Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

7/23/2026 at 1:16:01 PM

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.

by tptacek

7/23/2026 at 5:12:03 PM

Tangential but one day when bored at work, I browsed the GitHub discussions for Helix, my main text editor, and the most active thread was regarding adopting an LLM policy for the repo[0]. The maintainer thought it would be beneficial to use an LLM policy similar to Ghostty which is AI friendly with human review. Now the whole topic is "brigaded" by a small number of extremely passionate anti-AI voices that immediately react positively to any pushback against AI usage and negatively to anyone who isn't staunchly anti-AI. Even when presented with, in my opinion, reasonable middle-ground such as only merging maintainable code, the counter-arguments are mostly against the harms of AI (mostly datacenter related) dismissing AI outright and refusal give an any ground.

It's a real impasse where the pro-AI or indifferent opinions seem to simply stop posting when they realize there is going to be no real debate, and the anti-AI individuals swarm on any new input.

My personal opinion is I don't care either way -- AI is a tool and if contributors use that tool to improve code or the product, I could care less. I just find this interesting.

[0] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/15408

by nazgulsenpai

7/25/2026 at 5:57:55 AM

You should see pro-AI zealots. Oof!

by AlexeyBelov

7/23/2026 at 2:24:05 PM

We could call them software manufacturers - in the etymological sense (manu factus == made by hand).

by veganmosfet

7/23/2026 at 1:41:44 PM

I don't see the correlation here. You insinuate that codeberg's opinion is due to hosting Zig. I don't see any indicator of that.

I also don't see your points of contention - it may help to be more specific.

Last but not least, I am also not sure they are a community hub. This depends on how many people use codeberg. IMO it is still a niche right now; perhaps that will change, but right now I am not entirely certain it is a community hub per se when compared to github. But competition is good and if there are alternatives to fatso Microsoft controlling github, I am all up for that. The upcoming mandatory age sniffing will be a waterfall moment.

by shevy-java

7/23/2026 at 1:54:23 PM

> You insinuate that codeberg's opinion is due to hosting Zig.

I didn’t interpret GP that way. Rather, they were saying that like-minded projects are appropriately homed.

by zbentley

7/23/2026 at 8:30:56 PM

There's another underlying theme when you consider Forgejo having Codeberg as a home - anti-commercialization / sensitivity to commercialization and breaking of trust in the ecosystem. I could see anti-LLM sentiment stemming from these things a bit, in terms of what the LLM's were trained on. It's like an evolution from the olden days of slashdot commenters ragging on M$ every chance they got - only now it's AI and slop.

by iambenm

7/23/2026 at 1:56:17 PM

Yep, different strokes for different folks.

by sanderjd

7/23/2026 at 10:55:16 AM

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).

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...

by croemer

7/23/2026 at 1:07:36 PM

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.)

by graemep

7/23/2026 at 11:52:25 AM

I was wondering if copyright was part of it, but their blog post didn't mention copyright.

For me that would be the single biggest reason. People who vibe code don't legally own the copyright to the output (to the best of my hobbyist-non-lawyer knowledge), so they cannot themselves provide permission for others to be able to legally copy.

by conartist6

7/23/2026 at 1:15:13 PM

> People who vibe code don't legally own the copyright to the output

In the US at least, the PTO has not said this. They have said that artwork is not copyrightable if it was substantially "generated" with little human input. They have not said anything about software or other creative works. And certainly nothing about software that has been carefully "vibe engineered" with lots of human input, direction, and review.

It seems unlikely to me that the PTO would declare that a software project that heavily utilized an AI-based advanced autocomplete would make it not copyrightable.

Now, if you just one shot the most advanced Tetris algorithm of all time and post it on the web without any scrutiny or review, and no input, then it's probably not going to be copyrightable.

by petcat

7/23/2026 at 8:10:12 PM

What does the patent and trademark office have to do with the copyright office at LoC?

I agree that the copyright office has not said this either -- they have just said that you need to be a human to register a copyright.

by tingletech

7/23/2026 at 4:13:49 PM

> It seems unlikely to me that the PTO would declare that a software project that heavily utilized an AI-based advanced autocomplete would make it not copyrightable.

Why would they have different rules for one potentially copyrightable material versus another?

What the PTO (courts, actually) have not said is how much and what kinds of work a human must perform to transform a machine-generated work into a copyrightable work. It could be that this would be domain specific (i.e. different rules for software and art). But totally different rules entirely for software and art? Seems unlikely to me.

by PaulDavisThe1st

7/23/2026 at 2:05:39 PM

Yes, my understanding is that there is some test, as yet not clearly defined, in the middle of those two extremes. At one extreme you let AI make all the choices and own nothing. At the other extreme you use AI more or less like a tab complete and own everything.

by conartist6

7/23/2026 at 2:42:55 PM

Legal ambiguity tends to have a chilling effect. Although I think this is overshadowed by hype at the moment.

by catlifeonmars

7/23/2026 at 12:48:48 PM

> so they cannot themselves provide permission for others to be able to legally copy.

If something is not covered by copyright law then others do not need permission to copy it. However, you cannot impose conditions on copying it either (not even minimal conditions like the 2 clause BSD license).

However you can enforce licenses in jurisdictions where even pure vibe-coded LLM output is covered by copyright. So you might find yourself in a position where, for example, you can enforce the GPL on your vibe-coded software on someone in the UK, but not someone in the US.

by graemep

7/23/2026 at 1:10:55 PM

There is at this time no reason to believe that. We know an AI cannot own copyright in the US. We don't know that the author doesn't own it. And if they don't we don't know how much of their own manual effort on the output would make them own it.

If a photographer can own a point and click snap of a painting then I expect we'll land somewhere where LLM outputs are or can become owned by the tool weilder with at most some minimum effort.

by singpolyma3

7/25/2026 at 4:04:58 PM

You don't need to own the copyright if the output is not copyrightable.

You seem to think one needs to have copyright to publish something but that's not true. If you don't infringe on anyone else's copyright there's no problem. And others can of course copy themselves.

The only problem is if someone else had copyright to the output.

by croemer

7/23/2026 at 1:29:35 PM

Not a lawyer, but additionally there's also legal concern about the legality of the training source. How can you verify that the model you're using wasn't trained and therefore incorporates code that is not licensed for sharing. e.g. someone theoretically uploading the shared source windows kernel to github and it being added to copilot.

There's no reasonable belief that or similar scenarios cannot happen and does not happen.

That's my problem with Linus's announcement regarding AI in the kernel -since the announcement I'm counting the days until we see SCO II Electric Boogaloo.

There's a lot of people with deep pockets and a deeper hatred of FOSS, and AI gives them the backdoor to take FOSS out -legally, on the grounds of province.

