- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1279028/codeberg-bans-vibe-coded-projects
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- 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).
That feels like a reasonable middle ground. Allow some things with some AI written code, but don’t allow stuff that is a majority of AI code.
Guess I’ll pull all my stuff from Codeberg then, vibe coded or not.
That’s dangerous as hell, because there is no guarantee that your stuff is deleted for the wrong reason.
It’s their decision. But I dislike it.
There’s never a guarantee that they won’t delete your stuff for the wrong reasons. That’s not something you had before this. I’m not trying to be pedantic, I just mean if that’s a legitimate concern you have that you should be backing things up in different ways as well.
Like anyone who’s offended by this isn’t already slopping for Microsoft’s GitHub.
Seeing how codeberg is FOSS only, I’m not suprised. Vibe-coded projects is a HUGE legal trap considering licensing. And seeing how it’s based in Germany (notorious about siding with license owner against regular individuals) it only makes sense
How can I prove that I have ownership over code I wrote myself, and that it isn’t copyrighted somewhere in the world? How can anyone prove that code is written by a human or AI (if you don’t commit obvious AI harness files and folders)?
Developers also “generate” code and are also “trained” on code they written as freelancers or employees for others which is potentially copyrighted. In that aspect just because it’s written by hand, doesn’t imply the writer has copyright on it.
A repo host that can remove your repo at any moment because someone can accuse your code of being “vibe coded” is not a repo host I’d trust. It shouldn’t matter how good, bad, or A.I. written your code is. It’s a hosting platform.
I mean, I agree with you, but there’s still room for abuse.
Have you seen OpenClaw’s issues page?
Vibe coders and AI agents are floating it with garbage, if they were to do that to Codeberg, it’ll probably run out of resources pretty quickly
IMO everyone should have a local backup of everything they can get related to the repo. Like I know with git itself, anytime you clone the repo you get everything, but also the supporting stuff that is in the layer outside of git. IMO the host should mainly be the hub where everyone gets and interacts with the project, while everything else is already good to go in a new location, should the host either screw up in good faith, get corrupted by outside influences, or gets overrun by local or remote powers.
This makes me a bit curious about whether the overall risk to projects is higher from individual local device failure or politics around who controls remote hosting services and the nature of the project.
Actual question. Can you revert git to a prior state without the remote repo?
Yeah, as the other commenter mentioned, git is a distributed source control system, so all clones have the full history (though you can bump up the “starting point” to reduce the overhead of storing all previous commits).
Hosts like github can add more features on top of that, which would have to be backed up separately, but you can automate the repository itself using a single command, which is the same command used to make a clone in the first place.
Yes, that’s a core purpose of git.
git reset --hard <commit-hash>
I mean the host can always remove your repo. We’ll see how they handle it; but I would assume it won’t be without care. But yet another reason to host your own as well.
The main argument is due to copyright issues of LLM generated code. Github will happily remove repos which violated copyright laws or IP laws. It makes sense that Codeberg doesn’t want to host code which may be violating copyright law.
And anybody could try to take down your repository by pointing to copyright law in general. Bad faith takedowns are not a new phenomenon.
Then why not say it’s not allowed to upload code you don’t have copyright to? This would make sense, nobody would question it and it would generally also cover AI-generated code.
Mentioning vibe coding just upgraded it into a social and moral topic, while the sole fact that AI generated code is no issue at all, just that there is not a general concensus in the world who holds the copyright to that code.
It’s kinda like blanked banning cooking, because you can’t cook without a knife, and knife can be used as a weapon.
What
And how do they know it’s violating copyright law?
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I have the same feeling with SourceHut which bans projects related to crypto money. I think bitcoins is a stupid idea, but knowing that the owner of the site can ban you because of the stupid idea of the day is a very wrong idea.
Very cringe thing to do when the whole industry jumps on LLM-automation wagon. This way you filter out people who actually do stuff professionally.
Good to know though. Would avoid.
The only acceptable use in the industry is using it as a code analysis tool - vibe-coding is not.
Why though? Aside from blind hate, good written JIRA stories are almost oneshot now in many occasions. You can spend more mental energy on logic correctness rather than translation of requirements into code.
Not only it is faster, but you can deliver greater quality faster. Slopware is a result of trying to crank the dev speed to the max without following proper sdlc with proper dod.
I get it, but determining and moreso verifying code is mostly generated is so intractable that this will likely not do anything practically. Well, perhaps it will discourage some disclosure.
Yeah but I also get it as a thing to put down, just in case you need to mass-ban thousands of clearly-AI-generated projects. You can then just point to this ToS.
Define clearly
As in obvious. Like they have model instructions and bots credited as authors on commits.
Congrats you made a mistake. Any contributor can make commits with ai bots credited into them, and it’s not displayed to the reviewer. Meaning that for just accepting a MR that looked good, you would get banned. Nothing is obvious
I think a lot of the time with these things is not really about filtering every single offending project but stablishing a legal precedent to remove a project the moment it is found to be violating the rules.
