebases routinely contain copied patterns, unnecessary abstractions, stale comments, superficial tests, security vulnerabilities, and large subsystems nobody seems to understand. Many mature projects exhibit the exact same problems attributed to LLM-generated code with the technical debt they've built up over time. Slop isn't new or unique to generated code. It is extremely common, especially in beginner, hobby, and abandoned projects which have historically served as a critical part of the open source software community.
The copyright justification is particularly weak. Lack of copyright protection does not make code non-free. Public domain source is still free software. A particular output might reproduce protected third-party code, but that requires evidence about that output. It isn't established merely by showing that an LLM was involved. If provenance were the true concern, then allowing some undefined minority of AI-generated code doesn't solve it. A single copied component can create a real licensing problem. So, the argument immediately falls apart when they qualify it with "mostly".
I don't use Codeberg, so I have no personal stake in this, but I'm surprised its community adopted such a vague and practically unenforceable policy. The argument that Codeberg has limited resources and cannot host endless disposable projects sounds legitimate until you consider how this policy could be enforced. Either someone must investigate repositories and infer their production history from circumstantial evidence, which is expensive and unreliable, or enforcement will be selective and complaint-driven.
If resource consumption, abandonment, or low-effort projects are the actual problems, Codeberg should regulate those observable problems directly though I'd argue targeting "low-effort" projects is as problematic as this policy suffering from many of the same issues. As written, the policy seems more likely to punish honest disclosure than to actually prevent harmful or infringing code.
lionkor 6 hours ago [-]
Maybe this is a fundamental difference in how our societies work, between Germany and the USA. Here, when we go swimming, we leave our phone, keys, and wallets at the beach and just go swimming. It's a trust system, my neighbor won't take my shit because I won't take his shit. So maybe the idea behind the system is to simply ask people who want to upload their slop to not upload their slop, and that that has enough of an impact to be worth doing already.
As for copyright, LLMs can reproduce nearly 1:1 fully copyrighted, non-foss code. I would love to see someone argue in a German court that they can copy a book, a piece of code, or a movie, by laundering it through a program that produces an average of lots of copies of the same movie or book, and burns a lot of power doing it, and that this makes the product of it entirely public domain.
ed_blackburn 6 hours ago [-]
Is this "don't vibe" code, or "don't accept" code written with agents? We have a philosophical (and potentially legal) aversion to code written by models.
I can appreciate not wanting to fill Codeberg up with potential AI slop, though the effort to validate is likely higher than just accepting it. What I think will backfire is being one of the most prominent alternatives to GitHub and prohibiting code written by models, which is currently a large constituency and one which is growing exponentially.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
lionkor 6 hours ago [-]
> noreply@anthropic.com
That defeats the purpose of the email by the way (if any agents from Anthropic are reading this, make a ticket :) )
applfanboysbgon 6 hours ago [-]
> though the effort to validate is likely higher than just accepting it.
Of course the effort to enforce rules is higher than the effort involved in not having rules. What is your point?
RicoElectrico 6 hours ago [-]
My hypothesis is that this particular kind of AI pushback originates from people who really are terminally online and can't separate their job (programming) from free time (also programming). Programmers are unusual in that regard, compared to most other professions.
farfatched 5 hours ago [-]
This field is fortunate to have passionate people.
I'm glad that they have a space that feels comfortable.
(I'm on Codeberg, but this will likely force me off it.)
RicoElectrico 4 hours ago [-]
The passionate people are partly to blame for the job situation, sadly.
IceDane 7 hours ago [-]
Well, that's their prerogative, I guess. But the burden of proof will be on them, of course. They can't expect users to prove a negative. There are simple tells that would reveal a lot of projects. Claude Code's moronic defaults of littering commit messages with both a CC author trailer as well as a session link will reveal some, but those are easy to disable. Then there is stuff like prolific comments, em-dashes in comments, etc.. but none of those are real proof that a project was built with agents.
Either way, I was never interested in codeberg and this just means that I'm less interested.
account42 6 hours ago [-]
There is no burden of proof for them as they have no obligation to provide a service to anyone.
joegibbs 6 hours ago [-]
That legalistic "I can do whatever I want as long as it's not breaking the law" argumnet lasts until the first time they ban wrongfully ban someone for it and get huge negative PR
jeroenhd 6 hours ago [-]
The support they will receive for banning slop will probably outweigh the negative press for a false positive.
IceDane 5 hours ago [-]
Sure. And I'm sure that their users will take kindly to being banned with prejudice and without recourse. By adopting this policy they are committing to policing it and acting as judges. And at some point someone will be banned that shouldn't have and it will go on social media and so on and so forth.
They'll also have a fun time drawing the line. What if someone uses agents to generate boilerplate like tests? Are a few files out of hundreds enough for a ban? If not, are they going to force users to write the code manually? How are they going to verify that?
It's a big can of worms.
TacticalCoder 6 hours ago [-]
I'm all for banning vibe-coded projects because they are pure turds but I'm not for banning a codebase where AI is used to make the codebase better.
So what's the definition of a vibe-coded project?
