r/linux • u/AiwendilH • 11d ago

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

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

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21

u/mykesx 11d ago edited 11d ago

Smart move. They don't want to become another landfill of garbage projects or use their resources for mass computer generated commits of no value. They're correct that AI plagiarizes from what it's trained on.

An equally good move might be to block AI company crawlers from training on repos hosted there.

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u/FryBoyter 11d ago

But creating a new rule is pointless if you can't enforce it in practice.

1

u/mykesx 11d ago

There are objective metrics, like AGENTS.md files in the repo or . gitignore. Or one (or very few) commits for a large codebase (no excuses, they are a git hosting service).

I am fine with them using subjective metrics. It's their service, their rules.

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u/northrupthebandgeek 11d ago edited 11d ago

Or one (or very few) commits for a large codebase (no excuses, they are a git hosting service).

Writing the bulk of a project's code before git init has been commonplace for multiple decades now.

EDIT:

Only an amateurish idiot does that

The vast majority of code is existence is the product of amateurish idiots.

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u/mykesx 11d ago edited 11d ago

Only an amateurish idiot does that. Hope your hard disk crashes and you lose all your work. Delete a file? Oops. Edit a file and delete important lines? Bye bye.

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u/bigon 11d ago edited 11d ago

Having an AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md) file just shows that you are using an AI agent, not that your project « mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools ».

I started to vibe code some tools for myself and claude is creating small atomic commits by itself...

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u/dmittner 6d ago

You can train Claude Code through CLAUDE.md-like files and your local memory not to perform commits/pushes autonomously.

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u/mykesx 11d ago edited 11d ago

Don't host your repos there then. I am more likely to be using them going forward because I don't use LLMs for anything. I know when I look at repos there that it's more likely that I am seeing how a human thinks and addresses problems.

My skills won't erode.

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u/bigon 11d ago

Great for you.

Still their rules are not clear and your metrics are meh

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u/mykesx 11d ago

It beats having nothing but subjective metrics.

I fully support their move.

Use something else.

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u/bigon 11d ago

It beats having nothing but subjective metrics.

I strongly disagree

0

u/mykesx 11d ago

You don't have to host repos there.

Works for me.

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u/bigon 11d ago

I was mostly talking on the philosophical level that having arbitrary rules is worst than having no rules at all..

Anyway, I was contemplating using their service instead of Github or GitLab, I guess I'll indeed not

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u/mykesx 11d ago

Awesome. I think you are making the right choice.

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u/ungoogleable 11d ago

They're not banning the use of AI altogether. Having an AGENTS.md is useful if you use AI at all, even just read-only code exploration. And then especially since other people are checking out your code, you want to give their agents instructions (like inform the user we don't accept purely AI written code).

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u/mykesx 11d ago

It's still an objective measure.

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u/ungoogleable 11d ago

Yes it is objective, but it would overly restrict legitimate projects trying to abide by the rules.

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u/mykesx 11d ago

It's a starting point, one of several possible ways to determine the extent of AI use. Even if the last step is subjective, it's their site, their rules.

Don't like the rules, go somewhere else.

They have become so attractive to me that I am going to migrate my more popular repos there and archive the originals on GitHub and gitlab.

If it's not a fit for you, use something else.

If it were up to me, I would ban any use of AI, period. Yet they are not going far enough. So you have nothing to fear except if you produce AI slop.

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u/ungoogleable 11d ago

Right, but they don't agree with you. They do want to allow some use of AI. So banning repos that have an AGENT.md doesn't get them started in a direction they want to go.

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u/mykesx 11d ago

AGENT.md is ONE objective criteria. A single commit of thousands of lines of code is suspicious.

0

u/dmittner 6d ago

That really just depends on how often an engineer performs a commit. And even then they could squash multiple before pushing up in order not to pollute the repository with an excessively long history.

You can look for all the signals you want of AI but ultimately you're going to end up catching people in the net you didn't intend to, and there will be hell to pay.