(I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, and this is only my speculation from a layperson's point of view)

by rnd0

7/23/2026 at 1:43:08 PM

> Not a lawyer, but additionally there's also legal concern about the legality of the training source

That's not how copyright works. If you use a pirated copy of photoshop the resulting image is not illegal.

by EdiX

7/23/2026 at 6:39:07 PM

That's apples and oranges; a better analogy would be if you post a video on youtube that you made yourself, with products you're allowed to use, but happen to overlook that copywritten music is on the radio in the background or on the tv.

How many youtube videos have gone dark over bogus copyright claims over the years? And you think people will overlook what's in AI -when there's over a trillion dollars on the table?

by rnd0

7/23/2026 at 1:52:09 PM

If the resulting image contains copyrighted content, such as a snippet of photoshop's proprietary code, then it most certainly might be infringing.

It's not as simple as your reductive analogy. It's for a court to decide.

by xyzzy_plugh

7/23/2026 at 3:48:10 PM

The blog post did mention license laundering, which is one of the copyright issues with LLMs.

by Narishma

7/23/2026 at 1:23:03 PM

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.

by NoboruWataya

7/23/2026 at 1:39:15 PM

I get that impression too. Seems like codeberg wants to be the hub for meaningful software, not a dump for any random file that happens to technically be free software.

See also: 100MB per-user quota for repos that are not meaningful software.

by inigyou

7/23/2026 at 1:05:04 PM

[flagged]

by kstenerud

7/23/2026 at 9:10:05 AM

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.

by TheChaplain

7/23/2026 at 9:27:52 AM

+1. Membership is open. The vote was given to members.

This is all reasonable.

I will have to move my projects off Codeberg, but that's okay. We have incompatible views. No grudges.

by farfatched

7/23/2026 at 11:31:16 AM

I had a somewhat active GPL/copylefted project on there for 11 months, but I didn't even see a point in signing up as "community member" to become a part of the registered voting community in order to vote ... because from reading the threads around this it was already an indiscriminate pile-on of moralism and judgement and it was clear where things were going to go from day one.

Any voices that said anything on the PR or on threads about it on Mastodon even ask for clarifications on where the limits etc were intended to be were immediately attacked and shut down in a black and white way... It was very clear where it was going to go and there was zero nuance to the discussion. The "community" shouted out anybody who would have voted against this.

I got ready to pull my project the moment I saw all that going down, and just waited to pull the trigger til the day it passed.

It's their right to narrow their definition of community on this basis. I also think the way they did it is crude, lacks nuance, and was executed poorly.

I'm sure my project probably would not have fallen afoul of their judgements. I hosted my own CI in part because I didn't want to suck up their resources. I was by no means producing "slop" -- I'm a software engineer with a 30 year career and capable of engineering judgement. I'm also long time open source user and contributor, an advocate of copyleft licensing, have my own critical opinions about aspects of LLM usage, and wanted off GH because I saw a lot of ... evil.. there and wanted to not be reliant on American infrastructure among other things.

But... I like probably the majority of authors of large packages these days, use AI tooling as do my contributors. And parts of my project have hooks to use open weight models, and provide MCP etc. hooks, and so on.

Having seen the type of discussion both on the PR and on Mastodon, I felt no desire to have these particular people holding open judgement over me and my project. [Aside: I'm fairly certain someone has gone through the PR that proposed the ban and removed egregious comments ... there are some comments missing that were formerly there, wish I had archived them]

Take the comments on this Mastodon thread: https://wandering.shop/@silvermoon82/116964029691087138 "I'm sorry you caught abuse off the slop fondlers. Consent and boundary issues are inbuilt in their community."

Or here, when someone tried to ask for similar clarification: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912 "You're coming off similar to someone trying to probe the limits of consent instead of trying to honor the request in good faith. It's a bad look." "Opening your conversation with a group by saying "well I'll get to violate your group's values a _little_, right?" does not project the mentality of someone who wants to collaborate in good faith."

Comparing AI usage or questions about it to rape culture or violating consent is absolutely repulsive and trivializes the latter and exaggerates the former.

Or making analogies to Claude Code users being NAZIs? "@piggo @tante I see such a rule as being similar to the "no Nazis" rule. It works by Nazi sympathizers self-identifying by arguing about the rule."

Pre-defining an in-group or out-group based on how contaminated they are by the tools they use... I'm sorry, it's ridiculous. And not in the slightest "democratic" even if it holds a formal vote.

It's possible that nuance would prevail when the people sitting in judgement over things happened to look at my project. The actual public blog post seems going out of its way to provide a bit of "don't worry" ... but none of that was provided before. And I felt no need to be under that microscope.

... and so then the flood of "good riddance, so glad we got rid of people like you" comments... and people ritually going through my other comments to downvote me, blah blah. It's all the hallmarks of an angry echo chamber.

I posted this elsewhere about the kind of un-dialectical purity-of-essence thinking I saw on display:

[I fear] Blunt purity tests administered by people with reductionist and categorical thinking.

The reality is that even tools produced by concentrated capital and mass appropriation can also increase the productive capacity of a small free-software project whose code remains available under copyleft. They're not "infected" and contagious. They're tools.

They can deskill and dispossess workers; they can extend what a particular worker is able to make. Which tendency dominates, under what conditions, and to whose benefit are material questions.

"AI bad" is not an answer to them, any more than tech-bro "innovation good" is.

by cmrdporcupine

7/23/2026 at 12:11:08 PM

There is no winning with this type of perpetually online activist. It is the moral prerogative of any open source project that wishes to achieve any success in the real world to gatekeep these sort of purity testers out. Thankfully, Mastodon has been invented as a containment zone.

by veeti

7/23/2026 at 12:35:40 PM

I respect that you tried to argue with people so bound to black and white thinking that they have the need to filter out anyone with any ambivalence or diverging opinion that they are creating a closely monitored and moderated filter bubble at all. I'm just staying miles away from those codeberg, gitea, fediverse people. Sad and not beneficial to democracy, but why bother?

by RamblingCTO

7/23/2026 at 1:43:03 PM

I think those people are trying to say that if someone doesn't know whether their project is mostly AI-written, they're an idiot or lying. Nobody doesn't know that. Unless the point of the project is to exactly balance at 50% AI code, then you know whether you're vibecoding or regular-coding.

Their comparison was to a no-Nazis rule, not to Nazis. That comparison works. Only vibecoders argue about the intricacies of a no-vibecoding rule, just like only Nazis argue about the intricacies of a no-Nazis rule. They aren't saying vibecoders are Nazis, they're saying both vibecoders and Nazis are dishonest and try to find loopholes in the rules and accidentally identify themselves by doing that. The people who argue about age of consent also do that, which is why the person mentioned rape.

by inigyou

7/23/2026 at 1:47:44 PM

The point is that the comparisons used in both cases are absolutely inappropriate. I never said they were saying vibecoders are Nazis or rapists. I'm saying using those as analogous/similar comparison points displays an absolutely bonkers lack of decorum, nuanced thinking, or "democratic" behaviour and also trivializes those actually horrendous cases.