I verify the code the latest SOTA/frontier models I pay for do generate and although I daily facepalm myself several times per day, it's still a tool allowing me to be more productive. That's why I've got countless examples of mediocre output to give: if people were to take a look, they'd notice the same.
The problem is the mindset "it runs, hence it's good" of fully vibe-coded crap.
I'm talking about stuff like "Add this information on the webpage next to that other info" and the model going on a tangent and pulling in new libraries to then do a computation on the server-side and then using client/server communication to send the info to then display it.
It works. It did what I prompted. We've got intelligent machines in 2026. Yay!
Except all that nonsense was totally unnecessary and the information was already on the client and all that was needed was to display it.
But the model saw a pattern: can you believe that? A pattern of information being exchanged between the client and the server. So of freaking course my prompt had to be solved by following the same pattern.
So what's that about? Full AI ban or ban of fully AI-generated turds? I'm all for the later but don't ban everything: AI can produce acceptable stuff at a rate that's making it a productivity enhancement tool.
Models have also only been getting better and better: as of 2026 fully vibe-coded projects are pure turds but what about 2028? 2030?
It's not because these things are introducing bugs in every five line of Bash code they write and generate what looks like an infinite amount of slop to solve things which should have required 1/10th of code that it's always going to be like that.
alfiedotwtf 6 hours ago [-]
Anyone else feel like this is pushing shit up a hill?
goodpoint 5 hours ago [-]
no
GaryBluto 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
vlugorilla 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jaggs 7 hours ago [-]
I'll add my comment from a previous thread:
This is a bit strange. Are they saying that Codeberg no longer accepts vibe coded projects at all?
If so, it seems kind of short sighted. Within a very short period of time all code will be AI code. What then?
And as the models improve, along with better code will come better bug fixing etc etc. So the quality of AI code will absolutely surpass that of human code. What then?
Will the repositories demand proof of programming ability? Why, when AI will be handling everything anyway. It would be rather like driving schools mandating that all drivers can strip an engine before they're allowed to drive? Very odd.
awesan 7 hours ago [-]
It's not strange to ban chess computers at a chess tournament, and it's equally not strange to ban AI code on a code hosting platform.
The costs involved with hosting a bunch of vibe coded stuff that no one is really invested in or cares about would undermine the mission of Codeberg, so it makes sense for them. Other code hosting platforms can go a different route.
skeledrew 2 hours ago [-]
> The costs involved
How much does it cost to host a few text files in the same way a bunch of other text files are already being hosted? Particularly if there's no investment - ie no significant traffic - in accessing said text files?
thih9 6 hours ago [-]
> Within a very short period of time all code will be AI code.
This is unlikely. Perhaps “most code”, but not “all”.
People can overwhelmingly shift to a new technology, but the old one usually remains in use, even if niche.
skeledrew 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah there are still people out there hand-crafting Assembly. Not so sure about punch carding though; maybe some extreme retro getup.
jjgreen 6 hours ago [-]
Once most code is AI slop, then the training data is tainted -- you know what happens when you eat your own crap ...
skeledrew 2 hours ago [-]
> eat your own crap
Technically you do. Every living thing eats it's own and every other living thing's crap. Just that it's recycled - through other living things - crap (does it stop being "your own" when it's processed by another?).
"All code will be AI written" is like saying "all code will be written in an IDE". That in itself doesn't matter, nobody should care,and it doesn't make a difference.
The workflow, or complete lack of a workflow, for vibe coded projects in terms of design, architecture, vision, etc.is the problem. The lack of oversight is the problem, and the lack of thinking by an actual human capable of thinking, is the problem.
JodieBenitez 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
jddj 7 hours ago [-]
It would be rather more like driving schools disallowing autopilot.
Not to say that I agree that the metaphor makes sense here in the first place
applfanboysbgon 7 hours ago [-]
I suppose, if your completely insane fantasy ever becomes reality, they could simply reverse the policy. Codeberg currently lives in the real world, not your fantasy world, so it makes sense to determine policy based on the state of the real world.
casey2 6 hours ago [-]
Concerned Citizen: Someone keeps lighting the town hall on fire, can someone arrest them!
Police Officer: #WONTFIX Town hall will be fireproof in the next version
Concerned Citizen: But it's still a crime. And what of the paper and desks inside the building how can that possibly be fireproofed!?
Mayor: Now now Citizen, fireproofing technology has come along way, besides, we've repurposed the Jail House into a Molotov cocktail factory; we couldn't arrest them even if we wanted to.
Concerned Citizen: You did WHAT!? Why would you do that when the Town Hall is burning down every other week!?
Molotov Salesman: Why because this town needs Molotovs to test their fireproofing tech of course. We've set up the arson test pipeline for the good of all in town!
imtringued 6 hours ago [-]
I was kind of thinking of switching to codeberg, but now I am questioning their decisions here.
