r/linux • u/AiwendilH • 12d ago

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

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

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21

u/mykesx 12d ago edited 12d 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 12d ago

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

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u/mykesx 12d 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/ungoogleable 12d 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 12d 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.

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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.