More worrisome is I saw this same set of comparisons made over and over in multiple threads.

Like, it's clear many people in this community see themselves as violated in some sense by the actions of American AI companies. The emotional response is legitimate. Transitioning from that emotion to indiscriminate policy is not, and making comparisons like that in a public forum is distasteful.

As for "if someone doesn't know whether their project is mostly AI-written, they're an idiot or lying. Nobody doesn't know that" -- that is not the question. The question is the precise definitions of what "AI-written" means, because people legitimately wanted to know if their projects were going to be voted off the island. Because like it or not based on your moral principles -- vast amounts of people are using these tools now. I can't say a majority because I don't have the numbers but it would absolutely not surprise me. And I can guarantee a large number of projects on codeberg use(d) them. So clarify in advance of the policy passing what the policy will be. Instead the language was left ambiguous so they could choose to exercise personal judgement.

Calling them stupid or dishonest is a dick move. People legitimately wanted to know.

by cmrdporcupine

7/23/2026 at 2:00:04 PM

> I'm saying using those as analogous/similar comparison points displays an absolutely bonkers lack of decorum, nuanced thinking, or "democratic" behaviour and also trivializes those actually horrendous cases.

Are they correct? That should be the most important thing.

> More worrisome is I saw this same set of comparisons made over and over in multiple threads.

Maybe because they're correct

> because people legitimately wanted to know if their projects were going to be voted off the island.

Thus outing themselves as AI projects. Nobody with a non-AI project doesn't know that it's non-AI.

by inigyou

7/23/2026 at 3:24:59 PM

Good grief. The question is simply "what is vibecoding?" You're taking the position (without saying so) that any use of AI in coding is banned: from Cursor autocomplete to full omp harness chugging with Fable, whether or not the person has taken decades to learn coding, whether or not the code was reviewed professionally.

I suspect the reason you're not saying this is because when you write it out, it's obviously a policy rooted in simplistic thinking, similar to "We won't host code if it was written in Emacs" or "We won't host code if it uses spaces instead of tabs."

by rpdillon

7/23/2026 at 6:03:36 PM

No, the question is a classic case of jaqing off. Not a single person is in actual doubt which side of the line they fall on.

Your second paragraph is a strawman.

by hananova

7/23/2026 at 11:36:27 PM

Not true. I have no idea if the "majority" of my recent projects was authored by AI. It's a hodge-podge that I've assembled by tweaking things myself, deleting wrong tracks, implementing touchy logic myself, and had AI do lots of boilerplate, over hundreds of commits and thousands of back and forth interactions.

In world where we cannot copyright facts, but we can copyright compendiums, we've demonstrated that we acknowledge the effort and value of curation. The way I use AI, I'm carefully curating what makes it into the released version, either by writing it myself or iterating with an AI to get it written.

You're just being dismissive.

by rpdillon

7/23/2026 at 6:45:54 PM

Did you read the actual terms? It's quite clear, it says mostly written by AI.

by inigyou

7/23/2026 at 11:33:38 PM

Yeah, that doesn't mean anything in a world of agentic tooling. That's why folks are seeking clarification of what "mostly" means. Like more than 50% of the characters in the source code? From a harness? Tab-based autocomplete? Function completion? As I said, it's simplistic thinking.

by rpdillon

7/24/2026 at 1:45:21 AM

If you aren't sure, then you're on the wrong side of it.

by inigyou

7/24/2026 at 3:02:42 AM

That's not true just because you say it is. You're rejecting the notion that the rule is written badly, and as an excuse for other problems, and, as written, is actually unenforceable. If I pushed my repos, they wouldn't even be able to tell that the code was written by AI, because I author every commit. Silly argument. Time will judge.

by rpdillon

7/24/2026 at 3:05:30 AM

If you were on the right side of it, you'd know.

by inigyou

7/24/2026 at 2:35:13 PM

"The right side"? You just keep posting thought-terminating dismissive replies. I don't even use Codeberg, and there is no "right side". That's the point.

by rpdillon

7/24/2026 at 3:11:32 PM

The right side is the one that doesn't get you banned from Codeberg. But since you don't use Codeberg, it seems like there is no problem.

by inigyou

7/23/2026 at 2:15:06 PM

Right, I see I'm dealing with a fundamentalist.

I'll move on now.

by cmrdporcupine

7/23/2026 at 6:04:53 PM

[dead]

by redsocksfan45

7/23/2026 at 9:22:02 AM

[flagged]

by youre-wrong3

7/23/2026 at 9:54:47 AM

Not being a US citizen* means I cannot vote in US elections, thus it is a closed door vote by your reckoning and so the US is not democratic. Did I get that right?

*This is shorthand for me not being associated with the US in any way, but you are of course free to reply with all the edge cases that makes the point impossible to state briefly.

by SiempreViernes

7/23/2026 at 1:13:38 PM

It does become a problem when the US claims global jurisdiction for its laws or tries to impose laws on other people.

by graemep

7/23/2026 at 10:24:39 AM

[flagged]

by flir

7/23/2026 at 10:32:03 AM

He did attack the argument - he argued reductio ad absurdum that classifying "democratic" as "open to everyone" wouldn't be a sensible definition, because the argument would set such a high bar for democracy that no state is democratic.

The irony of this comment is that leaning back and snarkily accusing someone of "playing internet" is precisely the kind of disengagement you're complaining about.

by stuartjohnson12

7/23/2026 at 11:05:31 AM

[flagged]

by flir

7/23/2026 at 12:17:09 PM

you did screw up the words i regret to inform you

by stuartjohnson12

7/23/2026 at 9:51:47 AM

Who do you think should be voting if not their active users?

by falsemyrmidon

7/23/2026 at 11:33:49 AM

Active members* ("mere" users can't vote).

But yeah, if you care about the project and want to participate in it (including having a say), you can become an active member.

https://join.codeberg.org/

by jraph

7/23/2026 at 10:02:18 AM

It is still democratic, what would be you preferred way to do it?

by not-kinsale-joe

7/23/2026 at 9:56:44 AM

“closed door” is a bit disingenuous considering any private individual codeberg user can apply to become an active voting member https://join.codeberg.org/

by dijksterhuis

7/23/2026 at 4:53:06 PM

[dead]

by youre-wrong3

7/23/2026 at 10:31:49 AM

[flagged]

by zajio1am

7/23/2026 at 11:06:34 AM

It's safe to say it's reasonable to majority of codeberg members. It doesn't really matter if it seems unreasonable from the outside.

by omnimus

7/23/2026 at 1:23:32 PM

I agree that they are fully within their rights to decide how they want to run services they provide. However, i do not think it shields such decisions from public criticism.

If they were some random corporation making business decision, everybody would have an opinion about it and express it, not just say 'it is reasonable according to majority of board/shareholders and that is only thing that matter.'

by zajio1am

7/23/2026 at 11:23:34 AM

You wouldn't say that about the above example.

