Huzzah! This is excellent news. Safe spaces and healthy communities are borne from enforcing strict moderation to keep the bad actors out. This is an important step forward for the platform.
I don't really see a problem with this decision (or the one regarding crypto), they were voted on by the active members of Codeberg, simply a democratic outcome.
I wonder how this turns out longer-term. Obviously more and more software development is moving to LLMs. But depending on how principled codeberg ends up about enforcing this, a project being on codeberg might end up as a strong signal that the project is not ai-slop (either made by hand, or at least by humans who care about the project)
> To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.
This seems fully orthogonal to whether LLMs are used or not
Since the blog post doesn't actually include the change to the TOS and only links to it at the very end, here it is:
> 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).
The justification given in the TOS is very different from those in the blog post. The TOS mentions copyright and the risk of malicious code. The blog post has a completely different list of justifications. The increased risk of malicious code only applies to unreviewed AI generated code, but the TOS does not reflect that.
The blog post is more consistent with the actual change to the TOS. It makes a lot more sense now. If the TOS are a problem then you can always use another host or self-host. Codeberg is intended for a specific type of project (open source license, public repo, encouraging collaboration etc.)
Interesting that the TOS contains the justification for the rule. That isn't necessarily something I would expect to see in a TOS and leaves the door open for people to dispute the justification or argue "well that's not relevant to THIS vibe coded project".
Beyond the reasons stated I think there is probably a more general (albeit less tangible) benefit to having a forge with a reputation for being human-focused. Like if you see a project on Codeberg you can reasonably expect it's probably not completely machine-generated slop, which is no longer an expectation I have for GitHub. People are getting offended about it but why not just use a different forge for your vibe-coded projects?
The main risk is that it leads to loads of distracting discussions about whether projects are "too vibe-coded" or whether they fall on the right side of the line. I would assume Codeberg would be relatively light touch about enforcement in marginal cases, which equally might blunt the effectiveness of the rule but ultimately, it doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.
Many of their points ring true - increased pressure on maintainers, LLMs turning coders into paper pushers, the erosion of community.
Regarding discussion here o democracy - pure democracy can lead to suppression of minority views. Democracy can mean 6 / 10 people voting to beat the crap out of the other 4. The US, for example, is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic, with checks and balances to prevent such abuse. Not perfect by any means, but doing pretty well compared to the alternatives available today.
Codeberg's philosophy sounds really good, I build open source scientific research projects, would you advise me using this platform instead of Github for making my code public?
This makes sense. The largest project hosted on Codeberg today is, what, Zig? Zig is also openly hostile to LLM agents. It's a a clear identity for the site: a home for projects that identify as anti-LLM.
I disagree with basically all of the logic they're using here, but that's the point: not every site needs to be for every person. Clearly there are quite a few software developers who agree vehemently with the stance they're taking. They should have a community hub, and now they do.
Codeberg kind of positions itself as an alternative to github here. Granted, you can find many differences and say that github is huge, codeberg is tiny, but this is much more about momentum. People are angry about many things, including big greedy US corporations milking people or AI slop spamming them down; this frustration of people increases, which in turn helps create more competition because people will look more for alternatives. How much of that momentum shifts into real adoption is another matter, but it is an initial seed. My own use case is that ever since the orange king and his cronies seized power, I don't want my money to go into that mafia. Trump kills the little good-will reputation the USA still may have. It also does not help that recently another Epstein-buddy (Daniel Siad) "suicided" in France; we all know that the US "justice" system will never go to uncover all billionaires who participated here, yet alone put them in jail.
It is fine to have corners of the internet that run in a particular way.
My issue however, is that this is changing the rules on people. Codeberg initially was a FLOSS alternative to big company Github. Now it's more narrow, an alternative to Github and only for people who don't want to use AI. What's the next step? This is the problem, you either a platform and be, within legal reasons, agnostic, or you are trying to be a specific community. It is unclear to me if the specific community that Codeberg wants to be today will be the one it wants to be in a year from now, because clearly it's changing.