How do you distinguish a vibe coded project from a heavily AI assisted project? The output is AI generated code. The difference between vibe and agentic coding is how selective you are about the end result and not whether it is AI generated or not.
rmunn 6 hours ago [-]
In Codeberg's case, they have chosen not to distinguish between those. Their bright line is "mostly", as in, if your project "mostly" consists of LLM output then it is not allowed. The definition of "mostly" is, of course, vague, and people are going to argue about where the line should be drawn. But there's at least something vaguely approaching an objective measure: they might look through commits and count how many have an LLM listed as a co-author, or they might count the number of lines of code changed by those commits. Who knows, at this point, what they will end up doing. But they're not trying to judge "how well did you curate the output of the LLM"? They have, instead, decided to judge "how many lines/commits/something created by LLMs have ended up in your code?"
skeledrew 2 hours ago [-]
> people are going to argue
They should just migrate their stuff elsewhere IMO. Even if all current forges go the length of banning AI-assisted projects, before that completely happens there will be several forges which expressly welcome such projects. Guaranteed.
cwillu 6 hours ago [-]
“Vibe coded” does not appear in the patch to the terms of use.
“You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools” would seem to clearly prohibit both vibe coded projects as well as heavily AI assisted projects, assuming both result in mostly AI generated code.
LtWorf 6 hours ago [-]
I seriously hope we codeberg users will be able to survive without your presence.
kreco 6 hours ago [-]
> I was kind of thinking of switching to codeberg, but now I am questioning their decisions here.
It reads to me that you are afraid of getting your project removed if you ever move. No need to pretend you care about the morality of their decision.
qsera 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lazzlazzlazz 6 hours ago [-]
Are they also banning projects whose code was written with AI or just vibe coded projects? Roughly every serious codebase now and forevermore will be at least mostly AI written.
lionkor 6 hours ago [-]
> Roughly every serious codebase now and forevermore will be at least mostly AI written.
There is a difference between AI written and AI authored, somewhat. Or maybe call it written vs designed.
A lot of the code written today is written by AI, even in serious projects, but the difference is that serious projects don't vibe code. They don't let the AI write whatever it thinks is best, they instead have clear requirements, established architecture, established testing frameworks, tests, CI/CD, linting and human code review.
The difference is intent; if you use AI to write the code you would have written, then nobody can tell, and it's still fully your code and you have reviewed it. That's not vibe coding.
If you let an agent autonomously plan and write code, that's different. The autonomous "Jesus take the wheel" approach results in code you wouldn't have written yourself, and might also have clear AI tells, fundamental issues (like security flaws by design, performance flaws by design, correctness flaws by design, and general maintainability issues).
This matters. I doubt anyone wants to use or read projects done the latter way.
andy99 6 hours ago [-]
This appears to be mostly due to fringe / activist views about copyright, rather than anything to do with quality or principle. If it was the latter I could get on board, as in instituting some standards against slop. But in reality it’s just letting activists hijack with their agenda.
account42 6 hours ago [-]
Fringe / activist views about copyright pretty much describes open source / free software so why do you think that is an argument against doing this?
noosphr 6 hours ago [-]
All vibe coded projects are in the public domain by definition.
The question is if the massive copyright infringement that all the major labs engaged in means that all work derived from llms is under the copyright of the original owners of the work.
It is quite possible to keep track of what piece of training data changed the value of what weight to the point that the activations for any piece of code can be attributed back to the original copyright holder, including the random initial values which are public domain. I've done this on a toy project for gpt2.
cwillu 6 hours ago [-]
The discussion doesn't appear to have been in public at all; all there is on the linked issue is a bunch of first-time posters who wouldn't have been able to vote.
idkwhat8272 6 hours ago [-]
activism is advocating for principles, don’t you see the connection?
witx 6 hours ago [-]
That's just open source and software freedom views though
rarisma 6 hours ago [-]
Baffling.
Why are they the arbiters of what is made?
Also does this break s230?
witx 6 hours ago [-]
They are arbitrers of what projects they allow hosting on their servers. What's baffling about that?
jeroenhd 6 hours ago [-]
I don't think American laws such as s230 apply here, as Codeberg is German.
If you want to be the arbiter of what you make, throw an instance of https://forgejo.org/ online. It's practically the same as Codeberg except you get full control.
applfanboysbgon 5 hours ago [-]
It's absolutely hilarious that vibe coders see themselves as some sort of protected class who are being discriminated against and think they can use the law to force an unrelated third-party to host their files for free. AI psychosis is a trip.
Ekaros 3 hours ago [-]
When from what I have understood they can easily deploy fully featured alternative in afternoon or less. Just take a single weekend and they have as good place to host their code ready, tested and secure. So should not in anyway be a big deal for them.
LtWorf 6 hours ago [-]
Create your own server and pay for it and they won't have anything to say about what you do with it.
CodesInChaos 6 hours ago [-]
How do they define "vibe coded"? I believe "vibe coded" was originally defined as letting AI write code without human review. But I often see it used for all AI assisted code.
edit: Looks like they don't talk about "vibe coding" at all, but ban code mostly written by AI:
> You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools
1. You try to ban low quality vibe-coded projects, but try to not ban high quality projects that made use of AI. The goal is to send a message on what you deem acceptable. 2. Anyone creating what you deem a low quality vibe-coded project sees their project as belong to the second kind of project and therefore insists that their project is allowed. So how do you make sure what category a project belongs to? You might use scripts to identify classic trades of vibe-coded projects, look at the users history, etc. None of that is going to be bulletproof though and it is a lot of work. 3. You stop trying to enforce this rule as it is a "fight" you can't win and dealing with this takes more effort than dealing with the issues the low quality vibe-coded projects caused in the first place.
