Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Should I be concerned that many of my hobby projects are little "one-off software [projects] specific to my need"? Is Codeberg only for hosting large, community-driven projects that require long-term support? I certainly "don't actually have a community" around my (hand-written) solo projects.
Fair enough if Codeberg isn't the correct place for stupid little personal hobby projects, but that wasn't the sense I got when I signed up.
- My first push to Codeberg was 4 years ago. Back then I certainly got that they discourage small throwaway single-developer projects, and especially ones that are not FLOSS, and may exist only in the user's private repo. I pushed anyways, none of my projects took off, and they're basically just sitting there abandoned.
I get the feeling I should move the repos to my own Forgejo instance out of respect soon enough, but I'm certain they will not be deleted any time soon, at least not without me being notified of it. It's a community, not a corporation.
by FireInsight - Many of their points ring true - increased pressure on maintainers, LLMs turning coders into paper pushers, the erosion of community.
Regarding discussion here o democracy - pure democracy can lead to suppression of minority views. Democracy can mean 6 / 10 people voting to beat the crap out of the other 4. The US, for example, is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic, with checks and balances to prevent such abuse. Not perfect by any means, but doing pretty well compared to the alternatives available today.
by grokcodec - > The US, for example, is not a democracy, it is a constitutional republic
The US is both. Or, to phrase it another way, it is neither a pure democracy nor a pure republic. That's a good thing, it helps to reduce the downsides of both.
by JohnFen - Most of the discussion before this official post:
Codeberg bans vibe coded projects
- Codeberg's philosophy sounds really good, I build open source scientific research projects, would you advise me using this platform instead of Github for making my code public?
- Depends if you require just public space for the project or if you also need the project to be part of social media network of Github. As "forge" Codeberg is pretty great. I use both Codeberg instance and my selfhosted Forgejo instance (the software behind codeberg) and have no problems with it.by omnimus
- It is fine to have corners of the internet that run in a particular way.
My issue however, is that this is changing the rules on people. Codeberg initially was a FLOSS alternative to big company Github. Now it's more narrow, an alternative to Github and only for people who don't want to use AI. What's the next step? This is the problem, you either a platform and be, within legal reasons, agnostic, or you are trying to be a specific community. It is unclear to me if the specific community that Codeberg wants to be today will be the one it wants to be in a year from now, because clearly it's changing.
I cannot rely on a service provider that does change that quickly.
by somnium_sn - I kind of like the idea of a software forge that won't host the Torment Nexus discovered in 2027 because its TOS didn't contain language about it in 2026.by duped
- Yeah, they are setting up a capricious environment which is hard to avoid with rules like this.
In the blog post they complain about AI-assisted projects being too polished, using CI resources even though it's a one-man project with zero users. (Reasons they don't give for banning it in the TOS)
So, what's the rule exactly? Can I set up release builds on my one-man project or not? What about when the clearly vibe-coded project does it, do I report them? Does everyone just remember to not check in their AGENTS.md when pushing to codeberg?
I think things should just cost money. Far better than a nonsensical honor system around LLMs which has the obvious outcome of hiding LLM use.
That said, they can foster what ever environment they want. I think it's just a regressive self-limiting view that tries to pretend like the world isn't changing with rules that have bad downstream outcomes, as opposed to a platform that accepts reality and figures out what to do from there. And I find that disappointing.
by hombre_fatal - Codeberg always limited private repositories since its inception. They were never set out to replace GitHub/GitLab.
As the other commenter said, they didn't change their values and target.
Also, these changes are enacted by members of the e.V. Nobody is forcing them to do something. It's all public and transparent.
by bayindirh - > Codeberg initially was a FLOSS alternative to big company Github
Codeberg never was a full alternative to Github. From the start it's been an open platform, run by European non-profit, exclusively for Free and Open Source projects. I see the recent changes to be inline with their initial values and community they want to foster.
by archargelod - I run an open source project, contribute to others and in the last 6 months I've set up two homelabs (one at work, one at home) out of hard rubbish/ewaste running a bunch of open source software.
I don't get the anti-AI sentiment.
From the maintainer standpoint, it basically eliminated entire classes of frustrating, tedious jobs that existed before - especially with regards to packaging and CI/CD
No longer do I have to do the back and forth dance of getting slightly further into a 20-minute build over the course of an evening until GitHub Actions finally produces a correct build. I just log into `gh`, give Claude the specs ("Please make it as statically-linked wherever sensible, support these platforms xyz back to versions abc") and it loops 2 or 3 times itself until the build is done.
If a user posts an issue, Claude can track it down in 15 minutes flat. Our issue backlog was cut by around 70% in a couple of months after Opus 4.5 was released - I could fix 5 issues in a coding session rather than 1, and new users who would vibecode a fix would often upstream the solution via PR.
As a user, deployment of many FOSS apps has gone from a nightmare to 15 minutes of prompting. I have a Claude skill that has the user accounts, IP addresses and configs of the servers. You just say "Install Immich on server xyz" and it does it. My wife says she wants the Immich photos on the Chromecast, I sign into adb and say "Make the Immich photos the screensaver on the Chromecast", and it installs ImmichFrame.
