alt Hacker NewsSo I voted against, partly because I feel that the text doesn't to justice to such a multifaceted topic.
If all projects on Codeberg were human-written, that would be a big seal of quality! There are a lot of projects coming out now where someone feels like they've made a cool thing but it breaks on the first edge case and is entirely unmaintainable. Many are built on wrong principles because the prompt authors aren't savvy and don't know better. Some authors (I've encountered this in the OpenStreetMap community) even have the gall to pretend that their code is a gift that we now have to host and maintain. Aside from these quality and community issues, build and test pipelines also take a lot of compute resources, and with large growth in projects, that will increase as well. That the author of the proposal wants to avoid this makes a ton of sense to me.
But it also drives a lot of projects away because maybe you later want to use LLM assistance (imagine LLMs got twice as good as they are today), or maybe the auto-generated tests might become >50% of the code. You'd have to migrate your repository and community away from Codeberg. Why take that risk? It's just not a worry I feel that developers need. They're looking to get away from Microsoft (GitHub) for their open source project and that's the point where Codeberg should be a no-brainer
We're an open source community and so the mass stealing of all our work to feed LLM training which heats the world and causes (at least temporarily) giant price hikes in consumer hardware... there's a lot to say for more ethical training and use of LLMs, but does it matter at all if Codeberg bans LLM output? Won't we just make ourselves obsolete? Idk. It's multifaceted and this proposal seems too vague and blunt for me. That's not an option that's set in stone btw, just my current understanding of the different aspects
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A big seal of quality because it is human written? Maybe in narrow spaces but in general, I’d put money on the average developer being significantly worse at writing code with bugs than an AI. It’s codebergs infra so their choice, but it seems like an overly simplistic solution to a complicated advancing technology, in that it is a threadbare line between “vibe-coded” and “complex agent harness with human oversight and review”.
Also, I’m actually quite happy with some of the vibe-coded apps I use. Handy is an example, which started as a vibecoded app, and is fantastic for STT/dictation. It seems like a literal baby with the bath water approach.
> imagine LLMs got twice as good as they are today)
I have no idea how you'd quantify that, but they're pretty good already. At least in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing.
I share everybody's concern about many aspects of LLMs; copyright, data collection, energy use, component prices, not to mention what it does to us: outsourcing our thinking, dependency, slop. And I don't entirely disagree wanting to limit that.
And yet, I have just written a library that I was planning to put on Codeberg, but I've used a lot of LLM assistance for it, because it's simply too big otherwise. I put a lot of effort on code quality and architecture, and I don't think this counts as slop, but I do think it violates Codeberg's new rule, so I guess I'll have to look for another place.
No idea where yet; I don't want to go to Github, and I believe there were similar concerns about Gitlab, so I don't know where to go yet.
You'd have to migrate your repository and community away from Codeberg. Why take that risk? It's just not a worry I feel that developers need.
I feel like we are already there. I am not vibecoding a lot, but I certainly use LLM-assisted coding now for most of my work. Once you go beyond vibe coding, an LLM feels a lot like a compiler from your well-specified ideas to code. So, to some extend, these restrictions feel like disallowing a higher-level programming language in a time when everyone was still writing machine code.
I understand where this decision is coming from (especially because they have been under attack by LLM bots) and it is well within their right, but the vague language adds a lot of uncertainty:
You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools
It's clear that this excludes vibe coding. But what about LLM-assisted coding, where the developer writes very clear instructions of what to do and carefully reviews every line? In such cases a project 'mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools', but the quality is probably not worse than fully hand-written code, especially because an LLM is often more able to 'think' of all kinds of corner cases.
I have some projects on Codeberg and donate monthly, but I have to reconsider both, since with this change Codeberg does not really align with how I work anymore. The projects that I have on Codeberg are largely human-written, but certainly use LLM-assistance for new code.
At any rate, I guess I'm back to GitHub until I have found a better alternative.