Codeberg bans vibe coded projects
codeberg.org
codeberg.org
[Edit] The pull link is https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253/files and says
"7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5)."
Whatever "mostly" means. If you autocomplete a lot, and the code written is "mostly" written by AI by autocomplete - it seems you fall under this.
I wonder what the ratio needs to be. And I wonder if auto-refactoring in Intellij is also included, because Intellij created the code and then also has "unclear copyright status" if we follow the logic.
Together this opens up more questions to me than it answers.
I guess if you auto complete line by line and actually read the code it should be gucci.
Edit: Oh, you found it as well now. Disregard my post.
Not from their wording.
Seems pretty clear to me?
Otherwise I don't think this is clear at all.
Otherwise, what is mostly?
Mostly at the outset, or at any given time? Must the project move out when it goes from 49% to 51% AI-assisted code?
Yes, old project with 1M LOC of pre-AI code + 100% AI 100k LOC generated coded for the last three months, is that mostly?
"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".
If someone is in the process of intentionally turning their project into slop, replacing human written code with bot-extruded code, then they can pay to host their own...
... And they should still be held fully responsible for the true environmental cost of the power and resources used to run the bots replacing craft with slop.
This activity is criminally wasteful, and should be treated as a crime.
What does "written by generative AI" means? Autocomplete? IDE-with-AI-normal-classname-completion? Everything not typed by a human.
I personally don't find this clear at all and see many unhappy discussions in the future for Codeberg.
1. Don't ask us, ask the Codeberg people in the thread above.
2. If you're not sure you can meet Codeberg's terms of service, do what others are claiming to do: Take your repositories elsewhere.
3. I'll just hypothesize that you don't have Codeberg repositories and are only arguing here for argument's sake.
Here's what I cannot understand - the spirit behind this update is clear: to carve out a space for human-written projects.
Now we have a bunch of people nit-picking what "human-written" means, with a bunch of snide "Hah! Gotcha!" thrown in for good measure...
"What about if it autocompletes - that's not written by a human!!! Lusers!!!"
"Hey, I used LLMs to rubberduck this; that's not fully written by a human even though I typed it!!!"
"Hey, I used a _KEYBOARD_ to type it in; that's the computer and keyboard firmware that /akshually/ wrote the code!!!"
Face it, if you need to know how close to the line you can go without going over it, then Codeberg is probably not for you anyway - there's no need to nitpick the wording.
If you, in your own words, "write your own code", you don't really care where the line is because you're so far from it anyway.
There is no scenario where you'd want to nitpick the wording...
It is not that clear though.
I use the Lazarus IDE for Free Pascal. Free Pascal is kinda verbose and the LCL framework Lazarus uses has a bunch of boilerplate and its design is biased towards tool-assisted development. As such, Lazarus itself writes a lot of code for you and you fill in the "blanks" that provide what you want to do. It also provides a lot of functionality for code completion where you provide something basic like a magic word or a very partial/incomplete declaration and it automatically fills in the rest, often adding functions and such.
To me, despite Lazarus writing a bunch of code itself, the projects i made using it are "human-written".
And to me many uses LLM also fall under the same category - e.g. i often use some small local LLM as "awk that can think" to transform text/code in ways that would be either cumbersome or sometimes impossible with actual awk (or similar). If i give an LLM a few C function prototypes and ask it to write the boilerplate C code for exposing them as a native module i do not see as any less "human-written" than if i used a script that parsed the C prototypes and generated the code or some similar tool: in both cases i had a few functions i wrote myself and had my computer generate code for exposing them as a native Python module.
So from my perspective, projects doing any of the above would still be a fit for "human-written" spaces.
If they create a place for human written code, it would be much easier to say
No AI generated code.
Examples include but are not limited to:
* No autocomplete
* No prompt generated code
* No automatic agent generated code
* No bug fix or PR fix AI code
All code needs to by typed by a human.
Codeberg is run by people. People who can make contextual judgments. They're even pretty explicit about it in their blogpost; that it's not going to be a search-and-destroy process, and that they're generally communicative.
