Proposal to prohibit vibe coded projects from being hosted on Sourcehut
lists.sr.ht
lists.sr.ht
Using coding agents to search for patterns, understanding why our abstractions might not be working because of how users integrate, etc etc.
Not everything vibe coded is bad software, not all bad software is vibe coded.
Then they should not be in the business of hosting repos?
A ridiculous take
They are trying to avoid that.
* Not allow these types of projects at all, like sourcehut, or
* Embrace and charge for the capacity/infrastructure it would take to support it, like cursor's play with origin seems to be.
Coding is just going to be asking for a result and manually testing it, no real thought about what code has been generated, and no human should ever need to look at or review it. Even some versioned tarball on s3 will do for the storage.
So, really, who cares about what they do when their entire business model (and Github's) is speedrunning becoming obsolete?
Basically, the future of tools like github is a platform for manual testing, where the AI proposes a change and you can experiment with the UI and attach notes for the next iteration. The whole idea of coders carefully reviewing the output of LLMs is insane, it'd be like carefully poring over the output of GCC; we've made lines of code so cheap and skill-free that there's no point in these platforms that treat code like it's important to view.
You want to be leading the agent, not lagging the produced code.
Your process doesn’t sound like vibe coding to me, though maybe this part is “and even write code that I would never write”. If you’re just generating snippets as black boxes and putting that into a project you’re otherwise maintaining general understanding of, this isn’t what I refer to as vibe coding. (Not that I’d use this process in a community with clearly stated rules against AI use.)
FWIW, if an LLM is writing significant code, I'd consider it vibe coding regardless of your understanding of the code or expert guidance and almost certainly ban-AI people would too. The scale people seem care about when this comes up is code percentage that's LLM-written to hand-written, not code ignorance to full understanding by the author.
I think you're very wrong.
I think many of the people who "support these bans" do recognize value in LLM's and use them as tools in the kit applied to their workflows but recognize that rampant abuse and misuse of those same tools threatens to ruin (or already has ruined) many community projects that had previously been healthy and thriving.
And so they find themselves insisting upon unambiguous firewalls as an existential necessity for the communities they have invested years or decades of their lives into.
How do we figure out who's right?
Some would say I a, vibe coding since I don’t really write the code. I say I’m not because I’m thinking through the features more than vibe coders.
People say that LLMs are not like compilers because they are unreliable. I think with time they will get fixed.
But at this point, the term has been diluted down to basically being meaningless.
Now, I would say 80% of my code is written through an LLM, and the last 20% is usually me reviewing adjusting, etc. The part that I find cumbersome is that even when I make manual adjustments, I still need to tell the LLM, otherwise it leads to context drift.
When I compare these 2 times, I think I remember fewer specific details, but I'm getting better at creating more checkpoints.
I don’t even use LLMs, but these puritanical stands are a real turn-off. I got into FOSS because I don’t want anyone telling me what to do, not so I can be the one who tells other people what to do.
There’s a big chunk of the FOSS community that has dedicated itself to the cultural left “omnicause,” which seems to require full agreement with the consensus as one of its membership criteria. The thing is, even though I agree with many (but not all) of its tenets on paper, I don’t really agree with the methods used or the insistence on full agreement.
I also just despise ordinary politicking, and prefer slow procedure-driven decision making (like Debian) or projects driven by a visionary leader (like OpenBSD). This makes me an outsider by default. Projects that attract these people tend to engage in vicious struggle sessions any time there’s a serious disagreement.
I think the biggest schism I have with these people is over identity. I prefer to have no identity. Anonymous (or pseudonymous), faceless. They want to enforce a strong identity, even if it’s a constructed identity. It can’t just be about trust, given how often identifiable people break each others’ trust. I suspect it’s about enforcing ingroup signaling as a criteria of membership, in order to make the group look stronger and drive out dissenters.
Same here. I don't even have just one identity in the first place (thanks to DID), but not a single one identifies as a "real human". I suspect these people have some sort of idea of what constitutes a "real human" to them, and in this case it seems to be making a full canonical identity directly available. I don't do that; my life (and brain) is incredibly compartmentalized and I don't use the body's likeness online, nor do I make my personal email address available to the public, so even if I did identify with humanity I feel like I would probably still not be "real human" enough.
That’s a great point. They want to be able to dig through your history to make sure that you’re co-aligned, and maybe to find something they can use if they need to influence or target you. To that I say, no thanks.
I choose to support the inverse; that is, I will explicitly tell others that they have no need to trust me whatsoever. I try to make arguments, contribute work and generally conduct myself in such a way that any merit is self-evident, and that there is no need to trust me. It is not an issue when someone does, of course, but there is certainly an issue when they try to demand my trust in return.
In my opinion, we live in a dystopia, and we should generally strive towards protocols and "cultures" that do not demand so much "trust". If full trust is required to participate, you will suffer from bad actors that pretend to trust, while excluding honest actors who do not. The same problem exists with things like ID verification, because bad actors have access to unlimited IDs, while honest people may not have access to, or be willing to surrender, any at all.
I’ve been burned by freely giving trust when it wasn’t deserved, assuming that it would be respected and reciprocated. As you said, that’s just not the world we live in.