If I run into issues, instead of just giving up I'll just prompt a fix. I'll often clean things up, draft a PR and upstream it - and to be honest results have been mixed. Some maintainers (myself included) are appreciative that someone has upstreamed a fix that others can find useful, others are actively hostile to it and plenty more are just too busy to review the PRs.
I do empathise with them about the wasted CI/CD resources for small projects with a handful of users, but the rest just sounds academic and out-of-touch. From my own experience as an early adopter I've found that AI has massively increased my participation in the FOSS sphere - as a maintainer, contributor and consumer.
by AussieWog93 - > I don't get the anti-AI sentiment.
There are valid social, ecological and maybe philosophical concerns.
But on the technical aspects... I don't get it either. It's a wonderful tool. even if it didn't write a single line, the fact that it can analyse a source and explain things to me in context is a game changer.
by JodieBenitez - From their recent announcements it seems Codeberg is operating as a club that just so happens to have a git UI. Perhaps that is amusing if you're playing along, but I can't imagine why I should want to actually host anything at an org with this kind of governance.by evantbyrne
- Seems fine. A git host is not a particularly hard piece of software to self-maintain and there’s always GitHub for most things.
I can understand why. The cost to the host is entirely in volume of code, and creating volume is cheap now. Without some constraining measure they will have lots of AI code. Even just by itself that would make it impossible to have.
It’s also a cultural thing. This is for that niche of developers. That’s all right. Communities have their own (often-hyperspecific) rules. HN certainly does and we’re all here.
by arjie - I don't really see a problem with this decision (or the one regarding crypto), they were voted on by the active members of Codeberg, simply a democratic outcome.by TheChaplain
- Ridiculous. Any liability is solved through the terms and conditions, where the uploader is held responsible. The uploader solves this, by holding the AI company responsible.
I couldn't care less about if AI was used to develop software, if it does what it is supposed to do, and if it is secure. Bad software can be produced with or without AI, so ultimately it is up to _you_ to vet the software you use if you don't pay anything for it.
by abc123abc123 - I had a somewhat active GPL/copylefted project on there for 11 months, but I didn't even see a point in signing up as "community member" to become a part of the registered voting community in order to vote ... because from reading the threads around this it was already an indiscriminate pile-on of moralism and judgement and it was clear where things were going to go from day one.
Any voices that said anything on the PR or on threads about it on Mastodon even ask for clarifications on where the limits etc were intended to be were immediately attacked and shut down in a black and white way... It was very clear where it was going to go and there was zero nuance to the discussion. The "community" shouted out anybody who would have voted against this.
I got ready to pull my project the moment I saw all that going down, and just waited to pull the trigger til the day it passed.
It's their right to narrow their definition of community on this basis. I also think the way they did it is crude, lacks nuance, and was executed poorly.
I'm sure my project probably would not have fallen afoul of their judgements. I hosted my own CI in part because I didn't want to suck up their resources. I was by no means producing "slop" -- I'm a software engineer with a 30 year career and capable of engineering judgement. I'm also long time open source user and contributor, an advocate of copyleft licensing, have my own critical opinions about aspects of LLM usage, and wanted off GH because I saw a lot of ... evil.. there and wanted to not be reliant on American infrastructure among other things.
But... I like probably the majority of authors of large packages these days, use AI tooling as do my contributors. And parts of my project have hooks to use open weight models, and provide MCP etc. hooks, and so on.
Having seen the type of discussion both on the PR and on Mastodon, I felt no desire to have these particular people holding open judgement over me and my project. [Aside: I'm fairly certain someone has gone through the PR that proposed the ban and removed egregious comments ... there are some comments missing that were formerly there, wish I had archived them]
Take the comments on this Mastodon thread: https://wandering.shop/@silvermoon82/116964029691087138 "I'm sorry you caught abuse off the slop fondlers. Consent and boundary issues are inbuilt in their community."
Or here, when someone tried to ask for similar clarification: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912 "You're coming off similar to someone trying to probe the limits of consent instead of trying to honor the request in good faith. It's a bad look." "Opening your conversation with a group by saying "well I'll get to violate your group's values a _little_, right?" does not project the mentality of someone who wants to collaborate in good faith."
Comparing AI usage or questions about it to rape culture or violating consent is absolutely repulsive and trivializes the latter and exaggerates the former.
Or making analogies to Claude Code users being NAZIs? "@piggo @tante I see such a rule as being similar to the "no Nazis" rule. It works by Nazi sympathizers self-identifying by arguing about the rule."
Pre-defining an in-group or out-group based on how contaminated they are by the tools they use... I'm sorry, it's ridiculous. And not in the slightest "democratic" even if it holds a formal vote.
It's possible that nuance would prevail when the people sitting in judgement over things happened to look at my project. The actual public blog post seems going out of its way to provide a bit of "don't worry" ... but none of that was provided before. And I felt no need to be under that microscope.
