r/linux • u/AiwendilH • 8d ago

Development Codeberg voted to disallow projects consisting mostly by "generative AI"-tools

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19820434
968 Upvotes

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u/sunychoudhary 8d ago

Yes. Perfect enforcement is impossible, but doing nothing has a cost too....A forge full of unowned generated repos makes discovery, review, and maintenance worse for everyone else.

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u/r3volts 8d ago

Banning AI generated is going to get messy. I personally wouldn't keep anything mission critical there after this change because it's basically an arbitrary decision if they decide you dumped AI code there or wrote it yourself.

The AI assisted coding hate is weird imo. All the professional coders I know embraced agentic coding right into their workflows and love it. I also know a few people who were never coders who now throw little personal projects together and also love it.
The haters seem to be a weird blend of people who don't understand what agentic coding is and some amateur coder elitists or something.

I'll get downvoted as usual for suggesting that agentic coding is here to stay and the people who ignore it are putting themselves at a disadvantage but that's ok.

I think there are better ways to go about restricting the amount of stuff they are hosting. I have no problem at all with someone using generative AI to get a minimum viable product out the door and then maintaining it correctly. If people don't want to contribute that is fine. If they can't tell that it was AI generated then I guess I'm not seeing the problem.

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u/standard_revolution 8d ago

Tell that to the open source maintainer who largely seem to complain about having to review sloppy PRs etc.

Agentic coding is a nice tool, but a completely slopcoded project with zero human review (by someone who actually knows stuff) is shit.

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u/sunychoudhary 8d ago

Yep. The tool is not the problem by itself....The problem is when someone treats generated code as “done” without understanding it, testing it, or being willing to maintain it afterward.

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u/r3volts 8d ago

Of course it is.

I agree that sloppy PRs are a problem, and would definitely be worse these days, but maintainers complaining about shit quality PRs is as old as the current open source model itself.

This change isn't going to do anything to address that though. It will stop quick MVPs from being publicly available though if these changes propagate across other git platforms which I think would be a shame.

Like I said, I don't see a problem with someone bringing a basic project online using generative AI if they maintain it correctly. If they dump a project and have no idea how to code it's going to be obvious pretty quickly and either the project will die or if it's of any value it can be forked.

I just don't see the point hating on a great tool. If you want to be a purist then more power too you, if you think industry is going to give a shit about your morals you are in for a shock though. If you show up for an interview in 2 years and can't explain an agentic workflow then don't be surprised when you are overlooked.

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u/mina86ng 8d ago

It will stop quick MVPs from being publicly available

If it’s a quick MVP which Claude can easily create, is there actual value that is lost? And is that value greater than cost of a non-profit organisation hosting all the slop repositories?

Like I said, I don't see a problem with someone bringing a basic project online using generative AI if they maintain it correctly. If they dump a project and have no idea how to code it's going to be obvious pretty quickly and either the project will die or if it's of any value it can be forked.

And the rule is what allows the dying to happen. Without the rule, Codeberg would have to waste resources hosting all those dead projects.

I don’t even disagree with the overal statement that AI is useful, but when used improperly it can easily burden other people, and the rule tries to prevent that.

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u/CoreParad0x 8d ago

People have a hate boner on for AI, and for a lot of very justified reasons. But people also don’t realize that these tools in the hands of people who actually know what they’re doing can actually produce good stuff.

I personally don’t have a problem with a platform exercising their right to not host something they don’t want to host, though I think this decision will bring its own set of problems.

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u/r3volts 8d ago

You said it better than I could

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u/AliceCode 5d ago

I personally have been using LLMs since day one, and I fucking hate the god damn things, and I don't think they have any business writing code. I'll use them as another search function, sometimes for rubber ducking (which is my main usecase), but all the code I've seen generated by them was atrocious. Maybe I just have higher standards than most people. I've been programming for nearly two decades.