We ended up settling on restricting new projects instead as the majority of projects that fall into the first category don't last long. So step 4 would be to introduce some other kind of proxy for this kind of project that can actually be enforced.
It's not just AI stuff btw. I recently evalutated hosting a static site on codeberg for a project I am working on. It is a cool project, and although it is commercial now (it's a video game) I would like it to be open source one day. It would have been a great contribution to codeberg (in my opinion)! Maybe my game can't be open source software right now; sharing open source art is a mess. But I would love to make the blog for it libre!
However, I came to the conclusion that the static page feature of codeberg simply isn't appropriate for this use case. The codeberg staff really only maintains it so that codeberg can be feature complete with other publicly available git forge hosts (github, gitlab, etc.,). It actually is a huge infrastructure burden that contributes to their instability. They have made it explicit in the past - that feature is so that libre software projects hosted there can have a static page if it would make the project better, and they don't care about any other use case. I don't need that - I want a stable platform that will host my small static website blog at a very low cost, with high stability and uptime, no questions asked. We simply don't have goals that align, and that is okay. I don't take it personally. The whole point of making my blog a static site was to build it locally and be host agnostic. The hosting privilege ultimately is going to Cloudflare workers.
I think that is a much healthier way to think of this sort of. The great AI deluge of code (slop) IS disrupting a lot of assumptions we made about the internet that were based on creating code that works is hard. Now creating code is easy. Creating good code may still be hard, but I think it will be healthy to re-evaulate everyone's goals and agenda's, trust in the people that act in good faith and have the best attentions in mind, and respect everyone's limitations.
This is what I love about selfhosting btw - I am a really active participant on that sub and I actually appreciate the balance you guys are trying to achieve between allowing people to share projects they think are helpful (even if some LLM code was involved) vs. not letting it be entirely overrun by crappy AI slop app spam (which opens up a lot of supply chain risk anyway). I love self hosting my software, and I have gotten a lot of use out of my self hosted Qwen model - notes only, no code generation though. Selfhosted is honestly the solution out of this mess. Empowering individuals to run the computing they need to use every day off of their own computers that they own, bringing computing to the masses. I hope we can move past this RAM market cornering BS and get back to that mission.
[Edit] The pull link is https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253/files and says
"7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5)."
Whatever "mostly" means. If you autocomplete a lot, and the code written is "mostly" written by AI by autocomplete - it seems you fall under this.
I wonder what the ratio needs to be. And I wonder if auto-refactoring in Intellij is also included, because Intellij created the code and then also has "unclear copyright status" if we follow the logic.
Together this opens up more questions to me than it answers.
Seems pretty clear to me?
What does "written by generative AI" means? Autocomplete? IDE-with-AI-normal-classname-completion? Everything not typed by a human.
I personally don't find this clear at all and see many unhappy discussions in the future for Codeberg.
1. Don't ask us, ask the Codeberg people in the thread above.
2. If you're not sure you can meet Codeberg's terms of service, do what others are claiming to do: Take your repositories elsewhere.
3. I'll just hypothesize that you don't have Codeberg repositories and are only arguing here for argument's sake.
Here's what I cannot understand - the spirit behind this update is clear: to carve out a space for human-written projects.
Now we have a bunch of people nit-picking what "human-written" means, with a bunch of snide "Hah! Gotcha!" thrown in for good measure...
"What about if it autocompletes - that's not written by a human!!! Lusers!!!"
"Hey, I used LLMs to rubberduck this; that's not fully written by a human even though I typed it!!!"
"Hey, I used a _KEYBOARD_ to type it in; that's the computer and keyboard firmware that /akshually/ wrote the code!!!"
Face it, if you need to know how close to the line you can go without going over it, then Codeberg is probably not for you anyway - there's no need to nitpick the wording.
If you, in your own words, "write your own code", you don't really care where the line is because you're so far from it anyway.
There is no scenario where you'd want to nitpick the wording...
It is not that clear though.
I use the Lazarus IDE for Free Pascal. Free Pascal is kinda verbose and the LCL framework Lazarus uses has a bunch of boilerplate and its design is biased towards tool-assisted development. As such, Lazarus itself writes a lot of code for you and you fill in the "blanks" that provide what you want to do. It also provides a lot of functionality for code completion where you provide something basic like a magic word or a very partial/incomplete declaration and it automatically fills in the rest, often adding functions and such.
To me, despite Lazarus writing a bunch of code itself, the projects i made using it are "human-written".
And to me many uses LLM also fall under the same category - e.g. i often use some small local LLM as "awk that can think" to transform text/code in ways that would be either cumbersome or sometimes impossible with actual awk (or similar). If i give an LLM a few C function prototypes and ask it to write the boilerplate C code for exposing them as a native module i do not see as any less "human-written" than if i used a script that parsed the C prototypes and generated the code or some similar tool: in both cases i had a few functions i wrote myself and had my computer generate code for exposing them as a native Python module.
