8 ms·

Codeberg bans vibe coded projects

• sirnicolaz 2mo 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.
• saidnooneever 2mo 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?
  • Vivek-KY 2mo ago
    even i wonder,its hard to detect it.
  • guessmyname 2mo 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. [1] https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/how-tos/commit-changes/creating-a-commit-with-multiple-authors https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/how-tos/commit-chan...
    • prennert 2mo ago
      honesty?
    • applfanboysbgon 2mo 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.
      • ramon156 2mo ago
        Then the linux repo is also banned. I don't think that's a good way to detect "vibe coding"
        • FabCH 2mo ago
          The Linux repo clearly would be considered vibe-coded by Codeberg policy and it being banned is the policy working as intended. It is probably a good example of why do many people think that the policy is ultimately counter productive even to Codeberg itself.
      • mattashii 2mo 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 2mo ago
        But that just means they probably used AI to help code, not that it is vibe coded, no?
      • graemep 2mo 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.
      • Trung0246 2mo 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.
    • K0nserv 2mo 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 2mo ago
        Me too, whenever I check in something compiled by a compiler. I always make sure to credit GCC!
        • K0nserv 2mo ago
          I don't usually check in compiled artifacts myself.
    • raesene9 2mo ago
      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) :)
    • skeledrew 2mo 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.
  • adisguy 2mo 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).
    • no-name-here 2mo ago
      True, but it still enhances uncertainty for users - if you uploaded trade secrets, malware, etc you already had that uncertainty, now you also have it for whether your code will be deemed too high a percent AI, when you thought it was only ~1/3 AI or whatever.
      • seanclayton 2mo ago
        Using any AI code is a risk of ban on codeberg. Just write it yourself and no one can say it's written by AI.
  • OleksandrC 2mo 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.
    • timjver 2mo ago
      That doesn't really answer the question of how they're going to detect it at scale. Ban repositories with long comments?
      • OleksandrC 2mo 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 2mo ago
          It’s very poetic that codes written without human efforts can be efficiently dealt without human efforts.
        • roundabout-host 2mo ago
          Non-generative AI is not slop.
    • themgt 2mo 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?
  • flohofwoe 2mo 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 2mo 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.
• IceDane 2mo 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 2mo ago
    There is no burden of proof for them as they have no obligation to provide a service to anyone.
    • joegibbs 2mo 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 2mo ago
        The support they will receive for banning slop will probably outweigh the negative press for a false positive.
    • IceDane 2mo 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.
• jaggs 2mo 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.
  • qsera 2mo ago
    [flagged]
  • awesan 2mo 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 2mo 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?
      • AloysB 2mo ago
        > How much does it cost to host a few text files At large scale, it probably adds up. Remember that they also need to ensure backup, etc. Whether or not your code is being "used" or not, it has a cost. Even GitHub has been struggling last year with the ramping amount of LLM produced code. I can imagine that it is a real issue. They already encourage users to use 'agit' instead of doing 'physical' forks. I imagine that the costs are sufficient enough to motivate them to follow through on this; on top of the ethical and legal concerns. --- Why don't you host your own git for those dormant projects? It's really easy, you don't even need a forge. Just a bare git repo on server via ssh and you off to the races. I think their stance is fine; there are other providers if you don't agree with this.
• trentor 2mo ago
  Maybe a bit petty but I am fine with it their infrastructure really struggled in the last few months.
• GaryBluto 2mo ago
  [dead]
• CodesInChaos 2mo 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
• marginalia_nu 2mo ago
  Surprising to find a comment thread full of vibe coders being extremely defensive.
  • jeroenhd 2mo 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.
  • jjgreen 2mo ago
    Depressing rather than surprising.
  • Antibabelic 2mo ago
    Sarcasm?
    • uncircle 2mo ago
      No, not at all.
  • lionkor 2mo 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 2mo ago
      Yeah could argue that's why it grates so much with people who enjoy the work and care about it.
• alfiedotwtf 2mo ago
  Anyone else feel like this is pushing shit up a hill?
  • goodpoint 2mo ago
    no
• sajithdilshan 2mo 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 2mo ago
    Especially being a non-profit, and a free product.
• cedws 2mo ago
  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 2mo ago
    You just delete the account of anyone caught vibe coding until they get the message.
    • cedws 2mo 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?
      • inigyou 2mo ago
        Do you know what "caught" means? Murder is illegal, do the police track you 24/7 to see if you murder? Or do they wait for someone to come in with a complaint?
    • gnabgib 2mo ago
      That's bad news for you
• feverzsj 2mo ago
  GOOD! Now I'm seriously considering moving to coderberg. Their website is also 10 times faster than github already.
  • witx 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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.
• RicoElectrico 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo ago
      The passionate people are partly to blame for the job situation, sadly.