In that situation, anyone who is complaining that the rules are "too vague" is probably just trying to figure out exactly how close they can get to violating the rules without getting kicked, and that's precisely the kind of people who would not be welcome on a community service like Codeberg. If you actually follow the spirit and intention of the rule, it would never even get to a point of ambiguity.
We left. Because of people talking like you, people starting from categorical purist blanket judgements and implying that anybody who used these tools is immoral and their legitimate questions about what the policy would actually be were attempted rule breaking. Before there was even a rule.
"They're even pretty explicit about it in their blogpost; that it's not going to be a search-and-destroy process, and that they're generally communicative."
The blog post came after the vote, FFS. People asking just what was going to happen got the kind of response you gave above -- complete with analogies of being "creepy guys" trying to "violate constent."
Now. What about next week? When the mood changes?
I am amused.
You don't understand their goal in doing this?
Frequently (much more than we'd like to admit) actual contracts leave loopholes in, said loopholes which go against the spirit of the contract. It is not unusual to have a concrete contract that allows more (or less) than the spirit the contract was signed in.
Rather than nitpicking the contract (the TOU), why do you think they need this updated contract in the first place?
"If you have shit on your shoe, please don't walk across our carpet".
"But how do they know? maybe we should test if they can tell", and all that stuff... no. Most people would simply take a good look, and if they're worried about something that could be be mud or not, brush it off just in case. And if they come directly from 12 hours of drunk partying in the wilderness, they can still simply take their shoes off and ask for a plastic bag at the door, just in case. Easy.
And yes, maybe the owner goes crazy or hates you, and you just bought new shoes that are squeaky clean, but brown, and get thrown out with no appeal. That can happen. But in that case, they could use many other things to be petty about, too. And Codeberg does not strike me as that.
How can you tell if you drank too much? What is the exact amount of alcohol molecules a given person could ingest in an exact instant (like, down to the exact Planck whatever) and no longer be fit to drive? And if someone says "no drunk driving on my property" while not caring what happens outside of it, can we really let them off the hook before they showed us the machine that can calculate it?
If people are worried about using libraries that contain vibe code, sure, that may become a real concern, but even then, why not have a really restricted website? For projects where the people are either so good, or the project so small, that that they know for sure there is no vibe code in it? Why this oozing over and into everything?
You cannot discuss in non-English languages on this site. Even though you could slur and degrade English, and therefore it being impossible to give you an exact heuristic right now that separates English from non-English exactly. The rule is still accepted, and cases dealt with as they come up.
This is going in circles. For someone to "ask it themselves", first they need to know what to ask. But the term is vague: what does "mostly" mean? You can't ask yourself if your code is "mostly consist of code written by" generative AI if you don't know what whoever is going to judge the rules means by it.
Is it to be taken literally? I.e. a 2000-line project where 1000-lines are written by AI is fine but if there are 1001-lines your project is out (in which case, if the human-written lines get refactored to become shorter and more efficient, does that suddenly mean the project is out?).
the same as "zero", in that if the amount is zero, you're fine.
"did you pack your bags yourself?"
"no/not sure/what does that mean let's discuss" = please leave the premises now
"yes" = welcome
However this isn't what the terms update state. If that was the meaning then they would have explicitly written "zero" - or something along these lines. The fact they didn't do that (despite the update being there for weeks and people were able to vote on them for a long time - so it wasn't just some mistake) means they do allow "some" use of genAI - so at that point the question becomes "how much".
Even if you could afford the equipment to make sure you don't have a single molecule of shit on your shoe, you couldn't operate it. Most people couldn't. So what gives? How is it possible that people have parties and then not endless discussions for decades and centuries about this unsolvable issue, right up there with how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
Because they're not playing games is why. Because it's simple, if you don't bend over backwards to make it seem hard. You don't walk through shit on purpose, and before entering you check your shoes to your best ability. The end. There will be small percentage of cases where this fails, and that's fine. Spirit of the law and all that.
You do the same with genAI. If you are worried it's too much, "the wrong kind", whatever, you simply ask them. Because you have good intentions and will respect their answer, you have no reason not to do that. If you don't even have anything you're unsure if you can upload there, it's totally moot.