Especially given several Global South countries see it as an example of foreign interference.

by inemesitaffia

7/23/2026 at 12:54:48 PM

The important difference is that leaving Codeberg forever is much easier and lower impact than leaving your country forever

Switching costs are a core part why certain governance methods work on the internet but not in real life. Similar reason to why dictatorships work well for companies and open source projects, but not governments

by wongarsu

7/23/2026 at 11:38:26 AM

Strawman argument.

by rnewme

7/23/2026 at 11:30:24 AM

Not platforming your slop is the same as killing minorities? Okay...

Codeberg is not a state. This is not life and death. If you have any disagreements, feel free to join another community. The network effect hadn't kicked in yet, you're free to compete in the marketplace of ideas.

by pona-a

7/23/2026 at 1:11:43 PM

[flagged]

by graemep

7/23/2026 at 1:59:44 PM

> they were sincerely meant to be for people's own good

That is an incredibly offensive bastardization of history.

by devmor

7/23/2026 at 2:55:56 PM

Its very rare for people do deliberately do bad things. Almost everyone thinks they are doing the right thing. My point (which I think should be apparent in my original comment) is that we should look at doing things "for their own good" has a very bad history. Now do you get it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY

by graemep

7/23/2026 at 4:38:48 PM

Your phrasing in the post I replied to is not the phrasing you are using now.

People frequently do bad things to people that they think are the right thing and that they still know are not “for [the victim’s] own good”. For example, removing an entire group of people from society is often presented as “for the good of everyone else”.

This is an incredibly important distinction when talking about the horrific ways gay people have been treated in the past couple centuries.

by devmor

7/23/2026 at 5:08:46 PM

My meaning was clear. You are reading something I did not say into my comment. I have added to what I said, but my last comment does not contradict anything in my previous comment.

by graemep

7/23/2026 at 7:50:38 PM

Your meaning was not clear, which was why I made certain to explain why your two comments do not mean the same thing.

If that was not enough to explain why what you said was incredibly inaccurate and toes the line of fascist propaganda, I would be happy to have an amicable discussion with you one on one - as comment threads on HN only go so deep.

by devmor

7/23/2026 at 11:07:22 AM

Ridiculous. Any liability is solved through the terms and conditions, where the uploader is held responsible. The uploader solves this, by holding the AI company responsible.

I couldn't care less about if AI was used to develop software, if it does what it is supposed to do, and if it is secure. Bad software can be produced with or without AI, so ultimately it is up to _you_ to vet the software you use if you don't pay anything for it.

by abc123abc123

7/23/2026 at 2:52:52 PM

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.

by arjie

7/23/2026 at 2:19:22 PM

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.

by evantbyrne

7/23/2026 at 2:10:17 PM

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.

by somnium_sn

7/23/2026 at 2:18:51 PM

> Codeberg initially was a FLOSS alternative to big company Github

Codeberg never was a full alternative to Github. From the start it's been an open platform, run by European non-profit, exclusively for Free and Open Source projects. I see the recent changes to be inline with their initial values and community they want to foster.

by archargelod

7/23/2026 at 2:22:22 PM

Codeberg always limited private repositories since its inception. They were never set out to replace GitHub/GitLab.

As the other commenter said, they didn't change their values and target.

Also, these changes are enacted by members of the e.V. Nobody is forcing them to do something. It's all public and transparent.

by bayindirh

7/23/2026 at 3:02:53 PM

Yeah, they are setting up a capricious environment which is hard to avoid with rules like this.

In the blog post they complain about AI-assisted projects being too polished, using CI resources even though it's a one-man project with zero users. (Reasons they don't give for banning it in the TOS)

So, what's the rule exactly? Can I set up release builds on my one-man project or not? What about when the clearly vibe-coded project does it, do I report them? Does everyone just remember to not check in their AGENTS.md when pushing to codeberg?

I think things should just cost money. Far better than a nonsensical honor system around LLMs which has the obvious outcome of hiding LLM use.

That said, they can foster what ever environment they want. I think it's just a regressive self-limiting view that tries to pretend like the world isn't changing with rules that have bad downstream outcomes, as opposed to a platform that accepts reality and figures out what to do from there. And I find that disappointing.

by hombre_fatal

7/23/2026 at 3:32:37 PM

I kind of like the idea of a software forge that won't host the Torment Nexus discovered in 2027 because its TOS didn't contain language about it in 2026.

by duped

7/23/2026 at 2:27:24 PM

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.

by AussieWog93

7/23/2026 at 3:30:38 PM

> I don't get the anti-AI sentiment.

There are valid social, ecological and maybe philosophical concerns.

But on the technical aspects... I don't get it either. It's a wonderful tool. even if it didn't write a single line, the fact that it can analyse a source and explain things to me in context is a game changer.

by JodieBenitez

7/23/2026 at 1:00:39 PM

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?

by hamburgererror

7/23/2026 at 1:46:22 PM

Depends if you require just public space for the project or if you also need the project to be part of social media network of Github. As "forge" Codeberg is pretty great. I use both Codeberg instance and my selfhosted Forgejo instance (the software behind codeberg) and have no problems with it.

by omnimus

7/23/2026 at 2:12:15 PM

What do you mean by "social media network of Github"?

by hamburgererror

7/23/2026 at 3:21:37 PM

Github is social network. People follow other peoples profiles, people discover projects using "explore", trending and star system.

Codeberg has some of these features but the networking effect there is pretty weak because there are way fewer people. Almost Every programmer is on Github.

by omnimus

7/23/2026 at 3:21:52 PM

Whether you're expecting to have contributors that all have GitHub accounts already. And whether you expect to use the network-effects (follows/stars/activity feed) to have your project be more discoverable.

by sjs382

7/23/2026 at 1:18:23 PM

Most of the discussion before this official post:

Codeberg bans vibe coded projects

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386

by ChrisArchitect

7/23/2026 at 11:40:56 AM

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.

by grokcodec

7/23/2026 at 12:10:15 PM

> The US, for example, is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic

The US is both. Or, to phrase it another way, it is neither a pure democracy nor a pure republic. That's a good thing, it helps to reduce the downsides of both.

by JohnFen

7/23/2026 at 12:47:55 PM

Not sure what good you see. Recent history events show that whatever the US is, it is certainly not good.

by xeyownt

7/23/2026 at 1:38:47 PM

[dead]

by redsocksfan45

7/23/2026 at 3:02:46 PM

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.

by VariousPrograms

7/23/2026 at 3:18:14 PM

My first push to Codeberg was 4 years ago. Back then I certainly got that they discourage small throwaway single-developer projects, and especially ones that are not FLOSS, and may exist only in the user's private repo. I pushed anyways, none of my projects took off, and they're basically just sitting there abandoned.

