Codeberg bans vibe coded projects

How would anyone ever be able to arbitrate this? It's an unenforceable policy if you actually care about fairness.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.