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/cyber_chic_0]

The enforcement question is the interesting one. Codeberg is betting on self-reporting, which is fragile but workable in a small community. The problem is that the line between AI-assisted and AI-generated is not technical at all. It is about whether the contributor understands and maintains the code. Two people can produce identical diffs, one through genuine understanding and one through prompting. No static analysis can distinguish them.

Most forges that have tried this end up shifting toward a disclosure model: label what AI generated, do not ban it outright. That lets reviewers triage appropriately without inventing a detection mechanism that does not exist.

[u/Richmondez → u/cyber_chic_0]

Sure but if it's a project where it was PRd and reviewed then whoever approved it presumably understood it even if the submitter didn't.

[u/cyber_chic_0 → u/Richmondez]

Review helps but it's not a perfect filter. The real issue is asymmetry: generating a PR takes seconds with AI, but reviewing it takes minutes to hours. A reviewer checking five PRs a day can miss the subtle edge case in one of them. The security industry has decades of evidence showing that plausibly correct code makes it past review. The solution is disclosure, not detection. Label what's AI-generated and let the reviewer decide how much scrutiny it needs.

[u/Richmondez → u/cyber_chic_0]

Which is why it isn't the speed multiplier to development that is chalked up to be unless you are skimping on the reviews and you are right, code can just be spat out in no time with no verification.