I get the feeling I should move the repos to my own Forgejo instance out of respect soon enough, but I'm certain they will not be deleted any time soon, at least not without me being notified of it. It's a community, not a corporation.

by FireInsight

7/23/2026 at 10:02:58 AM

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)

by wongarsu

7/23/2026 at 11:02:29 AM

I think that's what Codeberg wants. It wants to be the hub of good software, not the dumping ground for random code files that GitHub turned into.

by inigyou

7/23/2026 at 11:19:47 AM

A hub of mostly human written software would be enough. It remains to be seen whether that results in measurably better quality code over the long term.

by e2le

7/23/2026 at 11:40:22 AM

Think about all the random git repos you've probably created for little scripts. Codeberg doesn't want to be a dumping ground for those. It wants to be a hub for software that actually matters, at least a little bit.

by inigyou

7/23/2026 at 5:01:20 PM

I would love to see other people's random little scripts. Those things tend to go hard on usefulness per amount of code.

by yjftsjthsd-h

7/23/2026 at 7:33:34 PM

Well start a website called Scriptberg

by inigyou

7/23/2026 at 12:18:12 PM

I wonder whether people moving to development LLM and people moving away from LLM will create a divide comfortable for both parties or not.

I would hope so, that split would be a natural parting of the communities.

My pessimism tells me that the more any community rejects LLM and polices against generated output, the heavier they would be crawled. Which means that proLLM community by nature puts pressure on all antiLLM infrastructure – an asymmetrical problem, where other people pay for your choice.

My optimism, on the other hand, tells me that after bubble pop, hopefully, far less people would have money to feed aimless crawl results into machine learning algorithm in hopes of slight improvements.

by lesostep

7/23/2026 at 10:23:34 AM

thanks for addressing the source of the problems as `LLMs` and not AI in general.

by endre

7/23/2026 at 2:22:31 PM

I'm guessing this is probably why I've been unable to connect to Codeberg with my very much human-driven browser...

by Sophira

7/23/2026 at 9:27:40 AM

Kudos to them and others who take a principled stance against LLM crapola.

by BrenBarn

7/23/2026 at 3:16:00 PM

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?

by sjs382

7/23/2026 at 3:14:27 PM

How are they going to scan for LLM use? Oh wait..

by outlore

7/23/2026 at 1:39:44 PM

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.

by shevy-java

7/23/2026 at 3:37:39 PM

[flagged]

by hounainehamiani

7/23/2026 at 10:09:23 AM

[dead]

by redsocksfan45

7/23/2026 at 10:23:09 AM

[flagged]

by Daffrin

7/23/2026 at 11:28:38 AM

[flagged]

by kstenerud

7/23/2026 at 1:18:49 PM

Vendors? Market? What do you think Codeberg is, exactly?

by Nnnes

7/23/2026 at 2:29:03 PM

Doesn't matter that they're a nonprofit. I still can't trust them.

by kstenerud

7/23/2026 at 6:15:50 PM

That's fine, you're not welcome there anyway.

by hananova

7/23/2026 at 9:49:47 AM

[flagged]

by superdisk

7/23/2026 at 1:01:13 PM

[flagged]

by arkwin

7/23/2026 at 1:39:30 PM

> You are not creating software with the exact rules that I have made up in my head on how software should be made, so I'm going to build a wall and hate you and the code you make.

The funny thing about this comment is out of the gate it screams the exact reason people don't want the LLM generated code in their zone.

This reads similar to people who make prompt art getting upset that they're not taken seriously. People demand respect for something they didn't earn. Programmers who have worked hard for their knowledge don't want to listen to the person who thinks they know everything because the magical machine spit out some working code. It doesn't matter if they're right or wrong. They're annoying and entitled.

I'll just paste the classic Ian Malcom Jurassic Park quote.

> I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox

by MSFT_Edging

7/23/2026 at 3:10:00 PM

The argument about entitlement is silly: every generation just "gets" all the benefits and hard work of the previous generations. We didn't have to invent the assembly line, or electricity, or radios, or transistors...I can work for a few hours in a McDonalds and make enough to buy a cell phone that would have power unimaginable to someone even 50 years ago.

And heck, I'm a guy in my late 40s who's been programming since I was 8. I have a masters in CS, and have been a programmer for decades and I don't have the tiniest bit of resentment for the AI builders out there. Sure, they don't have my expertise, but they can still make cool stuff if they work at it.

What's really happening is that Codeberg was build on the assumption that the volume of code submitted would be small, and that assumption no longer holds. So now everyone is backing into reasons why limitations have to be imposed, and of course they won't say "It's because we built this whole thing assuming not that many people would use it, and now we have tons of use, so we're going to ban projects that are the most voluminous."

So instead, it's about malicious code, or copyright status, or entitlement, or some other topic.

As for the Jeff Goldblum quote: "You read what others had done and you took the next step" is literally how human progress is made.

by rpdillon

7/23/2026 at 1:57:51 PM

I can see the point you are trying to make, and I'll make a counterpoint to that. When you play the "didn't earn" card, you are really getting nowhere. It's a bad argument.

It's putting up the gate, "I feel you didn't work hard enough for X result, but I did, so I must be better"

I drive a manual car. Should I hate every automatic car driver?

I have a master's degree in cybersecurity; should I shit on everyone who doesn't when they try to mention anything involving cybersecurity? I mean, I have a piece of paper that says I've earned it?

On some level, yes. I would listen to the advice of a doctor over a random person on the internet.

On another level, it's like saying, " Oh, you didn't have a blacksmith handcraft that knife for you, and you bought some machine-made knife? We should ban machine-made knives; the person making a knife using a machine didn't 'earn it '."

Perhaps you shouldn't create code; after all, you probably didn't develop a compiler. Or the computer chip running it... Or the OS.. Did you really earn the right to develop something?

by arkwin

7/24/2026 at 2:05:15 AM

It’s a big tent and anyone is welcome in. I learned to code on my own thanks to the efforts of people to write manuals, articles, text files on BBSs and NNTP. That’s just one way.

But try the other shoe on and walk a mile. You like writing code and solving problems yourself. Everyone in the world is telling you you’re irrelevant and should start using the machine or get left behind. The future is here and you’re not a part of it unless you give up and join us. Constantly.

It was hard before LLMs to convince software developers, let alone managers and product people and everyone else, to take quality seriously. Now it’s orders of magnitude harder. Because anything you say is met with someone who doesn’t care and thinks it’s all irrelevant. The machine will get better. It will solve all of these problems. Give up.

Fortunately that hasn’t deterred craftspeople in other trades who made knives, custom cabinetry, boats, houses and the like. Sure automation and progress has made a lot of knives available. Maybe more than we need. And most of them are disposable crap. But there are still knife makers.

All this talk of being reasonable is hard to take seriously when neither side will consider the other.