> If you are worried it's too much, "the wrong kind", whatever, you simply ask them.
If you have to ask them, then having terms of use is pointless. The entire point of ToU is to explain how one can use the service, if you have to "ask" then the terms are not doing their job properly.
Of course people aren't perfect and can write vague or misleading ToU - and considering i've seen the same questions about that "mostly" part here, on Reddit, on Mastodon, on Twitter, on Discord, on blogposts and even their bugtracker[0] where they claimed their blog post on the matter will clarify things, which it didn't, there is no question that the terms are inadequate here - but the response to that isn't to try and guess what they possibly could mean, the response is for the terms to be clarified.
If Codeberg wanted to tell people who use LLMs in their projects that those projects are not welcome there, then they should have put that in their terms of use in clear and unambiguous wording.
There are many people on the internet who think their interpretation of things i the only right one. Don't argue.
Yeah, right.
If you come up with "so no auto-complete" that's totally a you-having-no-arguments issue, not me not giving a fair hearing to something nobody said, because it doesn't exist.
Because if a club had a prominently posted rule "no shit on the soles of your shoe", I would not be asking "Well, how much shit is on the soles of my shoe?"
I would be asking, "How likely is it, that I'm going to get a couple drinks in me, and then get cornered by frowning men who need to inspect my shoe soles for shit traces? How would I feel after passing the no-shit-on-shoes challenge?"
Then I would find another club.
This is IMHO the reason why we can't have sanity, because there are people ready to hack it.
> You must not share projects that mostly consist [of LLM-generated code]
> Such projects having an unclear copyright status
There is no bright-line threshold at which a code contribution becomes copyrightable (and therefore relevant). It is a legal question determined by courts. However, nobody in practice has any difficulty determining whether their code is copyrightable.
Codeberg is essentially asking/demanding that "your code" coincides with "code you hold the copyright for". This responsibility can be delegated to other humans, but not to LLMs.
Also, if you are a non-German user of Codeberg and there is a wide difference between what is covered by copyright in your country and Germany (e.g. if you are British) this might make Codeberg less of a suitable choice for you. What copyright laws matter to a particular user? Their country, the US because of its dominance and reach, or some sort of global safe/effective compromise?
This has the feel of being done by people who do not understand how to work things to be clear legally, nor of an understanding of the consequences.
This is for human generated code. Some day we will have a way to enforce the amount of AI usage on its participants, right now we can just rely on an honor code and clear intent that you’re not welcome here
Best quick English language overview of status that I could find: https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2026/germany/when-can-a...
It looks like Codeberg want only copyrighted material in their service, so it is reliable in the future that e.g. licenses must be followed (e.g. GPL), and copyright doesn't suddenly get declared as being of the model owner, and it isn't a copy of something else.
That is a cautious reasonable position - in early days of LLM coding (3 years ago!) indemnity from model companies was a major issue globally because of the lack of clarity of the law around this. The US specifically has settled on it being (effectively?) public domain. But I don't think that is fully settled, and it certainly isn't settled in international copyright law.
The goal of the vague "mostly" in the Codeberg change is to ensure there is enough human input to the code they host, to be reasonably sure under German copyright law it is copyright of the person sharing it.
> user: veeti
> about: Just trolling.
That does not seem to be likely. The article you link indicates it is the prompter and provider of any other inputs (in the case discussed the photographer who took the photo the LLM modified) who might have claims.
> The US specifically has settled on it being (effectively?) public domain.
My understanding is that sufficient human input makes it copyright. This is not greatly different from German law.
In both cases something that is vibe coded in the strict sense of having only vague prompts will not be covered by copyright, something with real human input will.
That leads to a problem with "mostly" there. Does it mean mostly vibe coded, or mostly AI written? AI written under close guidance is covered by copyright so should be fine.
This does make it important to keep prompt history and record human edits of generated code as that is what will prove sufficient human input.
Also, its not just German law that matters to users. For many users law in their jurisdiction is what matters.
So from an open source perspective I don't see any legal risk here as the worst that could happen is that there is no legal protection of the code, which would only give users more and not less rights. Also not sure what they mean by "unclear" copyright status. At least from what I can tell it seems pretty clear that there is generally no copyright on AI output.