I cannot rely on a service provider that does change that quickly.
From their recent announcements it seems Codeberg is operating as a club that just so happens to have a git UI. Perhaps that is amusing if you're playing along, but I can't imagine why I should want to actually host anything at an org with this kind of governance.
I run an open source project, contribute to others and in the last 6 months I've set up two homelabs (one at work, one at home) out of hard rubbish/ewaste running a bunch of open source software.
I don't get the anti-AI sentiment.
From the maintainer standpoint, it basically eliminated entire classes of frustrating, tedious jobs that existed before - especially with regards to packaging and CI/CD
No longer do I have to do the back and forth dance of getting slightly further into a 20-minute build over the course of an evening until GitHub Actions finally produces a correct build. I just log into `gh`, give Claude the specs ("Please make it as statically-linked wherever sensible, support these platforms xyz back to versions abc") and it loops 2 or 3 times itself until the build is done.
If a user posts an issue, Claude can track it down in 15 minutes flat. Our issue backlog was cut by around 70% in a couple of months after Opus 4.5 was released - I could fix 5 issues in a coding session rather than 1, and new users who would vibecode a fix would often upstream the solution via PR.
As a user, deployment of many FOSS apps has gone from a nightmare to 15 minutes of prompting. I have a Claude skill that has the user accounts, IP addresses and configs of the servers. You just say "Install Immich on server xyz" and it does it. My wife says she wants the Immich photos on the Chromecast, I sign into adb and say "Make the Immich photos the screensaver on the Chromecast", and it installs ImmichFrame.
If I run into issues, instead of just giving up I'll just prompt a fix. I'll often clean things up, draft a PR and upstream it - and to be honest results have been mixed. Some maintainers (myself included) are appreciative that someone has upstreamed a fix that others can find useful, others are actively hostile to it and plenty more are just too busy to review the PRs.
I do empathise with them about the wasted CI/CD resources for small projects with a handful of users, but the rest just sounds academic and out-of-touch. From my own experience as an early adopter I've found that AI has massively increased my participation in the FOSS sphere - as a maintainer, contributor and consumer.
Seems fine. A git host is not a particularly hard piece of software to self-maintain and there’s always GitHub for most things.
I can understand why. The cost to the host is entirely in volume of code, and creating volume is cheap now. Without some constraining measure they will have lots of AI code. Even just by itself that would make it impossible to have.
It’s also a cultural thing. This is for that niche of developers. That’s all right. Communities have their own (often-hyperspecific) rules. HN certainly does and we’re all here.
Should I be concerned that many of my hobby projects are little "one-off software [projects] specific to my need"? Is Codeberg only for hosting large, community-driven projects that require long-term support? I certainly "don't actually have a community" around my (hand-written) solo projects.
Fair enough if Codeberg isn't the correct place for stupid little personal hobby projects, but that wasn't the sense I got when I signed up.
I mean, they have every right to adopt that policy... but because of the policy, I can't see myself CHOOSING to use Codeberg.
I don’t currently use LLMs for any significant part of my work but I’m not willing to put myself in a position where I might someday have to prove that something WASN'T written with an LLM because someone is making spurious accusations to troll or "DoS" a project.
It's unlikely to happen, but there are plenty of alternatives where this isn't a concern at all. Why open yourself or your projects to this?
32 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 70.1 ms ] threadThis seems fully orthogonal to whether LLMs are used or not
> 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).
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...
The blog post is more consistent with the actual change to the TOS. It makes a lot more sense now. If the TOS are a problem then you can always use another host or self-host. Codeberg is intended for a specific type of project (open source license, public repo, encouraging collaboration etc.)