So from my perspective, projects doing any of the above would still be a fit for "human-written" spaces.
You don't understand their goal in doing this?
Frequently (much more than we'd like to admit) actual contracts leave loopholes in, said loopholes which go against the spirit of the contract. It is not unusual to have a concrete contract that allows more (or less) than the spirit the contract was signed in.
Rather than nitpicking the contract (the TOU), why do you think they need this updated contract in the first place?
Otherwise I don't think this is clear at all.
Otherwise, what is mostly?
Mostly at the outset, or at any given time? Must the project move out when it goes from 49% to 51% AI-assisted code?
Yes, old project with 1M LOC of pre-AI code + 100% AI 100k LOC generated coded for the last three months, is that mostly?
This is IMHO the reason why we can't have sanity, because there are people ready to hack it.
I guess if you auto complete line by line and actually read the code it should be gucci.
Edit: Oh, you found it as well now. Disregard my post.
Not from their wording.
> You must not share projects that mostly consist [of LLM-generated code]
> Such projects having an unclear copyright status
There is no bright-line threshold at which a code contribution becomes copyrightable (and therefore relevant). It is a legal question determined by courts. However, nobody in practice has any difficulty determining whether their code is copyrightable.
Codeberg is essentially asking/demanding that "your code" coincides with "code you hold the copyright for". This responsibility can be delegated to other humans, but not to LLMs.
Also, if you are a non-German user of Codeberg and there is a wide difference between what is covered by copyright in your country and Germany (e.g. if you are British) this might make Codeberg less of a suitable choice for you. What copyright laws matter to a particular user? Their country, the US because of its dominance and reach, or some sort of global safe/effective compromise?
This has the feel of being done by people who do not understand how to work things to be clear legally, nor of an understanding of the consequences.
Best quick English language overview of status that I could find: https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2026/germany/when-can-a...
It looks like Codeberg want only copyrighted material in their service, so it is reliable in the future that e.g. licenses must be followed (e.g. GPL), and copyright doesn't suddenly get declared as being of the model owner, and it isn't a copy of something else.
That is a cautious reasonable position - in early days of LLM coding (3 years ago!) indemnity from model companies was a major issue globally because of the lack of clarity of the law around this. The US specifically has settled on it being (effectively?) public domain. But I don't think that is fully settled, and it certainly isn't settled in international copyright law.
The goal of the vague "mostly" in the Codeberg change is to ensure there is enough human input to the code they host, to be reasonably sure under German copyright law it is copyright of the person sharing it.
That does not seem to be likely. The article you link indicates it is the prompter and provider of any other inputs (in the case discussed the photographer who took the photo the LLM modified) who might have claims.
> The US specifically has settled on it being (effectively?) public domain.
My understanding is that sufficient human input makes it copyright. This is not greatly different from German law.
In both cases something that is vibe coded in the strict sense of having only vague prompts will not be covered by copyright, something with real human input will.
That leads to a problem with "mostly" there. Does it mean mostly vibe coded, or mostly AI written? AI written under close guidance is covered by copyright so should be fine.
This does make it important to keep prompt history and record human edits of generated code as that is what will prove sufficient human input.
Also, its not just German law that matters to users. For many users law in their jurisdiction is what matters.
So from an open source perspective I don't see any legal risk here as the worst that could happen is that there is no legal protection of the code, which would only give users more and not less rights. Also not sure what they mean by "unclear" copyright status. At least from what I can tell it seems pretty clear that there is generally no copyright on AI output.
I am a software engineer and I do use coding agents and I do believe that there can be spaces which do not encourage or allow projects built by generative AI.
Detection may become harder as time passes by but that aside, I think the massive generation abilities of multiple LLM providers will simply make it tough for code hosts. But it is also a choice - there should be spaces where people post projects that they actually write by hand (or with minimal assistance of agents).
I am personally and professionally very much on the "generate code" side of the situation simply because I can deliver things faster. But I know that LLMs are basically large word prediction systems that have been built on existing knowledge. They remix very well but I do not think they create brand new algorithms. For someone like me who is focused solely on building ramen-profitable products or services, LLMs are great but I know that I am not going to spend time/effort in any new research. I am not saying that every hand-written project is going to innovate but we should encourage spaces to maintain the barrier, else we may even become complacent.
- Forgejo: https://forgejo.org/
- Gitea: https://gitea.com/
- GitLab Community Edition: https://about.gitlab.com/
- OneDev: https://onedev.io/
- Gogs: https://gogs.io/
- Sourcehut: https://sourcehut.org/
- GitBucket: https://gitbucket.github.io/
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/en/bylaws....
However, they do this because of copyright status and harmful code:
"7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5). "
AI is used to launder a lack of care and skill, and people really love not caring and not having to put in any work.
A policy like this threatens this delusion.
1) "unclear copyright status"
Even if the copyright concern was legitimate (highly doubt so), Codeberg would be fully protected under safe harbor laws.
2) "little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code"
Inclusion of harmful code is no more likely than human-extruded code (probably less actually).