• KingOfCoders 2mo ago
  What is a vibe coded project? Where does it start? Cursor autocomplete? One shot Github project copies? [Edit] The pull link is https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253/files 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.
  • cwillu 2mo 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?
    • jorisw 2mo 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 2mo 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?
        • lproven 2mo ago
          No. "Most" is clear and unambiguous. It means more X than Y. The value of X is larger than the value of Y. X = bot slop ; Y = human written code In your question, 90% human written, 10% bot generated; no, it is not "most".
• exploderate 2mo ago
  They are a non-profit with a mission to support free software: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/en/bylaws.md 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). "
  • jorisw 2mo ago
    So 'mostly' is the clearest they get here. Meaning more than 50% of lines of code? At any given time?
    • lionkor 2mo 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 2mo 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.
  • aveao 2mo ago
    German court rulings on copyrightability of AI content, as far as I understand, so far have made it so that the person owning the copyright is a) the author, if there's enough creative input b) no one. A lets the author license it as if they wrote it, and B is just public domain, which is in line with their goals still. Their concern of "what if the license goes to model providers" is bonkers, and is completely out of line with their decision to ban projects that are mostly written by LLMs. I'm pretty sure it'd be violating copyright for me to upload a project that is 40% leaked Microsoft code and 60% my own, so what's the difference if it ends up that Anthropic owns 40% and I own 60%? It's clear that this is just them disliking LLMs for coding and trying to ban it in some way, and that's fine, but they should say it as it is and ban it fully, instead of going for this half-solution with a nonsense justification to go with it. If they don't actually dislike LLMs and are just concerned about copyright, then they should revert this change.
• mmoustafa 2mo 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.
• lazzlazzlazz 2mo 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 2mo 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.
• lilerjee 2mo ago
  Good job But how to check which projects are vibe coded?
  • code-blooded 2mo 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 2mo ago
      It also creates a perfect set of training data for future LLMs
      • code-blooded 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo ago
      Maybe this is their point
  • uncircle 2mo ago
    I know it when I see it.
• andy99 2mo 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.
  • cwillu 2mo 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.
  • witx 2mo ago
    That's just open source and software freedom views though
  • account42 2mo 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 2mo 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.
  • idkwhat8272 2mo ago
    activism is advocating for principles, don’t you see the connection?
• TacticalCoder 2mo 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.
• AyanamiKaine 2mo 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.
  • flohofwoe 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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".
  • potsandpans 2mo 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.
• rarisma 2mo ago
  Baffling. Why are they the arbiters of what is made? Also does this break s230?
  • witx 2mo ago
    They are arbitrers of what projects they allow hosting on their servers. What's baffling about that?
  • LtWorf 2mo ago
    Create your own server and pay for it and they won't have anything to say about what you do with it.
  • jeroenhd 2mo 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/ https://forgejo.org/ online. It's practically the same as Codeberg except you get full control.
  • applfanboysbgon 2mo 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 2mo 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.
• peter_retief 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo ago
      Neither really solved the problem, reality is too nuanced, AI fills the gap.
      • flohofwoe 2mo 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).
        • peter_retief 2mo ago
          Absolutely, I give my agents access to MCP/API and they can check logs and setup checks for potential problems and whatever else
  • lionkor 2mo 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.
• brainless 2mo 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.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  • sashank_1509 2mo ago
    Yes I don’t want to see AI paintings, I don’t see computers playing chess, I don’t want to see AI generated code. What you do for your business, in this economy is your choice, probably most will use AI for that anyway, but as a hobby I want to see humans doing all the coding and I’m glad codeberg can be a space for this. (Of course enforcing this is hard)
• frabcus 2mo ago
  Germany copyright law feels like the relevant thing here - Codeberg is a non-profit based in Germany. Best quick English language overview of status that I could find: https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2026/germany/when-can-ai-generated-content-be-protected-three-german-rulings-draw-the-line 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.
  • frabcus 2mo 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.
    • bxff 2mo ago
      If I had to guess this would make distillation 'attacks' easier, and I am not sure if it's allowed under most AI labs ToS. Anthropic goes pretty hard against keeping Claude Codes session histories local, opting to delete them if they aren't touched in the last 30 days by default.
  • veeti 2mo 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.
• olalonde 2mo 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).
  • lionkor 2mo 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 2mo 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.
• jeroenhd 2mo 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.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• batuhandumani 2mo 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 2mo 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.
• lionkor 2mo 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.
  • witx 2mo ago
    Vibecoders are implictly in favour of stealing content (code, art, books) so they get bothered by others taking a stance against that
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  • marginalia_nu 2mo 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.
  • throw310822 2mo 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 2mo ago
      > Because it's either plainly stupid virtue signalling aimed at the current strawman This seems reductive. Do you think that code-hosting sites should be unable to determine their own standards and the projects they host, solely because they make you feel bad (that "you" presumably neither wrote nor understand a single line of code in your project)? Do you think a lack of clarity on copyright rules is actually "tragic"? Or is the real "virtue signaling" always in the whiny comments because someone's rules on their own site hypothetically affected "you", for once?