Yeah, saying outright that you can’t gives them the ability to remove a problematic project without issue. Otherwise, GiganticProject, that prints “hello world” and is used by Microsoft, which is a million lines of code with 100,000 lines committed every day can be removed without having to deal with Microsoft’s lawyers.
I don’t think anyone expects to catch every vibe coded project that might end up on the site. It’s seems to be about nurturing specific direction for their community, giving admins clear rules on this issue and making their decisions easier in case they do find (or get a report about) a clearly AI “led” project.
Even if vibe coder manages to stick around, they can’t be sure their projects won’t disappear at random due to the new rules. Might be enough to prevent some of them from using the site.
giving admins clear rules on this issue and making their decisions
The wording used is “mostly”. Which is concerning, because “mostly” is anything but clear and leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
It’s a bit of a double edged sword. If you’re too vague it’s easy to allow for overreach but if you’re too specific some people will try to skirt the line on technicalities. The final comment in the linked discussion promised to clarify this point in a future blog post so I guess anyone who might be affected by this change should keep an eye for that.
Exactly.
Boosters: There’s no way to enforce this! This rule shouldn’t exist. You can’t be 100% sure a project isn’t slop. Keep the flood gates open.
Reality: We also can’t 100% enforce that people follow the speed limit, but we have speed limit laws. When we catch someone, we can point to the law. The mere existence of the law also acts as a small deterrent.
Same with Codeberg. We can’t 100% enforce the ban, but when we catch someone we’ll be able to point to the rule and kick em out. And just seeing an “AI not welcome” sign on the wall will deter some amount of people.
And: false positives? How much fun is it to go to clone your repo and find it locked because something (probably an AI algorithm) decided your project was “vibe coded”?
Don’t ask me. I have nothing to do with Codeberg and I’m not involved in the process itself, I’m just speculating. I would assume that if they’re against hosting AI projects they won’t try to hunt for them using AI screening and stick to a honour system + reporting instead but I know nothing about Codeberg’s inner workings to say for certain.
There will probably be more info on that once the official announcement drops so I guess we’ll see.
The Codeberg team seems crazy solid, or so I feel. I have all my repos there except one which isn’t open source.
That’s good to know. Hopefully they’ll be able to come up with a decent solution that’ll fit their community well.
Yeah that is a good way to frame it. Makes sense. It does say something about their ethos.
It’ll also be a great way to take down projects you don’t like. Just accuse them of witchcraft.
they could already take down any projects they didn’t like. it’s their service after all
Good thing we have pro-AI platforms like GitHub that would never arbitrarily remove projects… Right?? Right???
That’s just Facedeer, an infamous AI booster and concern troll.
A bad faith troll could claim any genuine rule against platform abuse could be turned into a witch hunt. Rules like “don’t upload giant files to overwhelm our servers” or, since I’m reminded of someone else who claims they’re labeled a witch, “don’t harass transgender people”…
Because GitHub arbitrarily removes projects it’s okay if Codeberg does too? “They’re the same as GitHub” is not actually a great point in their favor.
Issue Report: Project turned me into a newt.
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Hell yeah. Though I do always wonder if such entities mark themselves as targets for AI scraping. For instance, Wikipedia is also committed to banning slop articles. But that just means for any AI scraper it just becomes a reliable source of quality training data. So Wikipedia volunteers have to expend a lot of time and resources determining if something is slop and getting rid of it, all so that the slop trainers can come in and create the next version of the slop engine used to spam Wikipedia…
Anyway… whatever. Good for Codeberg!
based. So glad I moved there recently.
I use them as one of my mirrors for public projects, but host my own repos and CI now.
Based
Good to know that Codeberg is the digital equivalent of a fatberg.
found the vibe coder. hey bud, how’s that “killer app” scaling for you?
I’d brag and tell you, but I don’t want to be doxxed by luddites.
that bad huh?
Must be 🙄
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I see, your little ass that can’t code is offended of being locked down! Damn
As someone who can code, has coded for 40 years for a living, I’ll say: LLMs can be heavily abused to write a lot of garbage. I’ll also say: give a human enough time, and they can write almost as much garbage but they usually get discouraged by all the errors and crashes and have the good sense to give up - but these humans armed with LLMs can at least make stuff that runs.
I’ll also say: LLMs can be used as very effective tools, if you exercise the kind of care and planning that has always been required to write “good” (whatever your definition of “good” may be) software. They do speed up development - some development ends up in a good place, some… not so much. It was always like this even long before LLMs, but LLMs help get to those endpoints much faster.
Thanks for setting them straight. You’ve actually been coding longer than I have! Impressive.
It’s pointless, though. They’re just an angry mob - trying to educate any of them is like trying to teach the bees in a hive that stinging is more detrimental to themselves than to the one being stung.