If their mission is Free Software in some Stallman-adjacent interpretation of the idea, then it is actually quite a legitimate concern. The problem isn't that the code is illegal to possess, but that it's not Free Software, since that is entirely based on a licensing copyrighted code, and since there is legal precedent saying LLM outputs can't be copyrighted in many jurisdictions, it's highly debatable if it can be given a Free Software license.
Well, not quite, it would still have to deal with handling and moderating copyright claims under German law. So while it's not a legal issue, it's definitely overhead for a nonprofit.
> Inclusion of harmful code is no more likely than human-extruded code (probably less actually).
Based on what? So if I set up a markov chain and generate a couple ten thousand lines of python code, and somehow got it to run, you'd say it's safer than human code? What about low quality local LLMs? Where is the line that says that automatically (not quite "randomly") generated code has less issues than human-generated code?
Harmful code does not mean purposefully harmful, it could simply be accidental (like when an agent goes "hm, an instance is already running, let's ensure that doesn't happen" and adds a `pkill -9 myprogram` invocation to a script, unknowingly killing all processes that contain the word `myprogram`). It could also be code that claims to do one thing, but does another, or one that ends up logging auth keys, etc.
I have had SOTA models do all of the above. Not sure about more or less likely than human code, but since LLMs can generate thousands of lines per hour, that tips the scales.
Who is sending all those takedown requests on vibe coded repos? My guess is that this is absolutely not an issue that they actually have.
> Based on what?
LLMs produce buggy code. Humans do too. Like you mentioned, it's difficult to say one is categorically worse than the other since both humans and LLMs vary so much. By "less likely" I was just thinking about the fact that LLMs often refuse to intentionally produce harmful code.
Anyways, my point was that this is just a pretext. If by some objective measure they discovered that vibe coded repos were less likely to contain "harmful code", do you really think they would enact the opposite policy (e.g. ban non vibe coded projects)? Don't think so.
That means that they are ideologically motivated about the open source license being enforceable.
Just because you have ulterior motives, it doesn't mean others do. Codeberg is pretty clear on their stance.
> Inclusion of harmful code is no more likely than human-extruded code (probably less actually).
Right now this is unclear, based on personal experience. I am totally fine with using AI tools, but I do review every line of code it spits out.
It's fair to take a safe approach and favor human oversight.
It's been decided pretty much everywhere that LLM output is not copyrighted by the LLM vendor. The only realistic risk here is for vibecoded code to be considered public domain, if too little human input was involved, but public domain is functionally equivalent to a very permissive open source license (e.g. MIT minus attribution).
I don't think that's settled. For the time being it's fair to be on the safe side.
Either way, if it irks you that they chose this stance, you can just not use Codeberg. They are not the only game in town.
I created my account two years ago, but I have barely used it. I am gonna deleting it so that i do not take up space unnecessarily. Still, one thing should not be forgotten, those who fail to adapt eventually fall behind.
Another issue is what stance they would have taken if the vote had yielded the exact opposite result. I sense a whiff of a long-term self-serving approach in Codeberg’s stance. Who can guarantee that a platform with open-source, human-written code won’t eventually make that code available for use in models?
Adapt to what? Current LLM endgame is "wished-spec => code". Where do you fit in this? You are fighting for the last 10%, 1%, 0.1% contribution in this march of the 9s game.
You say this as if it’s a big loss.
But in the future, I will at some point experiment more with vibe coding projects. Apparently I'll have to host those projects on Github.
Maintaining two accounts is needlessly tedious, and might result in me fully moving back to Github.
Perhaps the same will hold true for many others.
And even if you tell it to make it leaner, it'll maybe trim a little, but it'll still be a wall of text. Claude really likes to write its opuses and fables in comments.
And commit messages suffer from the same verbose prose.
And all of that happens even if you explicitly instruct in CLAUDE.md to keep things lean/concise. It's a disease.
I find that it helps Claude when it's updating that code again (it's a kind of out-of-session memory). A few times it's come across a past decision I gave it, and notified or asked me to clarify where an update would be conflicting. I'm not reading the code but I sure know when those "sins" help to prevent a regression or otherwise undesired behavioral change.
"quite easy to spot" this style in what sense? To a human? To an LLM? To a deterministic code scanner you wrote by hand yourself, per Codeberg policy?
[1] https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/how-tos/commit-chan...
That way if a consumer does not want to use LLM generated/assisted software, it's easy for them to do that without having to search around in the codebase for "AI Tells".
Removing those would feel like I was mis-representing my coding abilities (LLMs are better at most coding than I am) :)
But how to check which projects are vibe coded?
But I don't think it will be easy to detect AI written code especially with frequent releases of new models.
If a project is found to be violating their terms of service they can terminate the account without much fuss.
A couple of cool and interesting projects maintained by modern day trappist monks. A couple of insular communities that are intolerant to views that don't align with their own.
Majority of the world will move on and acquiesce to the new ways of working, which is writing code primarily through the use of llms.
There will be plenty of witch hunts and public stonings along the way.
Eh, if this would be true than we would have arrived at a single religion, a single language, a single economic system or a single political ideology. Reality is the opposite, ideas tend to diverge instead of converge.