• ed_blackburn 2mo 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>
  • applfanboysbgon 2mo 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?
  • lionkor 2mo 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 :) )
  • killix 2mo ago
    [flagged]
• iepathos 2mo 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 2mo 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.
• countWSS 2mo 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 2mo ago
    > Looks like those vibe-powered opensource projects will mighrate to somewhere else. You say this as if it’s a big loss.
    • countWSS 2mo 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?
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• openmarkand 2mo ago
  Thank you so much codeberg for supporting - artists, - creators, - translators, - writers, - climate
• jdw64 2mo 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.
• aniviacat 2mo 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.
• vlugorilla 2mo ago
  [dead]
• yomismoaqui 2mo ago
  They are free to limit what they allow in their service and we are free to host our own code: - Forgejo: https://forgejo.org/ https://forgejo.org/ - Gitea: https://gitea.com/ https://gitea.com/ - GitLab Community Edition: https://about.gitlab.com/ https://about.gitlab.com/ - OneDev: https://onedev.io/ https://onedev.io/ - Gogs: https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/ - Sourcehut: https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/ - GitBucket: https://gitbucket.github.io/ https://gitbucket.github.io/
• FinnKuhn 2mo 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 2mo 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.
• VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago
  This is nothing but a good thing. We need respite from the chaos and unrefined unregulated slop-filled AI coding world. If you want all that, I got a product for you - GitHub.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• alexruf 2mo ago
  I'm not really sure what to make of this. First of all, I think this decision should be left to the project maintainers rather than being dictated by the platform itself. Besides that, I don't think Codeberg is doing itself any favors here. It's kind of turning a blind eye to reality. AI is already an integral part of modern software development and can't just be ignored. For some open-source projects, this obviously makes Codeberg a risky platform to use.
• 7e 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  • tomhow 2mo ago
    Please don't sneer like this on HN. You've been here long enough to know we're trying for much better than this here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• FabCH 2mo ago
  The problem with this logic is that Codeberg itself is built on top of other FOSS. What will happen when Git accepts its first vibe-coded patch. Linus is famously ok with AI assisted coding, so eventually Linux can or will also cross the threshold. Will Codeberg stay principled and stop using Git and Linux?
  • archagon 2mo ago
    "Yet you participate in society. Curious!"
    • FabCH 2mo ago
      Do they? A luddite response is not necessarily participating in society. It could be argued Codeberg group made a choice to opt out of participating.
      • Timon3 2mo ago
        Unless you're willing to host vibe-coded projects, you're for sure opting out of society. It says so right on the second page of the social contract. On the other hand, stealing all intellectual works ever created without compensating the authors, building a plagiarism machine and then selling access to the stolen knowledge? Now that's participating in society.
        • FabCH 2mo ago
          And how do open models fit into that narrative? Say I am running Kimi K3 locally and commit security patches to Git. What now? Should Codeberg fork Git pre-2020 and keep the vulnerabilities?
          • Timon3 2mo ago
            I don't know, should they? Unless I've missed something, Codeberg haven't mentioned anything like this. You seem to be the only one bringing this strange idea up. So why are you asking me?
• lproven 2mo ago
  Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48822172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48822172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003465 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003465
• onel 2mo ago
  I think it's their right to build the community they want. If the rules they find good for them. We're not forced to use them. I think we're going to start seeing this more often, as more people and orgs are moving towards self-hosting or not relying on one central community hub, be it for code hosting, chat, etc
• menturi 2mo ago
  I do wonder how this influences projects like CoMaps which can currently accept code predominantly written by LLMs/agents. I've heard that the contributor must understands the code and is able to explain it, though I cannot find where this is a real rule. They do disallow using such tools in autonomous-looking ways (they say ‘agent mode’ or ‘vibe coding’). See: https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance/src/branch/main/AI_USAGE.md https://codeberg.org/comaps/Governance/src/branch/main/AI_US... Despite these restrictions, it seems Codeberg's new rules could put pressure on repos like CoMaps if the proportion of contributions is largely LLM-written.
• rainmaking 2mo ago
  This is completely insane. What are they trying to run, a museum?
• landdate 2mo ago
  Fuck yeah
• amiga386 2mo ago
  I already didn't like Codeberg, even though I am a free software developer, I prefer my politics to be software distribution, privacy/GDPR and right-to-repair rather than $CURRENT_THING... if I had to pick, I'd probably pick GNU Savannah. With this sudden fallout, I feel vindicated to have not moved to Codeberg. I like neither AI slop nor the crypto hustlers, but I like organisations that suddenly change their minds even less. Self-hosting is the way.