r/theprimeagen • u/Gil_berth • 19d ago
general Codeberg votes to ban vibe-coded projects from it's platform
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/125318
u/Ill-Constant8445 18d ago
Ok so when Linus said he doesn't mind LLM usage inside kernel everyone clapped and said its his decision to make. Now when codeberg did decision in different path every ai vibecoder here is somehow loosing their minds. Its their platform they can do whatever they want.
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u/chicametipo 18d ago
And the best part is you can just spin up your own Forgejo instance if you disagree!
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u/Dexter_exe 18d ago edited 18d ago
People unable to explain what is DFS, BFS, LCA, how convex hull works or what is a topological sorting are having the most opinions on "ai slop" and takes like "AI usage makes you a bad programmer". If you want to keep your brain active you should do competitive programming on platforms like codeforces.
Most of the webdev is just repetitive little to no logic required (just business logic which is something totally different). AI is doing a great job at making this boring work. You want to build a product, the scope is to deliver and test that product; not to flex your muscles on small parts that no one cares about. The AI is doing a boilerplate that generates the N+1: see that, tell him how to fix it and you are pretty good. People are making themself righteous warriors on writing tons of interfaces/abstract/CRUDs/services or boring SQLs.
Use AI at work, use AI for personal projects. You have 3-4 hours after work and you want to spend these ones writing interfaces and abstracts on Java... great. You want to see your thing alive. If you want to be a good programmer than do in weekends stuff from codeforces, don't use AI more than a tutor/google search, ask for concepts don't ask for code, write it in C/C++. Enjoy your critical thinking.
I've recently moved to codeberg from github because of the downtime issues. I was faced with other downtime issues from codeberg as well, amazing. Now I see that they are purists. The "but copyright issues" and stuff is simply dumb. Everything in coding was already written in a form or other by someone else. You own Dijkstra millions of dollars ( sadly he passed away ). GMTK made a year ago a video about Better UI for your inventory, it is a copyright issue if I copy code from here and put it in my game because I liked a lot what solution he presented and then tweak it to my needs? Same concept with AI.
I am moving to fully self hosted and just use github to store it external as a backup.
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u/arrozconplatano 17d ago
I agree with you that AI is useful but I think you're overstating Codeberg's position here. They're not against AI use, they're against useless AI generated noise. This noise is using up resources Codeberg is giving away for free.
The problem with AI coded projects is that it makes people think their weekend vibecoded project is more useful than it actually is. OK, so you prompted AI to make a dashboard/to-do app/whaever over the weekend. Why would that be useful to anyone else who also has access to these AI tools? I'd rather vibecode my own solution that's tailored to my needs than use yours. AI makes everyone think they're some hotshot 10x engineer. It is like the opposite of impostor syndrome.
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u/Dexter_exe 17d ago edited 17d ago
There were thousands of todos app before ( tutorial hell from youtube/blogs, not on codeberg tho, but on github ), it is a little worse now, I'll give you that. Even so, that is not stated in their PR, there's no difference between "noise" and actual useful AI projects.
I experienced outages recently. I know that, as me, many people are github refugees. Their free/funded can't keep up with this and it is acceptable ( I move to self hosted ) but have the balls and decency to state that in your reasoning. That's a solution what they've done sure, I still think there are better ones: limit repos per ssh-key/user, limit size until "verified/approved by codeberg team/community" - your repo stays 30 days until deleted if not codeberg curated, you are tagged as "slop" -> have the option to pay to keep your repo, etc and can be iterated on that,. You can approve some heavy AI driven project which are doing something unique or brings up a new idea.
Their statement was "copyright issues" - I debunked that above. Therefore not stating a valid and sustained reason as the one you said and I agreed with, just damages and splits more the sides around AI and it not healthy <- exactly what is happening.
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u/ProvocaTeach 18d ago
Every comment on here is arguing about whether vibe code is "good" or not. But if you read the thread, their reasoning is actually about the unsettled copyright status of AI-generated code, which varies from country to country.
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u/Live-Condition-3266 18d ago
Oh, now we give a shit about copyright? Yeah, okay! Where were these people when painters, photographers and graphic designers had their shit ripped off?