Can you explain how it is different from US law? It sounds closer to US law than to, for example, British law.
> You can find the original (German) verdict
I cannot read German. So you are saying Bird & Bird's explanation of the ruling is wrong? Or is it contradicted by other cases?
Yes, there are some similarities. The "personal intellectual creation" requirement I think is also similarly used in the US where only genuine intellectual creations by the author count as works. Typing "generate an image of a flower" doesn't clear that bar. If you however write very detailed long description of the image then it could clear that hurdle. The verdict says that the personal creative input needs to dominate the result if you sue someone over it, it is on you to proof that your prompt meet this hurdle, which "vibecoders" are not going to meet I believe.
However, in Germany copyright always belongs to the creator (a natural person), while in the US it can also be held by a company. In practice, this means you can't sell your copyright, only license it, although even an exclusive license has limits. So an AI provider never holds copyright over generated output either way: it either belongs to the creator or the output has none. German copyright law aims to protect the creator while US copyright law focuses more on economic aspects.
So the result is that either the author has the copyright (so just like any other code) or there is no copyright. Either way I don't see what issue uploading it to Codeberg could cause for them as it should be fine either way.
> You can find the original (German) verdict
I tried to explain the argument from the verdict in more detail above, otherwise number 18-22 are the relevant part. See here for the translation of those: https://claude.ai/share/4d52fb18-a375-4ce7-9d7f-35e3d52971aa The Bird & Bird article seems to pretty much say the same from what I can tell, just in more detail.
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.
1. You try to ban low quality vibe-coded projects, but try to not ban high quality projects that made use of AI. The goal is to send a message on what you deem acceptable. 2. Anyone creating what you deem a low quality vibe-coded project sees their project as belong to the second kind of project and therefore insists that their project is allowed. So how do you make sure what category a project belongs to? You might use scripts to identify classic trades of vibe-coded projects, look at the users history, etc. None of that is going to be bulletproof though and it is a lot of work. 3. You stop trying to enforce this rule as it is a "fight" you can't win and dealing with this takes more effort than dealing with the issues the low quality vibe-coded projects caused in the first place.
We ended up settling on restricting new projects instead as the majority of projects that fall into the first category don't last long. So step 4 would be to introduce some other kind of proxy for this kind of project that can actually be enforced.
It's not just AI stuff btw. I recently evalutated hosting a static site on codeberg for a project I am working on. It is a cool project, and although it is commercial now (it's a video game) I would like it to be open source one day. It would have been a great contribution to codeberg (in my opinion)! Maybe my game can't be open source software right now; sharing open source art is a mess. But I would love to make the blog for it libre!
However, I came to the conclusion that the static page feature of codeberg simply isn't appropriate for this use case. The codeberg staff really only maintains it so that codeberg can be feature complete with other publicly available git forge hosts (github, gitlab, etc.,). It actually is a huge infrastructure burden that contributes to their instability. They have made it explicit in the past - that feature is so that libre software projects hosted there can have a static page if it would make the project better, and they don't care about any other use case. I don't need that - I want a stable platform that will host my small static website blog at a very low cost, with high stability and uptime, no questions asked. We simply don't have goals that align, and that is okay. I don't take it personally. The whole point of making my blog a static site was to build it locally and be host agnostic. The hosting privilege ultimately is going to Cloudflare workers.
I think that is a much healthier way to think of this sort of. The great AI deluge of code (slop) IS disrupting a lot of assumptions we made about the internet that were based on creating code that works is hard. Now creating code is easy. Creating good code may still be hard, but I think it will be healthy to re-evaulate everyone's goals and agenda's, trust in the people that act in good faith and have the best attentions in mind, and respect everyone's limitations.
This is what I love about selfhosting btw - I am a really active participant on that sub and I actually appreciate the balance you guys are trying to achieve between allowing people to share projects they think are helpful (even if some LLM code was involved) vs. not letting it be entirely overrun by crappy AI slop app spam (which opens up a lot of supply chain risk anyway). I love self hosting my software, and I have gotten a lot of use out of my self hosted Qwen model - notes only, no code generation though. Selfhosted is honestly the solution out of this mess. Empowering individuals to run the computing they need to use every day off of their own computers that they own, bringing computing to the masses. I hope we can move past this RAM market cornering BS and get back to that mission.