Beyond the reasons stated I think there is probably a more general (albeit less tangible) benefit to having a forge with a reputation for being human-focused. Like if you see a project on Codeberg you can reasonably expect it's probably not completely machine-generated slop, which is no longer an expectation I have for GitHub. People are getting offended about it but why not just use a different forge for your vibe-coded projects?
The main risk is that it leads to loads of distracting discussions about whether projects are "too vibe-coded" or whether they fall on the right side of the line. I would assume Codeberg would be relatively light touch about enforcement in marginal cases, which equally might blunt the effectiveness of the rule but ultimately, it doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.
Regarding discussion here o democracy - pure democracy can lead to suppression of minority views. Democracy can mean 6 / 10 people voting to beat the crap out of the other 4. The US, for example, is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic, with checks and balances to prevent such abuse. Not perfect by any means, but doing pretty well compared to the alternatives available today.
I disagree with basically all of the logic they're using here, but that's the point: not every site needs to be for every person. Clearly there are quite a few software developers who agree vehemently with the stance they're taking. They should have a community hub, and now they do.
Codeberg bans vibe coded projects
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
My issue however, is that this is changing the rules on people. Codeberg initially was a FLOSS alternative to big company Github. Now it's more narrow, an alternative to Github and only for people who don't want to use AI. What's the next step? This is the problem, you either a platform and be, within legal reasons, agnostic, or you are trying to be a specific community. It is unclear to me if the specific community that Codeberg wants to be today will be the one it wants to be in a year from now, because clearly it's changing.
I cannot rely on a service provider that does change that quickly.
I don't get the anti-AI sentiment.
From the maintainer standpoint, it basically eliminated entire classes of frustrating, tedious jobs that existed before - especially with regards to packaging and CI/CD
No longer do I have to do the back and forth dance of getting slightly further into a 20-minute build over the course of an evening until GitHub Actions finally produces a correct build. I just log into `gh`, give Claude the specs ("Please make it as statically-linked wherever sensible, support these platforms xyz back to versions abc") and it loops 2 or 3 times itself until the build is done.
If a user posts an issue, Claude can track it down in 15 minutes flat. Our issue backlog was cut by around 70% in a couple of months after Opus 4.5 was released - I could fix 5 issues in a coding session rather than 1, and new users who would vibecode a fix would often upstream the solution via PR.
As a user, deployment of many FOSS apps has gone from a nightmare to 15 minutes of prompting. I have a Claude skill that has the user accounts, IP addresses and configs of the servers. You just say "Install Immich on server xyz" and it does it. My wife says she wants the Immich photos on the Chromecast, I sign into adb and say "Make the Immich photos the screensaver on the Chromecast", and it installs ImmichFrame.
If I run into issues, instead of just giving up I'll just prompt a fix. I'll often clean things up, draft a PR and upstream it - and to be honest results have been mixed. Some maintainers (myself included) are appreciative that someone has upstreamed a fix that others can find useful, others are actively hostile to it and plenty more are just too busy to review the PRs.
I do empathise with them about the wasted CI/CD resources for small projects with a handful of users, but the rest just sounds academic and out-of-touch. From my own experience as an early adopter I've found that AI has massively increased my participation in the FOSS sphere - as a maintainer, contributor and consumer.
I can understand why. The cost to the host is entirely in volume of code, and creating volume is cheap now. Without some constraining measure they will have lots of AI code. Even just by itself that would make it impossible to have.
It’s also a cultural thing. This is for that niche of developers. That’s all right. Communities have their own (often-hyperspecific) rules. HN certainly does and we’re all here.
Fair enough if Codeberg isn't the correct place for stupid little personal hobby projects, but that wasn't the sense I got when I signed up.
I don’t currently use LLMs for any significant part of my work but I’m not willing to put myself in a position where I might someday have to prove that something WASN'T written with an LLM because someone is making spurious accusations to troll or "DoS" a project.
It's unlikely to happen, but there are plenty of alternatives where this isn't a concern at all. Why open yourself or your projects to this?