2 - How do you enforce this?
You make 10 commits over the weekend once a month for your fun side project, they won't police it (my assumption they can't and won't).
Your slop machines are running day and night, pushing hundreds of commits a day, day and night... You will get on their radar, take a look, then determine "yeah, this person can go somewhere else".
From that perspective, it makes sense to limit "vibe-coded" projects, since they don't fit in that traditional paradigm.
Now, there are big feelings around vibe-coding and a strong aversion to change, so I can imagine this is a rather jarring experience for folks that want to vibe-code and want to have the dopamine hit of sharing that with other folks in a forum that obstensibly is meant for folks to edit code together.
My anecdata tells me that most of these vibecoded projects are one offs or abandoned. That’s not to say they don’t have value to the people who put them together. What I’m wondering though is: “Do these have enough value to the community to justify the cost of more infrastructure?”
My guess is the answer is no. Then in which case, if you need a place for your pet projects, Forgejo or Gitea should work nicely for you.
Isn't that true of human authored code?
I was a little surprised that some people were outraged that Codeberg (strong ideology/principles) banned generative AI output.
Now that Sourcehut (craft-oriented?) is considering doing similarly, will there be be similar pushback?
These kinds of ideological purity tests and the weird bureaucracies and little fiefdoms associated with them are anathema the hacker ethos.
But look at the comments and discourse around this. I guarantee you it ain’t about the money.
Sourcehut is a subscription service with multiple tiers of access.
I think the different tiers are just for show, but I could imagine that if they felt there was a subset of projects they liked that were putting extra stress on their system they wouldn't be above differentiation at that point.
https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
And a repo of tainted projects and untainted alternatives.
From first principles a community that relied on high friction knowledge attainment as the barrier to entry does not survive contact with LLMs. That extends far beyond "programming" as well.
Coding is turning into burger flipping -- you ask the computer to do something, then you do a bunch of manual testing. There's a little bit of jargon needed to ask for the right thing, but it's closer to flipping burgers than it is to rocket science.
The kind of person who does the research and chooses to use Sourcehut or Codeberg vs just following the masses and using GitHub is exactly the kind of person who would know exactly what they're doing with computers and thus the kind of person that would not be afraid of just actually programming without the use of tools.
I don't have a Sourcehut account (nor a Codeberg account), but I follow a lot of projects that are hosted on those platforms and it's not just platform policies. The ethos is full of "we don't want that thing here". Lots of FOSS projects hosted on both platforms have their own "no AI" policy on the README or similar files.
Which is something that you would already know if you actually used any of these services.
To me, all these "oh my god, I can't believe they are not letting me host all this slop that I generated to fix my exact use case that is unique and will not be useful for anyone else" feels just performative drama.
It would be different if we were talking about a service I did not pay for: in that case, they can do whatever they like, and I have little to no right to complain.
May everyone find their niche but inclusion does not work when barrier to entry is reduced to near zero.
If this happens, one could imagine that the former will seek to use the code from the later for "training AI"
The later might charge the former a license fee
The other sites may not be able to afford the infrastructure to support vibe coded projects. Maybe that is one of the reasons Sourcehut has this proposal.
Personally I agree with what codeberg did.
This for me the main source of concern. I am having a blast vibe coding. I understand my job is at risk. But I am totally oblivious to the fact that they are accelerating climate change.
And nothing actually prevents a vibecoder to clone a repository on SourceHut, they just would be less able to add a ton of crap to it and spit it back on SourceHut (they'll just spit it back on GitHub).
I guess that's also a plausible possibility. Honestly I mostly don't think sr.ht has enough market share to matter either way.
This is a new one. "Main use" indeed!
And in the case it is, a lot of open source projects are mostly ripoffs of commercial projects, which are ripoffs of older (now non-existent) commercial projects. It's ripoffs all the way down.
But like.. the idea that it's "most" of the usage is absolutely absurd on its face.
obv they're going to have content restriction, but there is a spectrum from "actually illegal" to "wonderful chaps whom I love but happen to disagree with philosophically." Slop coding is neither of those, but is closer to the latter than I'd expect a general purpose host to draw a line.
The Drew from the Wayland/Sway era is not the same person he once was. It’s sad to see the lost potential here. I used to defend him, even after his attacks on RMS, but I won’t be moving forward.
Slop is slop but people have a right to churn out slop if they want it. Paid users should be allowed to experiment if they aren’t exceeding limits. (IMHO slop will soon be a self-correcting problem, we’re already seeing normie slop fatigue.)
I don’t want my source forge banning anything that isn’t blatantly illegal or abusing resources, because there’s no guarantee that I won’t be next on the chopping block.
If it’s because it’s a source code storage service, that’s just not an interesting function. Run your own on a cheap vps with backups to R2.
Where is the line?
Drew draws the line of any introduction of AI in any OSS project. (1.) (2.)
Vim, Linux, OpenBSD have AI in them now, even a small tinge of it, so that would be considered slop.
Is it now with some effort with AI assistance that is acceptable or unacceptable or is it still slop?
Or is it more extreme that an OSS project should absolutely not have ANY AI at all to comply with not being slop?