Maybe try the neocities supporter plan[0]? They allow custom domains, offer decent bandwidth and put a lot of effort into open source and encouraging people to write their own sites from what I can tell.
It seems like a better option than dealing with the Great Amorphous Corporate Centralizing Mass that is Cloudflare.
Their AUP isn't unreasonable: don't use them to host scams/spam people, don't abuse their services for an SEO farming operation, don't infringe on people's copyright, don't get their IPs blacklisted and don't use their services to harass or threaten people. All fairly standard as far as "we don't want to get sued/get in trouble" is concerned.
There's also an API to upload files to, shouldn't be too difficult to use it to rig up an SSG deployment script for it, or alternatively you can use their web interface to upload the resulting files. (Although it is on the assumption that you shouldn't abuse it.)
> 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
Interesting observations.
The problem is not that they're vibe-coded.
The problem is that they're low-effort abandonware.
It's very hard to tell apart if something is going to get abandoned.
I certainly have more abandoned vibe-coded projects than non-abandoned ones.
But I also have ones that I use daily or weekly, and ones that have 30+ GitHub stars and open tickets and forks without I ever expected that to happen.
When I go looking for software that I need, life has become more difficult, because I need to ask myself if the project I encounter is going to get abandoned because of the low effort it took to manifest it.
Rather than judge how it's made as a proxy for how its future will turn out, judge its future: Require some kind of sustained lifetime and social engagement around a project before it is deserving of advertisement.
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).
Well, not quite, it would still have to deal with handling and moderating copyright claims under German law. So while it's not a legal issue, it's definitely overhead for a nonprofit.
> Inclusion of harmful code is no more likely than human-extruded code (probably less actually).
Based on what? So if I set up a markov chain and generate a couple ten thousand lines of python code, and somehow got it to run, you'd say it's safer than human code? What about low quality local LLMs? Where is the line that says that automatically (not quite "randomly") generated code has less issues than human-generated code?
Harmful code does not mean purposefully harmful, it could simply be accidental (like when an agent goes "hm, an instance is already running, let's ensure that doesn't happen" and adds a `pkill -9 myprogram` invocation to a script, unknowingly killing all processes that contain the word `myprogram`). It could also be code that claims to do one thing, but does another, or one that ends up logging auth keys, etc.
I have had SOTA models do all of the above. Not sure about more or less likely than human code, but since LLMs can generate thousands of lines per hour, that tips the scales.
Who is sending all those takedown requests on vibe coded repos? My guess is that this is absolutely not an issue that they actually have.
> Based on what?
LLMs produce buggy code. Humans do too. Like you mentioned, it's difficult to say one is categorically worse than the other since both humans and LLMs vary so much. By "less likely" I was just thinking about the fact that LLMs often refuse to intentionally produce harmful code.
Anyways, my point was that this is just a pretext. If by some objective measure they discovered that vibe coded repos were less likely to contain "harmful code", do you really think they would enact the opposite policy (e.g. ban non vibe coded projects)? Don't think so.
> 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.
I'd be willing to wager that SOTA models are far less likely to write harmful code than random human beings. Models are far less likely to make mistakes as they continuously keep getting better, while every human may differ in their abilities at writing 'good' code.
That means that they are ideologically motivated about the open source license being enforceable.
Just because you have ulterior motives, it doesn't mean others do. Codeberg is pretty clear on their stance.
> Inclusion of harmful code is no more likely than human-extruded code (probably less actually).
Right now this is unclear, based on personal experience. I am totally fine with using AI tools, but I do review every line of code it spits out.
It's fair to take a safe approach and favor human oversight.
It's been decided pretty much everywhere that LLM output is not copyrighted by the LLM vendor. The only realistic risk here is for vibecoded code to be considered public domain, if too little human input was involved, but public domain is functionally equivalent to a very permissive open source license (e.g. MIT minus attribution).
I don't think that's settled. For the time being it's fair to be on the safe side.