... and so then the flood of "good riddance, so glad we got rid of people like you" comments... and people ritually going through my other comments to downvote me, blah blah. It's all the hallmarks of an angry echo chamber.
I posted this elsewhere about the kind of un-dialectical purity-of-essence thinking I saw on display:
[I fear] Blunt purity tests administered by people with reductionist and categorical thinking.
The reality is that even tools produced by concentrated capital and mass appropriation can also increase the productive capacity of a small free-software project whose code remains available under copyleft. They're not "infected" and contagious. They're tools.
They can deskill and dispossess workers; they can extend what a particular worker is able to make. Which tendency dominates, under what conditions, and to whose benefit are material questions.
"AI bad" is not an answer to them, any more than tech-bro "innovation good" is.
- +1. Membership is open. The vote was given to members.
This is all reasonable.
I will have to move my projects off Codeberg, but that's okay. We have incompatible views. No grudges.
by farfatched - Since the blog post doesn't actually include the change to the TOS and only links to it at the very end, here it is:
> 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 § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...
by croemer - Interesting that the TOS contains the justification for the rule. That isn't necessarily something I would expect to see in a TOS and leaves the door open for people to dispute the justification or argue "well that's not relevant to THIS vibe coded project".
Beyond the reasons stated I think there is probably a more general (albeit less tangible) benefit to having a forge with a reputation for being human-focused. Like if you see a project on Codeberg you can reasonably expect it's probably not completely machine-generated slop, which is no longer an expectation I have for GitHub. People are getting offended about it but why not just use a different forge for your vibe-coded projects?
The main risk is that it leads to loads of distracting discussions about whether projects are "too vibe-coded" or whether they fall on the right side of the line. I would assume Codeberg would be relatively light touch about enforcement in marginal cases, which equally might blunt the effectiveness of the rule but ultimately, it doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.
by NoboruWataya - I was wondering if copyright was part of it, but their blog post didn't mention copyright.
For me that would be the single biggest reason. People who vibe code don't legally own the copyright to the output (to the best of my hobbyist-non-lawyer knowledge), so they cannot themselves provide permission for others to be able to legally copy.
by conartist6 - The justification given in the TOS is very different from those in the blog post. The TOS mentions copyright and the risk of malicious code. The blog post has a completely different list of justifications. The increased risk of malicious code only applies to unreviewed AI generated code, but the TOS does not reflect that.
The blog post is more consistent with the actual change to the TOS. It makes a lot more sense now. If the TOS are a problem then you can always use another host or self-host. Codeberg is intended for a specific type of project (open source license, public repo, encouraging collaboration etc.)
by graemep - This makes sense. The largest project hosted on Codeberg today is, what, Zig? Zig is also openly hostile to LLM agents. It's a a clear identity for the site: a home for projects that identify as anti-LLM.
I disagree with basically all of the logic they're using here, but that's the point: not every site needs to be for every person. Clearly there are quite a few software developers who agree vehemently with the stance they're taking. They should have a community hub, and now they do.
by tptacek - Yep, different strokes for different folks.by sanderjd
- There's another underlying theme when you consider Forgejo having Codeberg as a home - anti-commercialization / sensitivity to commercialization and breaking of trust in the ecosystem. I could see anti-LLM sentiment stemming from these things a bit, in terms of what the LLM's were trained on. It's like an evolution from the olden days of slashdot commenters ragging on M$ every chance they got - only now it's AI and slop.by iambenm
- I don't see the correlation here. You insinuate that codeberg's opinion is due to hosting Zig. I don't see any indicator of that.
I also don't see your points of contention - it may help to be more specific.
Last but not least, I am also not sure they are a community hub. This depends on how many people use codeberg. IMO it is still a niche right now; perhaps that will change, but right now I am not entirely certain it is a community hub per se when compared to github. But competition is good and if there are alternatives to fatso Microsoft controlling github, I am all up for that. The upcoming mandatory age sniffing will be a waterfall moment.
by shevy-java - We could call them software manufacturers - in the etymological sense (manu factus == made by hand).by veganmosfet
- Tangential but one day when bored at work, I browsed the GitHub discussions for Helix, my main text editor, and the most active thread was regarding adopting an LLM policy for the repo[0]. The maintainer thought it would be beneficial to use an LLM policy similar to Ghostty which is AI friendly with human review. Now the whole topic is "brigaded" by a small number of extremely passionate anti-AI voices that immediately react positively to any pushback against AI usage and negatively to anyone who isn't staunchly anti-AI. Even when presented with, in my opinion, reasonable middle-ground such as only merging maintainable code, the counter-arguments are mostly against the harms of AI (mostly datacenter related) dismissing AI outright and refusal give an any ground.
It's a real impasse where the pro-AI or indifferent opinions seem to simply stop posting when they realize there is going to be no real debate, and the anti-AI individuals swarm on any new input.
My personal opinion is I don't care either way -- AI is a tool and if contributors use that tool to improve code or the product, I could care less. I just find this interesting.
by nazgulsenpai