Half of them I don’t think even understand why the hive is angry; they just like to feel like they’re part of a group effort.
LLMs can be used as very effective tools, if you exercise the kind of care and planning that has always been required to write “good” (whatever your definition of “good” may be) software. They do speed up development - some development ends up in a good place, some… not so much. It was always like this even long before LLMs, but LLMs help get to those endpoints much faster.
This is not vibe coding, vibe coding is using only the AI for making code without you knowing what the heck is happening and doing
If you know what you do and understand what the LLM does, you aren’t vibe coding, you are using it as a tool to speed up the development, that’s a big difference IMO
If Billy the graphic designer that never coded “makes” an app using Claude, he is vibe coding
If Torvalds make an app using Claude and understand what is the AI doing and what the code does, it’s not vibe coding
(That’s how i see it and how i judge the projects i am goin to use, being against LLMs is stupid honestly)
And how do you determine what was “vibe coded” and what wasn’t based on your definition?
I usually ask to the dev itself (eg: like i did with Degoog in my last post) otherwise i dig around to see if they made any statement and if not, i look at the contributions history, if there is any AI agent i straight up ignore (with a few exception, some are just to check PRs which i deem fine) then i check the agent.md or equivalent and look at whats written, i never go as far as checkin the code because at that point i might just be wasting my time
Thats your opinion just as this ban will be their opinion of if your code is good enough to be on their site. Which is bullshit
Billy the graphic designer that never coded “makes” an app using Claude, he is vibe coding
See, I don’t know Billy, and I don’t know what his app looks like. If Billy is a logically thinking, good graphic designer who communicates well with his clients, understands what they want, and can express all that in logically coherent statements, Billy’s first app using LLMs might be great. Probably not, but it stands a chance. Everybody starts somewhere.
If Billy just says "hey, like, I want an app that runs on Android and iPhone and desktops too, and I want it to do this list of random stuff, some of which is internally conflicting, and while I’m at it I’m going to spec that I want it in Scala, because reptiles are cool (like cold blooded, get it?) Yeah, Billy’s first app is only likely to be awesome for Billy.
Now, when I fire up Claude Fable and ask it to make me a webserver in Python, how does Codeberg determine if my app is “Vibe coded” or not?
Now, when I fire up Claude Fable and ask it to make me a webserver in Python, how does Codeberg determine if my app is “Vibe coded” or not?
I assume it’s not gonna be strictly enforced tbh, like a formal thing or just ban anyone who has contributions from AI agents in their git history, it’s a really hard thing to enforce
I can see them having problems / frustration with terabytes of junk showing up 10x faster than it used to because people have the new text generation tools and are just spewing massive “projects” of no value with them, and I would assume when they find an account that’s full of this junk they want to trim it out of their running expenses (consider that they’re also going to be crawled by stealth trainers who read everything they have publicly available)… but, then… no matter how they go about identifying “junk” there will be false positives.
I have some projects I initially wrote over 20 years ago that I like to look back at and tweak around a little every now and then… even if nobody has looked at a project for years, that doesn’t really mean nobody cares about it - so algorithms for activity are going to hit stuff like that.
I hope it’s nothing automatic, i have a few project that i barelly begin because that heat wave killed my motivation so i am waiting for winter lol, i have all of them on my disk IIRC, but it would be an hassle to re-upload them especially because i have them linked on other platforms like Modrinth :P
You admiring my ass? Thanks, but I didn’t realize you knew my NSFW alt account.
This is like MAGA announcing they’re banning the vaccinated.
Someone doesn’t know how to read punctuations too, great
You use them so haphazardly that they can be considered accidental, random and ignored. Damn
How is it the digital equivalent of a fatberg?
Well you see they both end in -berg and fatberg is a bad thing
Ah, the wit of a vibe coder…
i c
Nice one!!
What’s an LLM-extrusion?
extrusion
[ik-stroo-zhuhn] / ɪkˈstru ʒən /
noun
plural extrusions- the act of extruding or the state of being extruded.
- something that is extruded.
From context, I would expect the latter definition to be what they meant.
Oh, you don’t know what “extruded” means either? Don’t worry, I got you.
extrude
/ ɪkˈstruːd /
verb-
(tr) to squeeze or force out
-
(tr) to produce (moulded sections of plastic, metal, etc) by ejection under pressure through a suitably shaped nozzle or die
-
(tr) to chop up or pulverize (an item of food) and re-form it to look like a whole
-
a less common word for protrude
“LLM extrusion” most likely refers to definition 1 or 3, or some synthesis of the two.
Hope that helps!
Something extruded from an LLM?
Ah, LLM-generated code
A bell ends’ mental-excrement.
No idea, it’s mainly left wing progressive slop
I wonder if they have a statement on palestine
They’re German so no
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Oh no, how awful.