Either way, if it irks you that they chose this stance, you can just not use Codeberg. They are not the only game in town.
If their mission is Free Software in some Stallman-adjacent interpretation of the idea, then it is actually quite a legitimate concern. The problem isn't that the code is illegal to possess, but that it's not Free Software, since that is entirely based on a licensing copyrighted code, and since there is legal precedent saying LLM outputs can't be copyrighted in many jurisdictions, it's highly debatable if it can be given a Free Software license.
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). "
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.
Under German copyright law, this concern is unfounded. Copyright protection requires a "personal intellectual creation" (persönliche geistige Schöpfung) — a threshold that the provider of an AI model cannot meet, since they merely supply the tool, not the creative act itself. Fearing that a model provider owns the output is like fearing Microsoft owns code written in Visual Studio Code.
Moreover, German copyright can only vest in a natural person, never in a company. So even setting the "personal intellectual creation" issue aside, a corporate model provider is categorically ineligible to hold copyright in the first place.
A policy like this threatens this delusion.
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?
Not at all! They can do what they want, exactly as I'm free to judge what they do.
And no, I'm not affected- I had never even heard of Codeberg before.
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.
- Forgejo: https://forgejo.org/
- Gitea: https://gitea.com/
- GitLab Community Edition: https://about.gitlab.com/
- OneDev: https://onedev.io/
- Gogs: https://gogs.io/
- Sourcehut: https://sourcehut.org/
- GitBucket: https://gitbucket.github.io/
I created my account two years ago, but I have barely used it. I am gonna deleting it so that i do not take up space unnecessarily. Still, one thing should not be forgotten, those who fail to adapt eventually fall behind.
Another issue is what stance they would have taken if the vote had yielded the exact opposite result. I sense a whiff of a long-term self-serving approach in Codeberg’s stance. Who can guarantee that a platform with open-source, human-written code won’t eventually make that code available for use in models?
Adapt to what? Current LLM endgame is "wished-spec => code". Where do you fit in this? You are fighting for the last 10%, 1%, 0.1% contribution in this march of the 9s game.
After receiving Gen AI code, if you try to modify it all and integrate it into your codebase, it can sometimes take longer than just writing the code yourself.
I'm glad that they have a space that feels comfortable.
(I'm on Codeberg, but this will likely force me off it.)
You say this as if it’s a big loss.
- artists,
- creators,
- translators,
- writers,
- climateEither way, I was never interested in codeberg and this just means that I'm less interested.
They'll also have a fun time drawing the line. What if someone uses agents to generate boilerplate like tests? Are a few files out of hundreds enough for a ban? If not, are they going to force users to write the code manually? How are they going to verify that?
It's a big can of worms.
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.
See: 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.
[1] https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/how-tos/commit-chan...
It is probably a good example of why do many people think that the policy is ultimately counter productive even to Codeberg itself.
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) :)
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.
"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?
I find that it helps Claude when it's updating that code again (it's a kind of out-of-session memory). A few times it's come across a past decision I gave it, and notified or asked me to clarify where an update would be conflicting. I'm not reading the code but I sure know when those "sins" help to prevent a regression or otherwise undesired behavioral change.
I always resented having to write the same code over and over, now automated by AI
but also support free and open software, as all knowledge should be
Those problems had been solved in the 1970s and don't need LLMs. One solution is called 'copy-paste', another 'software libraries/components' ;)
But yeah, there are areas in software development where AI assistence is actually useful, I just see code-generation as one of the less useful areas, since tbh this isn't a problem that needs urgent solving. IMHO LLMs are much more useful for passively analyzing/bugscanning code bases (or data in general).
Careful with that wording. LLMs are not an abstraction, they do not provide an abstraction, not in the software sense, as they are completely non-deterministic the way they are used today. Saying "write me a function that does xyz" is not an abstraction layer ontop of writing it yourself.
You can host your projects elsewhere you know? Codeberg is not the only public git service available.
Get your slop machine to write you better analogies.
So what's the definition of a vibe-coded project?