It’s also possible that even after considering all of the technical features and capabilities that LLMs bring to software development that some folks don’t find the cost of using them to be worth it. So they can say, “Sure, I will use such tools when and if I deem it appropriate.” Which may be never.

But we’re in a world right now where you can be coerced into feeling like there’s no choice but to accept those trade offs and just use the LLM.

I think it’s interesting and good that there exist places for people who share similar goals. There are few places for people who want to just do programming to chill out and not be surrounded by LLM generated code.

Also the scraping situation is totally getting out of hand. Having to keep up services is not easy or fun work. It’s just toil created at the expense of many for the benefit of few.

by agentultra

7/23/2026 at 2:24:41 PM

It's less about "earning" and more the attitude and approach to the work. The flippant nature of people expecting the same respect for some piece of work that was churned out by a machine, as someone who understands every part. I know I used "earn" a lot in the last reply, but that was a shorthand for something more complex. A combination of appreciation, discipline, and a common work style.

The LLM stuff is being gatekept because the people inside the gate care, and the people bringing the LLM code don't.

I drive a manual car too, and I get upset when someone who doesn't care about where they're putting their car, let alone the transmission, endangers me on the road. They're apathetic.

I work with people who have fully adopted claude in their work flows. They don't care about the code they push. They generate, prune, generate, prune in 10kloc increments. They're apathetic to others who might need to use this code and expect some kind of consistent architecture/interface. Its exhausting to deal with yet they love to say "I did this". I respect someone who tells me "I slopped this out" more, as they respect me enough to set expectations.

I think if you're trying to build a community of people who care, you must defend against those who are apathetic, or else they'll bring the whole community down.

This isn't to say all LLM users don't care about their work, but that there are far more people who are happy to push slop and take credit than the reverse. To carefully screen those people brings us back to the original complaint, LLMs turn programmers into paperwork drones. Attempting to screen these types of users takes away even more time from the purpose of the community.

by MSFT_Edging

7/23/2026 at 3:45:04 PM

> The flippant nature of people expecting the same respect for some piece of work that was churned out by a machine, as someone who understands every part.

> with people who have fully adopted claude in their work flows. They don't care about the code they push.

This just isn't true and it's the cynnical self-limiting assumption the belies rules like the TFA. It's like when HN was full of people claiming that you weren't a real engineer and didn't care about code if you used Javascript.

I've vibe-coded some pretty cool things that I use daily, and I've put some serious work into vibe-coding them. Months of work, infinite polish, infinite revisions, without writing a single line of code. It feels like the right level to be at with 20 years of software experience.

LLM use has merely freed up the chore work so that I can focus on more important directional concerns, polish the testing system to completely derisk it, and then do it in parallel with everything else I'm working on.

I'm starting to see the "LLM users don't care" assumption as a somewhat understandable defensive posture that mostly comes from resistance to the world changing and watching the value of our expertise go to zero. Something I still grapple with every week btw. Maybe if you accepted the idea that veteran software engineers can completely replace the code writing experience with AI while delivering good software, it involves swallowing a pill you're not ready to swallow?

Codeberg's new rule about LLMs is about as enforceable as a rule against bad code quality and that is the more interesting discussion.

by hombre_fatal

7/23/2026 at 4:01:06 PM

Thank you; that is probably a better way to put into words what I am feeling.

I've never called myself a developer. But I've been playing with Linux and looking at code for the better part of 20 years.

I've done a lot of larger solution development. "Glue code," etc.

I think I use LLMs quite well. I mean, on some level, I understand software architecture and system architecture.

I've (before LLMs) had a master's degree, CISSP, Sec+, CEH. I am a pretty "qualified" person for whatever that means.

AI has made the chore work easy. It also allows me to think deeper about something than just bashing my head against code. Instead of spending time writing code, I'm researching technologies and thinking strategically about what something should look like years from now.

I've spent weeks and months, even on pet projects with LLMs. Things I use daily too.

But somehow "LLM coders don't care" is just annoying.

by arkwin

7/23/2026 at 4:51:04 PM

And I'd just grant the fact that LLM enables more low quality, low effort spam. Just like how opening up the internet to more people instead of just the research/academic nerds led to the same thing.

But the problem is a low quality spam problem, not a "people use LLMs at all" nor a "people don't care about the code like real artisanal engineers" problem. Neither of which are something you can police btw since they can't be proven.

How do you build a platform that is resistant to spam and low quality submissions? If you want an honor system, why not set the self-policing bar at low quality content instead of what you feel is a proxy for it?

by hombre_fatal

7/23/2026 at 11:20:56 PM

> I've put some serious work into vibe-coding them. Months of work, infinite polish, infinite revisions, without writing a single line of code.

Not being pedantic, but this is not "vibe-coding", as other commenter and blog post means it at least. Parent emphasize lack of work, polish, revisions:

> They don't care about the code they push. They generate, prune, generate, prune in 10kloc increments. They're apathetic to others who might need to use this code and expect some kind of consistent architecture/interface.

> This isn't to say all LLM users don't care about their work, but that there are far more people who are happy to push slop and take credit than the reverse.

by alwaysbeconsing

7/24/2026 at 3:19:34 PM

No, the TFA policy is specifically against LLM usage, not low quality code.

What you quoted is just how people paint LLM-heavy users just like how people used to paint JavaScript users as incompetent.

That there are people using LLMs to write 100% of their robust, derisked code disarms their argument or commits them to a sillier one like TFA's "we ban LLMs because you might get it to build a CI pipeline before you have users".

by hombre_fatal

7/23/2026 at 2:39:10 PM

Hey, thanks for taking the time to reply. And you bring up some good points. I'll be the first person to tell someone I used Claude on this. Hell I make sure it says co-authored by claude on my github projects specifically because I'm not trying to hide the fact that I'm using LLMs.

I think you are correct, is not not really an LLM problem as much as its a person problem.

But there doesn't seem to be a good way to fix this. If anything LLMs just expose someone's integrity? I don't know, its a hard answer. Some people use LLMs just because they are translating languages.

How do you prove "work" or "knowledge?"

by arkwin

7/23/2026 at 6:22:20 PM

The shift here is that up until now output (code, in this case) required a degree of competence. As such, we socialized that being able to put out the code showed a degree of competence. The act of putting together a PR with working tests showed you had a level of knowledge past "I want X to do Y."

Now, you have a lot of people taught that output (a working PR) is competence. They walk around thinking they are competent because they can produce output.

When faced with criticism on working code, they collapse and flail immediately because to admit they can't explain or defend the code is to admit they are not competent. From there you've hit pretty much all of the problems that the rest of the Internet suffers from: cognitive dissonance, digging in because being wrong threatens your constructed identity, constructing echo chambers of AI Influencers peddling the latest prompt, and so on.

by krinchan

7/23/2026 at 4:30:00 PM

Hiring a great F1 driver does not make a racing team owner a great driver.