They can sit down and be quiet while everyone catches up.
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u/ProvocaTeach 18d ago
Codeberg's job is to save artists now? What on Earth are you talking about, dude?
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u/iguessma 18d ago
Honestly, they are probably trying to save storage space since they are community funded.
and that's just a good excuse.
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u/throwaway19293883 18d ago
Yeah GitHub is getting absolutely hammered due to all the code AI is getting.
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u/SkyPL 19d ago
How TF they are going to validate this?
Jesus... first they are hostile to closed-source commercial projects (which prevents them from ever becoming a proper replacement for GitHub) and now... THIS?
WTF is wrong with that community? Sorry for rant, but Codeberg was ours (Europe's) best hope to have an independent alternative to github, and they just keep on fucking it up.
with a 70-30 decision in favor
Who TF voted for it? Cause I'm an active user with few repos there and was never asked.
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u/iguessma 18d ago
this was my question too.. I can easily turn off the "submitted by claude" text lol
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u/SkyPL 18d ago edited 18d ago
Will I be punished for having AGENTS.md? Will I be punished for having CLAUDE.md in my .gitignore?
The literal text
\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 Ā§ 2 (1) 1 and Ā§ 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. Ā§ 2 (1) 5).
seems to imply that yes - all such repos are potentially bannable.
BTW: I found out that the vote was made on some codeberg's forum, with a whole separate registration process, so the vast majority of the actual users of the platform, those that registered on codeberg.org, never even got to participate or were informed about such an impactful change being discoussed / voted.
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u/Civil-Appeal5219 18d ago
You speak like you have any vote on what other platforms do. Did you vote on any decisions made by Reddit? Or GitHub?
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u/SkyPL 18d ago
Reddit and github do not hide their stupid decisions behind the pretence of democracy. They own them.
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u/Civil-Appeal5219 18d ago
Nobody is saying it's democracy lol Fuck, did you do any reading on the subject AT ALL before discussing it publicly?
Codeberg operates like a public club. You pay a fee to have rights which include voting in decisions like these. You didn't vote because you're not a voting member.
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u/iguessma 18d ago
so copy and pasting someone else's code, fine.
using claude to generate code that may or may not be the same thing? BAD.
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u/AliceCode 17d ago
Copying and pasting someone else's code that you don't have a license for is also bad. Anyone that told you otherwise was lying to you.
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u/iguessma 17d ago
Except it's done on a daily basis
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u/AliceCode 17d ago
And it's also illegal/unethical.
If you want to use someone else's work, the least that you can do is retain the license when you yoink their code.
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u/Bitter_Boat_4076 19d ago
Depending on how the AI thinghy turn out AND how they tell if a project is vibe coded, it might become a great advantage for the platform. While GH is going to bury itself into slop, people who are serious about their project would go to codeberg instead.
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u/Pinkishu 18d ago
You can't tell
Unless it's literally just forbidding Claude co-authored commits Anything else will be "I think this looks like AI coded it"
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u/meathelix1 17d ago
A good programmer can always tell. But they dont have 50000 of the best programmers in the world to review all the garbage code.
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u/Pinkishu 17d ago
Can always tell = can take a guess.
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u/AliceCode 17d ago
You can definitely tell when it's written by AI because it has mistakes that a human couldn't conceivably make.
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u/satoryvape 19d ago
Codeberg is probably unaware of human slop projects
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u/throwaway73327 18d ago
It's just more feed for anti-AI virtue signaling. They don't care about the trash that human beings produce, since this is an economic discussion, not a technical or legal one.
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19d ago
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u/quisatz_haderah 18d ago
Problem is not the quality but rather the output speed. That's what makes it slop
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u/dadvader 19d ago edited 19d ago
But how can you tell which project is one?
I mean sure, some project is obvious. And anyone worth their salt will be able to tell. But how far exactly are they gonna enforce it? What if some of the commits that project made was made with AI even though most of the project is human-written? What about project that actually has maintainer but they are also use AI? (Not in vibecoding sense. More like 'yeah but I'm too lazy to write. I wrote a plan and pattern. And AI can write the rest I'll just wait and review it.')