I verify the code the latest SOTA/frontier models I pay for do generate and although I daily facepalm myself several times per day, it's still a tool allowing me to be more productive. That's why I've got countless examples of mediocre output to give: if people were to take a look, they'd notice the same.
The problem is the mindset "it runs, hence it's good" of fully vibe-coded crap.
I'm talking about stuff like "Add this information on the webpage next to that other info" and the model going on a tangent and pulling in new libraries to then do a computation on the server-side and then using client/server communication to send the info to then display it.
It works. It did what I prompted. We've got intelligent machines in 2026. Yay!
Except all that nonsense was totally unnecessary and the information was already on the client and all that was needed was to display it.
But the model saw a pattern: can you believe that? A pattern of information being exchanged between the client and the server. So of freaking course my prompt had to be solved by following the same pattern.
So what's that about? Full AI ban or ban of fully AI-generated turds? I'm all for the later but don't ban everything: AI can produce acceptable stuff at a rate that's making it a productivity enhancement tool.
Models have also only been getting better and better: as of 2026 fully vibe-coded projects are pure turds but what about 2028? 2030?
It's not because these things are introducing bugs in every five line of Bash code they write and generate what looks like an infinite amount of slop to solve things which should have required 1/10th of code that it's always going to be like that.
This is a bit strange. Are they saying that Codeberg no longer accepts vibe coded projects at all?
If so, it seems kind of short sighted. Within a very short period of time all code will be AI code. What then?
And as the models improve, along with better code will come better bug fixing etc etc. So the quality of AI code will absolutely surpass that of human code. What then?
Will the repositories demand proof of programming ability? Why, when AI will be handling everything anyway. It would be rather like driving schools mandating that all drivers can strip an engine before they're allowed to drive? Very odd.
The costs involved with hosting a bunch of vibe coded stuff that no one is really invested in or cares about would undermine the mission of Codeberg, so it makes sense for them. Other code hosting platforms can go a different route.
How much does it cost to host a few text files in the same way a bunch of other text files are already being hosted? Particularly if there's no investment - ie no significant traffic - in accessing said text files?
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.
Not to say that I agree that the metaphor makes sense here in the first place
This is unlikely. Perhaps “most code”, but not “all”.
People can overwhelmingly shift to a new technology, but the old one usually remains in use, even if niche.
Technically you do. Every living thing eats it's own and every other living thing's crap. Just that it's recycled - through other living things - crap (does it stop being "your own" when it's processed by another?).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#/media/File:Indus...
Police Officer: #WONTFIX Town hall will be fireproof in the next version
Concerned Citizen: But it's still a crime. And what of the paper and desks inside the building how can that possibly be fireproofed!?
Mayor: Now now Citizen, fireproofing technology has come along way, besides, we've repurposed the Jail House into a Molotov cocktail factory; we couldn't arrest them even if we wanted to.
Concerned Citizen: You did WHAT!? Why would you do that when the Town Hall is burning down every other week!?
Molotov Salesman: Why because this town needs Molotovs to test their fireproofing tech of course. We've set up the arson test pipeline for the good of all in town!
How do you distinguish a vibe coded project from a heavily AI assisted project? The output is AI generated code. The difference between vibe and agentic coding is how selective you are about the end result and not whether it is AI generated or not.
“You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools” would seem to clearly prohibit both vibe coded projects as well as heavily AI assisted projects, assuming both result in mostly AI generated code.
They should just migrate their stuff elsewhere IMO. Even if all current forges go the length of banning AI-assisted projects, before that completely happens there will be several forges which expressly welcome such projects. Guaranteed.
It reads to me that you are afraid of getting your project removed if you ever move. No need to pretend you care about the morality of their decision.
"All code will be AI written" is like saying "all code will be written in an IDE". That in itself doesn't matter, nobody should care,and it doesn't make a difference.
The workflow, or complete lack of a workflow, for vibe coded projects in terms of design, architecture, vision, etc.is the problem. The lack of oversight is the problem, and the lack of thinking by an actual human capable of thinking, is the problem.
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
How would they establish that a project "mostly" consists of AI-written code? Lines, commits, tokens, or architectural importance? There is no reliable detector, and metadata only catches people who honestly disclose their tool use. In practice, this only creates an incentive to conceal AI usage.