E.g. the 'agentic engineering believers' will just be another tribe in the jungle.
I wanted to say that it does not matter in which future the different camps believe in. There will only be one future and no one knows how it will look like.
After receiving Gen AI code, if you try to modify it all and integrate it into your codebase, it can sometimes take longer than just writing the code yourself.
I always resented having to write the same code over and over, now automated by AI
but also support free and open software, as all knowledge should be
Those problems had been solved in the 1970s and don't need LLMs. One solution is called 'copy-paste', another 'software libraries/components' ;)
But yeah, there are areas in software development where AI assistence is actually useful, I just see code-generation as one of the less useful areas, since tbh this isn't a problem that needs urgent solving. IMHO LLMs are much more useful for passively analyzing/bugscanning code bases (or data in general).
Careful with that wording. LLMs are not an abstraction, they do not provide an abstraction, not in the software sense, as they are completely non-deterministic the way they are used today. Saying "write me a function that does xyz" is not an abstraction layer ontop of writing it yourself.
You can host your projects elsewhere you know? Codeberg is not the only public git service available.
Get your slop machine to write you better analogies.
I don't think this should have much impact either. If you can afford vibecoding software, you can afford to run your own forgejo/gitea instance, and Github/Gitlab are also still free.
Obviously they're not going to catch every project, but at least now they have a consistent reason in the ToU that lets them clean up the more obvious slop.
Just saying mostly written by generative AI is extremely broad as that can happen even with “human written” codebases via AI-assisted tools.
I only keep github as a front to showcase projects I want for CV reasons but I host no code there
After years google will still link to github anyway.
I had thought of just keeping them open and sync them, but I thought in that case people would presume the project is actually active on github and try to interact creating issues and pull requests and getting frustrated.
I must say codeberg's reliability isn't the best, but with all the scrapers that hit them it's a miracle they do seem to manage. And at work things on our private network without scrapers aren't more reliable.
How would they establish that a project "mostly" consists of AI-written code? Lines, commits, tokens, or architectural importance? There is no reliable detector, and metadata only catches people who honestly disclose their tool use. In practice, this only creates an incentive to conceal AI usage.
Authorship is also a poor proxy for quality. Human-written codebases routinely contain copied patterns, unnecessary abstractions, stale comments, superficial tests, security vulnerabilities, and large subsystems nobody seems to understand. Many mature projects exhibit the exact same problems attributed to LLM-generated code with the technical debt they've built up over time. Slop isn't new or unique to generated code. It is extremely common, especially in beginner, hobby, and abandoned projects which have historically served as a critical part of the open source software community.
The copyright justification is particularly weak. Lack of copyright protection does not make code non-free. Public domain source is still free software. A particular output might reproduce protected third-party code, but that requires evidence about that output. It isn't established merely by showing that an LLM was involved. If provenance were the true concern, then allowing some undefined minority of AI-generated code doesn't solve it. A single copied component can create a real licensing problem. So, the argument immediately falls apart when they qualify it with "mostly".
I don't use Codeberg, so I have no personal stake in this, but I'm surprised its community adopted such a vague and practically unenforceable policy. The argument that Codeberg has limited resources and cannot host endless disposable projects sounds legitimate until you consider how this policy could be enforced. Either someone must investigate repositories and infer their production history from circumstantial evidence, which is expensive and unreliable, or enforcement will be selective and complaint-driven.
If resource consumption, abandonment, or low-effort projects are the actual problems, Codeberg should regulate those observable problems directly though I'd argue targeting "low-effort" projects is as problematic as this policy suffering from many of the same issues. As written, the policy seems more likely to punish honest disclosure than to actually prevent harmful or infringing code.
As for copyright, LLMs can reproduce nearly 1:1 fully copyrighted, non-foss code. I would love to see someone argue in a German court that they can copy a book, a piece of code, or a movie, by laundering it through a program that produces an average of lots of copies of the same movie or book, and burns a lot of power doing it, and that this makes the product of it entirely public domain.
I can appreciate not wanting to fill Codeberg up with potential AI slop, though the effort to validate is likely higher than just accepting it. What I think will backfire is being one of the most prominent alternatives to GitHub and prohibiting code written by models, which is currently a large constituency and one which is growing exponentially.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
That defeats the purpose of the email by the way (if any agents from Anthropic are reading this, make a ticket :) )
Of course the effort to enforce rules is higher than the effort involved in not having rules. What is your point?
I'm glad that they have a space that feels comfortable.
(I'm on Codeberg, but this will likely force me off it.)
Either way, I was never interested in codeberg and this just means that I'm less interested.
They'll also have a fun time drawing the line. What if someone uses agents to generate boilerplate like tests? Are a few files out of hundreds enough for a ban? If not, are they going to force users to write the code manually? How are they going to verify that?
It's a big can of worms.
So what's the definition of a vibe-coded project?
I verify the code the latest SOTA/frontier models I pay for do generate and although I daily facepalm myself several times per day, it's still a tool allowing me to be more productive. That's why I've got countless examples of mediocre output to give: if people were to take a look, they'd notice the same.
The problem is the mindset "it runs, hence it's good" of fully vibe-coded crap.