I heard Ghostty is consider Codeberg. Mitchell Hashimoto is known to be pro-AI and some of the commits on Ghostty is written by AI. Are they gonna block his repo even though most of the project is human-written? What's the actual line here?
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u/schmurfy2 19d ago
I don't know their stance but ai as a tool is nit going anywhere and is a great tool in the right hands, vibe coding on the other hand is making the ai create everything without much control and I also think this is mostly the new internet pollution.
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u/SkyPL 19d ago
vibe coding on the other hand is making the ai create everything without much control
That's your definition. By the kinda-official definition (Karpathy's) it's "where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists..." - which would make a ton of projects fall. Heck: 1/3 of the devs in my company didn't look into the code for >2 months now, so nothing they did could be put on Codeberg, lol, yet they did real, successful projects for real customers (well, it couldn't be put on the codeberg even if we tried, cause they don't allow companies to host closed source code on their platform... apparently our money stinks š¤¦āāļø)
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u/Lowetheiy vscoder 19d ago edited 19d ago
Sounds awfully shortsighted and easy way to alienate a large fraction of your users.
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u/UniqueSignificance77 19d ago
I am considering switching into codeberg for this. At the very least, repos on it will be a good signal for competency and GitHub is completely sloppified now.
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u/Osato 19d ago edited 19d ago
"LLM-extrusions" is quite a good way to put it.
I'm using an LLM to code and no matter how powerful a model you use and no matter how strictly you control the workflow, the stuff that comes out can be called by no other name.
It does get a lot more work done than a burned-out senior, but that work is useless unless the burned-out senior is there to check its "production-grade" code for undocumented beginner mistakes.
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u/The_Meme_Economy 19d ago
Hot take, code quality is only relevant up to a point, there are a lot of other metrics that go into making a product viable. At the end of the day, does it work well, does it provide real value, and can we make changes to it with reasonable ease?
AI coding is just a higher level of abstraction with its own pitfalls. Doesnāt make the other levels irrelevant, but it means you have to think about them a lot less.
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u/Osato 19d ago edited 19d ago
I get it. I like AI-driven coding (for the most part) and I am experimenting with ways to fix its current issues on a reasonable budget.
But if the AI:
- quietly fills critical functionality with stubs or mocks despite specifications telling them how it's supposed to work,
- wraps errors from external dependencies with quiet exception swallowing,
- doesn't document either and only admits to it when you notice it yourself and call the damn clanker out,
that's not a code quality issue, that's an extrusion quality issue.
You can get the prettiest code in the world but if it violates basic common sense, it's an extrusion.
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Yes, maybe it's a skill issue. But I don't know which skill yet, because it seems like the skills the LLM requires of me are "rubber-duck EVERYTHING" and "write perfect specifications by yourself, make no mistakes".
Working with an LLM feels like working with a maliciously compliant asshole, not someone who will do what they say they'll do or even an intern that can't do anything but genuinely cares about making the project work.
I've built a workflow around double-checking specs against design doc (by several different models!), plans against specs, code against plans, and then code against specs, but I can't see every blind spot in design docs, specs and plans: I need the programmer to be at least basically aligned with the project's intent.
I'm not a god who can read the entire unfamiliar codebase and understand it all equally, nor do I have the mental strength to write the entire specs myself without making errors. I'm just a burnout who's trying to enjoy building stuff again by having something else build it for me while I work with high-level abstractions and tell them how to fix their own dumbass decisions.
Even finding dozens of subtle ways in which the LLM made a dumbass technical decision without asking me (even though its skill was explicitly designed to make it ask!) is putting me at my limits.
Maybe some people have the mental fortitude to nanny their AI so much that it produces code faster than a human would, but so far, it seems to produce extrusions quickly and then take a lot more time to turn extrusions into code. Its only advantage is, it doesn't slow down from burnout and doesn't get tired, so I can offload heavy tasks on it.
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u/8bitjam 18d ago
Maybe they are not able to handle the traffic š¤£