Authorship is also a poor proxy for quality. Human-written codebases routinely contain copied patterns, unnecessary abstractions, stale comments, superficial tests, security vulnerabilities, and large subsystems nobody seems to understand. Many mature projects exhibit the exact same problems attributed to LLM-generated code with the technical debt they've built up over time. Slop isn't new or unique to generated code. It is extremely common, especially in beginner, hobby, and abandoned projects which have historically served as a critical part of the open source software community.
The copyright justification is particularly weak. Lack of copyright protection does not make code non-free. Public domain source is still free software. A particular output might reproduce protected third-party code, but that requires evidence about that output. It isn't established merely by showing that an LLM was involved. If provenance were the true concern, then allowing some undefined minority of AI-generated code doesn't solve it. A single copied component can create a real licensing problem. So, the argument immediately falls apart when they qualify it with "mostly".
I don't use Codeberg, so I have no personal stake in this, but I'm surprised its community adopted such a vague and practically unenforceable policy. The argument that Codeberg has limited resources and cannot host endless disposable projects sounds legitimate until you consider how this policy could be enforced. Either someone must investigate repositories and infer their production history from circumstantial evidence, which is expensive and unreliable, or enforcement will be selective and complaint-driven.
If resource consumption, abandonment, or low-effort projects are the actual problems, Codeberg should regulate those observable problems directly though I'd argue targeting "low-effort" projects is as problematic as this policy suffering from many of the same issues. As written, the policy seems more likely to punish honest disclosure than to actually prevent harmful or infringing code.
As for copyright, LLMs can reproduce nearly 1:1 fully copyrighted, non-foss code. I would love to see someone argue in a German court that they can copy a book, a piece of code, or a movie, by laundering it through a program that produces an average of lots of copies of the same movie or book, and burns a lot of power doing it, and that this makes the product of it entirely public domain.
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?
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.
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?
And I am asking you because we are on an Internet forum and you responded to my comment.
This complaint follows the same logic as "You want companies to emit less CO2, yet you keep breathing". Sure, if you remove all nuance from a topic other people's decisions often make little sense - but that doesn't indicate a problem with their position.
And Torvalds does seem to plan on continue using AI assistance.
It‘s because there is basically no way for code to become „clean“ so the entire process is one way.
But how to check which projects are vibe coded?
But I don't think it will be easy to detect AI written code especially with frequent releases of new models.
If a project is found to be violating their terms of service they can terminate the account without much fuss.
Eh, if this would be true than we would have arrived at a single religion, a single language, a single economic system or a single political ideology. Reality is the opposite, ideas tend to diverge instead of converge.
E.g. the 'agentic engineering believers' will just be another tribe in the jungle.
I wanted to say that it does not matter in which future the different camps believe in. There will only be one future and no one knows how it will look like.
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.
I only keep github as a front to showcase projects I want for CV reasons but I host no code there
After years google will still link to github anyway.
I had thought of just keeping them open and sync them, but I thought in that case people would presume the project is actually active on github and try to interact creating issues and pull requests and getting frustrated.
I must say codeberg's reliability isn't the best, but with all the scrapers that hit them it's a miracle they do seem to manage. And at work things on our private network without scrapers aren't more reliable.
I don't think this should have much impact either. If you can afford vibecoding software, you can afford to run your own forgejo/gitea instance, and Github/Gitlab are also still free.
Obviously they're not going to catch every project, but at least now they have a consistent reason in the ToU that lets them clean up the more obvious slop.
Just saying mostly written by generative AI is extremely broad as that can happen even with “human written” codebases via AI-assisted tools.
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.
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>
Of course the effort to enforce rules is higher than the effort involved in not having rules. What is your point?
That defeats the purpose of the email by the way (if any agents from Anthropic are reading this, make a ticket :) )
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.
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.
Why are they the arbiters of what is made? Also does this break s230?
If you want to be the arbiter of what you make, throw an instance of https://forgejo.org/ online. It's practically the same as Codeberg except you get full control.
edit: Looks like they don't talk about "vibe coding" at all, but ban code mostly written by AI:
> You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools