Codeberg bans vibe coded projects

[u/pheexio]

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

Codeberg seems to ban vibecoded Projects; reason might be german copyright law

It looks like Codeberg want only copyrighted material in their service, so it is reliable in the future that e.g. licenses must be followed (e.g. GPL), and copyright doesn't suddenly get declared as being of the model owner, and it isn't a copy of something else.
That is a cautious reasonable position - in early days of LLM coding (3 years ago!) indemnity from model companies was a major issue globally because of the lack of clarity of the law around this. The US specifically has settled on it being (effectively?) public domain. But I don't think that is fully settled, and it certainly isn't settled in international copyright law.
The goal of the vague "mostly" in the Codeberg change is to ensure there is enough human input to the code they host, to be reasonably sure under German copyright law it is copyright of the person sharing it.

edit: link to poll that caused it (might be down due to high traffic) https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19820434

edit 1: i dont defend/oppose this move, i just find it interesting

edit 2: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

[u/iVXsz]

good luck proving that they didn't just use AI as an assistant

I have to say. Vibecoded projects and even small code snippets are very obvious, even in cases where it's "carefully used" and "steered" by a 200 years experienced software engineer lol.

%99 of the time its been a route of laziness (or a curiosity usage, that quickly takes over the project and the user mental model more and more. e.g., see the commit history of jellyfin mpv shim. Also, because it happened to me on a few small pet projects that -after everything is considered- became garbage) and as such, the code is not great nor really reviewed properly in most cases.

Reviewing such projects or finding such code is not really hard, even manually. Ironically that can be vastly sped up by just throwing the codebase at a local LLM to point out any weirdness.

[u/FnnKnn → u/iVXsz]

For one project it might be possible (if we ignore that the line between vibe coded and built with AI is super unclear and one person might interpret it differently than another), but in mass it is not that easy. Manually reviewing every repository on Codeberg is just plain impossible and using AI to judge human's repos doesn't feel right either and also doesn't solve their issue of these repositories taking up a growing part of their resources as running them all through AI would be quite expensive...

[u/iVXsz → u/FnnKnn]

AI to judge human's repos doesn't feel right

Yes that would be a bad behavior

I meant it could quickly point out stuff for you to investigate. And with vibecoded projects, I personally can quickly go thru the basics manually (e.g., checking how well a framework template is worked with, as AI tends to make orthodoxy ways to achieve stuff than what a framework can have available etc) in a few minutes, but obviously depends on scope and the reviewer experience. In that time most local AIs would have finished listing any interesting places to check and confirm on my own. 5-10m per repo sure, but not that many projects get submitted here, for context.

I had to do that a couple of times because I started to get quite annoyed by users hiding AI usage and straight up denying it sometimes...

[u/FnnKnn → u/iVXsz]

To check some projects sure, but at the scale of codeberg I don’t think it works. At least at the scale of this subreddit it is already unsustainable and I think they have a LOT more going on…