Some of the people shoveling LLM slop seem to miss that point.

by saltcured

7/23/2026 at 5:16:21 PM

Someone using an LLM to code isn't calling themselves a great coder just because the LLM is writing good code. Being a software engineer/developer (whatever you want to call it) is not defined solely on your ability to write code.

To go back to your point, before the F1 driver (LLM) was hired the owner was the driver, mechanic, and everything else. Now that they have a driver they can focus on all the other roles and just ensure the driver is not crashing.

by chapel

7/23/2026 at 1:12:39 PM

It's a tragedy of the commons problem - if you allow LLM code, you get an infinite sewer of shitty commits from people who don't know you or care about you - so you close the door to everything.

Nobody wants to admit that we're going to have to go back to personal, verified relationships (it's who you know, not what you do) to fix it, unless we come up with something new.

Same problem with Eternal September - there was an "artificial" gateway that is now gone, but the need for some form of gateway still exists.

by bombcar

7/23/2026 at 2:24:16 PM

Developers who use LLMs: You are telling me that you have moral/ethical/practical issues with how I work but I'm going to ignore what you say to justify how I'm not at fault.

That's what these replies sound like to me.

by duped

7/23/2026 at 4:50:04 PM

The moral/ethical high ground argument just spirals.

Oh you drive a car? You should justify that to me.

Oh you bought any piece of clothing, tech, etc where it was made in countries with cheap labor and bad labor laws? You should justify that to me.

Oh you use electricity? Idk some of that is made via non-renewable resources.

Oh you eat meat? So much animal suffering and land is being wasted.

I get using an LLM has some problems. But I find it ironic that for most people, they didn't have a problem with any of this until it started to affect their job and their expertise.. And their paycheck.

Where was your outcry for anything else? Or is it just performative?

I sure hope you are also only using products and services derived from union labor.

by arkwin

7/23/2026 at 6:16:37 PM

This is about the kind of code allowed in a place to store code. Your comparisons are obviously nonsensical in relation to the actual topic at hand. If you're a part of the transit community, they have plenty to say about car dependence and its ethics. If you're a part of the fashion community, they have loads to say on fast fashion and its ethics. The list goes on and on. For all them it seems totally reasonable for them to have their own ethical lines within their relevant spaces and communities. But it should be pretty obvious that none them have anything at all to do with Codeberg, or the general discussion of ethics at hand here. I don't see how you have any ability to claim what causes are issues someone cares about or prioritize based on them raising an issue relevant to the actual subject matter.

by mynameajeff

7/23/2026 at 6:52:04 PM

You're missing the point. I was only saying those things to show that arguing ethics and morals is bad because it's a never-ending self-imploding purity spiral. I am not trying to argue those views, nor am I refuting some argument because the replier is trying to claim some moral high ground.

by arkwin

7/23/2026 at 6:11:50 PM

If someone hangs a 'no cars' sign at the entrance to their private nature path you're not going to think they're saying 'You are not traveling according to the exact rules I have made up in my head about how one should travel, so I'm going to build a wall and hate you'

No, they don't want cars on their path, because cars would be harmful to the environment they're trying to foster.

I'm not asking you to justify your choices. What I'm saying is that you sound like you're deliberately ignoring what other people think as a precondition to justify your choices to yourself.

by duped

7/23/2026 at 2:28:29 PM

If you look at the discussion at https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116962454004862117

The changes are more nuanced. It's not banning AI assisted coding. It's banning purely and mostly vibe-coded projects. If you're using LLM/AI assistance responsibly, you're on the clear.

There's nuance, and Codeberg guys understand it, AFAICS.

To quote the person who shared the news (tante): No, assistive use is not prohibited (ref: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116963072821111167).

Signed, a developer who doesn't use LLMs.

by bayindirh

7/23/2026 at 2:23:14 PM

Hiiiiii, developer who hates LLMs here. waves

I think I've avoided all of the LLM debate thus far, but I figure that some of my actual positions probably ought to be represented in this discussion instead of shadow-boxing.

I hate LLMs because I've had to sink a lot of hours into defending services and content that I host for myself or for others from companies that couldn't be bothered to write polite crawlers. This entirely unnecessary problem has contributed to some friction between me and a few clients as I try desperately to feather the pedal on traffic. This has subsided somewhat recently but the pain of it is still fresh.

I hate LLMs because they have taken a lot of goodwill and free labor from the creative community and turned it into a product. This isn't a new problem, it's been a point of sometimes rancorous argument in open source for decades, but this is another round of that old argument on what we owe or don't owe the people who donate labor and creativity to the commons.

I hate LLMs because I don't think Sam Altman or most of his social circle are good people and I don't want to give them more wealth and power. I believe Sam Altman is very comfortable enriching himself at the expense of humanity, and I want to still have some hope for the future of humanity. This position requires me to do whatever I can to deny any of my resources to Altman and his ilk, and to help foster the efforts of other people who want to do the same. To that end, I immediately support any protectionist efforts in the anti-LLM crowd.

I hate LLMs because they have inverted the effort it takes to generate some content versus consuming and considering that content. I am being drowned in a sea of garbage created by people in professional contexts who hand a few sparse notes to an LLM and ask it to generate a "professional email" or a "blog post" or a "technical document", and the quality on the overwhelming majority of this is terrible. It is having a severe and direct adverse effect on my ability to do work.

I hate LLMs because, after quietly observing differences between people who are at the far end of pro-LLM versus those at the far end of anti-LLM, I believe there's a consistent pattern of cognitive decline in the pro-LLM folks. I acknowledge this could just be me observing my own bias, but some literature is beginning to appear supporting it.

I hate LLMs because I love authenticity and creativity and constructive human endeavors, and LLMs are eating away at all of these and producing a homogeneous mass of superficial probabilistic crud. I have serious concerns about the future of art, creativity, and culture. They have been ever-changing and large parts of modern culture would be unrecognizable to someone 200 years ago, so this is more of a wait-and-see level of concern than a Big Hate, but so far, the Magic 8-Ball says, "Outlook not so good".

I hate LLMs because I'm strongly opposed to the idea that a few commercial companies, of whose finances I am deeply suspicious, should be made a required dependency in software development. This is an insane proposal to me. Even accounting for all of the upsides to LLM-driven development -- and I've followed all of that news just as much as all the negative takes -- it's nuts to me that there aren't more people worried about what this could mean for the future of software and technology. But, then again, I started my career during the height of Microsoft's domination of tech, so maybe that was formative for me.

I hate LLMs because I care about the environment that makes our existence possible and it's insane to me that so much of the tech sector suddenly stopped giving a shit about that. How can we, as a community, talk about the existential risk of climate change or the benefits of adopting renewable energy or cheer the development of ever-more-efficient power consumption while we also create a huge forcing function to convert as much electrical energy into thermal energy as possible? It's as if, practically overnight, everyone went from, "we need to do everything we can to reduce our demands on the environment or we're cooked" to "oooh, shiny new toy, and it only ruins everything around it, cool!"

I hate LLMs because I have been a hobbyist archivist for over a decade and a home computing enthusiast since the mid-1980s and right now I can't afford to buy a badly-needed hard drive or RAM or build out a new machine to even maybe experiment with an LLM in my own workshop because voodoo financing by everyone in the LLM ecosystem has totally wrecked the hobbyist computing economy, and there's no relief in sight.

I hate LLMs because I strongly suspect that the future they want is one of subscription computing and I will retreat back to retro computing before I go willingly into that long moonless night.

I hate LLMs because I am under enormous pressure, from many different angles, to also use them. I'm being asked -- required, in some cases -- to ignore all of my concerns about them and use them anyway because everyone else does and "obviously" they are the future. Because, somehow, all of my positions against LLMs make me unreasonable and a less valuable member of society.

LLMs could have been done in so many ways that I would have gladly and enthusiastically jumped right into. They are a really neat technology! I would love to be experimenting with them and playing with them and finding all the right ways to balance their benefits against their risks. But, I can't do that, because the way they've been developed requires me to set aside too many of the above concerns to be able to adopt them at all.

If I'm ever able to build a reasonable enough home system for the purpose, I might be able to, one day, change all the above to "I hate commercial LLMs...", but I have no idea right now how far away that day is, or if it will ever come. And, even that scenario would likely be a Faustian bargain, as it's likely that I'd be using open weights that were created under most of the same conditions as my concerns above.

by thaumaturgy

7/23/2026 at 4:01:17 PM

I dislike current-gen AI for much the same reasons you mentioned: the externalities its development & use are causing.

The tech itself is neutral in this respect. It's those externalities that need to be addressed. Don't want to depend on a subscription service? Then run open models under your own control (if you 'have to' use AI). Don't want that new datacenter disturbing a town's water supply? Make 'em pay extra such that existing users can keep being served @ the same price.

Do such things across the board, and responsible AI companies will be forced to be more community-friendly.

by RetroTechie

7/24/2026 at 6:50:27 AM

[dead]

by Juncture0

7/25/2026 at 9:17:23 PM

I agree with most of what you write, and I think it is good that you mention these details. I also do not use LLM/generative-AI and I do not intend to use LLM/generative-AI, and many of my reasons are like what you have.

by zzo38computer

7/24/2026 at 7:06:12 AM

Adding...

I hate LLMs because their pushers are hurrying us into the next financial crisis, which will impoverish another generation.

I hate LLMs because they have captured pretty much all R&D investment when we have far more important and urgent existential problems to solve. The world is literally burning in front of us, but no time for that because an even bigger model might make 0.03% less mistakes.

by foxylad

7/24/2026 at 12:08:40 AM

thank you for speaking up

by syngrog66

7/23/2026 at 2:10:39 PM

> You are not creating software with the exact rules that I have made up in my head on how software should be made, so I'm going to build a wall and hate you and the code you make.

More like:

> You are creating software using a tool incurring massive risks and costs for the rest of us even though we don't use it ourselves, we don't want you here

> plenty of people are using open offline models to code

…that needed to be trained and required siphoning the web too.

by jraph

7/23/2026 at 2:24:41 PM

Open source developer: I'm going to open source my software so the world can use it for whatever they want!

World: creates LLMs

Open source developer: >:(

Maybe don't open source your software if you're going to get mad about it?

by arkwin

7/23/2026 at 2:54:12 PM

Personally, the reason I hate LLMs is not they trained on public code. They trained on code which doesn't allow that kind of thing to begin with.

Training LLMs is not the problem. Consent, violating copyleft licenses and other ethical issues is the problem.

IOW, I don't hate the tech. I hate how it's built. On top of infringements, being ignorant of others' labor and being proud of stealing what others done.

by bayindirh

7/23/2026 at 3:50:37 PM

> Open source developer: I'm going to open source my software so the world can use it for whatever they want!

No, you are describing a SPECIFIC License called the The Unlicense: https://opensource.org/license/unlicense

This is ONLY ONE such OSS license and does not apply to all OSS.

by lenkite

7/23/2026 at 4:05:44 PM

US courts have ruled (for better or worse) that using code to train LLMs is a transformative piece of work and not subject to the original copyright.

by arkwin

7/23/2026 at 6:03:47 PM

I’m sure that the people making this kind of argument would be quite pissed indeed if I trained an LLM on their proprietary code and used it for my commercial projects.

by archagon

7/23/2026 at 4:10:45 PM

US Supreme Court has yet to make any explicit ruling though. It The EU top court (CJEU) is currently hearing arguments. I guess we will know in 2027-28 globally.

by lenkite

7/24/2026 at 12:38:04 AM

A big part of open source is about reciprocity: you taketh, you giveth.

Do LLM companies give back to the community?

by JuettnerDistrib

7/23/2026 at 3:02:21 PM

That's somewhat beside the point and bayindirh addressed this, but I'll answer to this bit:

> I'm going to open source my software so the world can use it for whatever they want!

Well, no, it's rarely "for whatever they want". Most open source licenses require attribution, and copyleft licenses require sharing any derivative work under the same license under some conditions. The terms of the licenses open source developer matter and are not there just to look pretty.

This idea that free software is released under no conditions needs to die. The few restrictions open source developers want for their code need to be respected!

And yes, I'm kinda mad the few lines of code I released to the world probably helped those despicable companies to train their despicable artifacts. We couldn't have possibly anticipated that this was coming, but now we know, and indeed the question of releasing publicly at all should be reconsidered. At the same time, we can't always stop doing anything that has bad consequences because otherwise we stop doing anything. So yes, I might both continue publishing free software and be mad at the same time. Any objection?

by jraph

7/23/2026 at 10:09:16 AM

> 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

by nylonstrung

7/23/2026 at 10:11:36 AM

I suspect that in reality it is not.

by ioasuncvinvaer

7/23/2026 at 5:59:08 AM

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.

by jaredcwhite

7/23/2026 at 7:00:00 AM

The article literally says they intend to selectively enforce this rule and not be strict with it?

by bcye

7/23/2026 at 12:45:01 PM

... and leave it completely up to their own personal judgement on when and how to apply their rules, and on public forums people who asked for more clarity on "boundaries" were called "creeps" and other insults.

That's not healthy democratic culture.

by cmrdporcupine

7/23/2026 at 12:52:03 PM

Called by whom?

Since when is Codeberg responsible of the Internet culture?

by xeyownt

7/23/2026 at 2:30:24 PM

Said community calling itself a community and behaving in a way on the community forums that encompass such community is... yes, take responsibility.

by cmrdporcupine

7/23/2026 at 6:17:00 PM

Not a single person is unaware if their projects are handwritten or vibe coded. Nobody is actually confused or concerned, you are just jaqing off.

by hananova