I'm talking about stuff like "Add this information on the webpage next to that other info" and the model going on a tangent and pulling in new libraries to then do a computation on the server-side and then using client/server communication to send the info to then display it.
It works. It did what I prompted. We've got intelligent machines in 2026. Yay!
Except all that nonsense was totally unnecessary and the information was already on the client and all that was needed was to display it.
But the model saw a pattern: can you believe that? A pattern of information being exchanged between the client and the server. So of freaking course my prompt had to be solved by following the same pattern.
So what's that about? Full AI ban or ban of fully AI-generated turds? I'm all for the later but don't ban everything: AI can produce acceptable stuff at a rate that's making it a productivity enhancement tool.
Models have also only been getting better and better: as of 2026 fully vibe-coded projects are pure turds but what about 2028? 2030?
It's not because these things are introducing bugs in every five line of Bash code they write and generate what looks like an infinite amount of slop to solve things which should have required 1/10th of code that it's always going to be like that.
This is a bit strange. Are they saying that Codeberg no longer accepts vibe coded projects at all?
If so, it seems kind of short sighted. Within a very short period of time all code will be AI code. What then?
And as the models improve, along with better code will come better bug fixing etc etc. So the quality of AI code will absolutely surpass that of human code. What then?
Will the repositories demand proof of programming ability? Why, when AI will be handling everything anyway. It would be rather like driving schools mandating that all drivers can strip an engine before they're allowed to drive? Very odd.
The costs involved with hosting a bunch of vibe coded stuff that no one is really invested in or cares about would undermine the mission of Codeberg, so it makes sense for them. Other code hosting platforms can go a different route.
How much does it cost to host a few text files in the same way a bunch of other text files are already being hosted? Particularly if there's no investment - ie no significant traffic - in accessing said text files?
This is unlikely. Perhaps “most code”, but not “all”.
People can overwhelmingly shift to a new technology, but the old one usually remains in use, even if niche.
Technically you do. Every living thing eats it's own and every other living thing's crap. Just that it's recycled - through other living things - crap (does it stop being "your own" when it's processed by another?).
"All code will be AI written" is like saying "all code will be written in an IDE". That in itself doesn't matter, nobody should care,and it doesn't make a difference.
The workflow, or complete lack of a workflow, for vibe coded projects in terms of design, architecture, vision, etc.is the problem. The lack of oversight is the problem, and the lack of thinking by an actual human capable of thinking, is the problem.
Not to say that I agree that the metaphor makes sense here in the first place
Police Officer: #WONTFIX Town hall will be fireproof in the next version
Concerned Citizen: But it's still a crime. And what of the paper and desks inside the building how can that possibly be fireproofed!?
Mayor: Now now Citizen, fireproofing technology has come along way, besides, we've repurposed the Jail House into a Molotov cocktail factory; we couldn't arrest them even if we wanted to.
Concerned Citizen: You did WHAT!? Why would you do that when the Town Hall is burning down every other week!?
Molotov Salesman: Why because this town needs Molotovs to test their fireproofing tech of course. We've set up the arson test pipeline for the good of all in town!
How do you distinguish a vibe coded project from a heavily AI assisted project? The output is AI generated code. The difference between vibe and agentic coding is how selective you are about the end result and not whether it is AI generated or not.
They should just migrate their stuff elsewhere IMO. Even if all current forges go the length of banning AI-assisted projects, before that completely happens there will be several forges which expressly welcome such projects. Guaranteed.
“You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools” would seem to clearly prohibit both vibe coded projects as well as heavily AI assisted projects, assuming both result in mostly AI generated code.
It reads to me that you are afraid of getting your project removed if you ever move. No need to pretend you care about the morality of their decision.
There is a difference between AI written and AI authored, somewhat. Or maybe call it written vs designed.
A lot of the code written today is written by AI, even in serious projects, but the difference is that serious projects don't vibe code. They don't let the AI write whatever it thinks is best, they instead have clear requirements, established architecture, established testing frameworks, tests, CI/CD, linting and human code review.
The difference is intent; if you use AI to write the code you would have written, then nobody can tell, and it's still fully your code and you have reviewed it. That's not vibe coding.
If you let an agent autonomously plan and write code, that's different. The autonomous "Jesus take the wheel" approach results in code you wouldn't have written yourself, and might also have clear AI tells, fundamental issues (like security flaws by design, performance flaws by design, correctness flaws by design, and general maintainability issues).
This matters. I doubt anyone wants to use or read projects done the latter way.
The question is if the massive copyright infringement that all the major labs engaged in means that all work derived from llms is under the copyright of the original owners of the work.
It is quite possible to keep track of what piece of training data changed the value of what weight to the point that the activations for any piece of code can be attributed back to the original copyright holder, including the random initial values which are public domain. I've done this on a toy project for gpt2.
Why are they the arbiters of what is made? Also does this break s230?
If you want to be the arbiter of what you make, throw an instance of https://forgejo.org/ online. It's practically the same as Codeberg except you get full control.
edit: Looks like they don't talk about "vibe coding" at all, but ban code mostly written by AI:
> You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools