Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

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.

[0] https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/discussions/15408

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.

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.)

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.

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.

This is all reasonable.

I will have to move my projects off Codeberg, but that's okay. We have incompatible views. No grudges.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I would hope so, that split would be a natural parting of the communities.

My pessimism tells me that the more any community rejects LLM and polices against generated output, the heavier they would be crawled. Which means that proLLM community by nature puts pressure on all antiLLM infrastructure – an asymmetrical problem, where other people pay for your choice.

My optimism, on the other hand, tells me that after bubble pop, hopefully, far less people would have money to feed aimless crawl results into machine learning algorithm in hopes of slight improvements.

The funny thing about this comment is out of the gate it screams the exact reason people don't want the LLM generated code in their zone.

This reads similar to people who make prompt art getting upset that they're not taken seriously. People demand respect for something they didn't earn. Programmers who have worked hard for their knowledge don't want to listen to the person who thinks they know everything because the magical machine spit out some working code. It doesn't matter if they're right or wrong. They're annoying and entitled.

I'll just paste the classic Ian Malcom Jurassic Park quote.

> I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox

Nobody wants to admit that we're going to have to go back to personal, verified relationships (it's who you know, not what you do) to fix it, unless we come up with something new.

Same problem with Eternal September - there was an "artificial" gateway that is now gone, but the need for some form of gateway still exists.

That's what these replies sound like to me.

The changes are more nuanced. It's not banning AI assisted coding. It's banning purely and mostly vibe-coded projects. If you're using LLM/AI assistance responsibly, you're on the clear.

There's nuance, and Codeberg guys understand it, AFAICS.

To quote the person who shared the news (tante): No, assistive use is not prohibited (ref: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116963072821111167).

Signed, a developer who doesn't use LLMs.

I think I've avoided all of the LLM debate thus far, but I figure that some of my actual positions probably ought to be represented in this discussion instead of shadow-boxing.

I hate LLMs because I've had to sink a lot of hours into defending services and content that I host for myself or for others from companies that couldn't be bothered to write polite crawlers. This entirely unnecessary problem has contributed to some friction between me and a few clients as I try desperately to feather the pedal on traffic. This has subsided somewhat recently but the pain of it is still fresh.

I hate LLMs because they have taken a lot of goodwill and free labor from the creative community and turned it into a product. This isn't a new problem, it's been a point of sometimes rancorous argument in open source for decades, but this is another round of that old argument on what we owe or don't owe the people who donate labor and creativity to the commons.

I hate LLMs because I don't think Sam Altman or most of his social circle are good people and I don't want to give them more wealth and power. I believe Sam Altman is very comfortable enriching himself at the expense of humanity, and I want to still have some hope for the future of humanity. This position requires me to do whatever I can to deny any of my resources to Altman and his ilk, and to help foster the efforts of other people who want to do the same. To that end, I immediately support any protectionist efforts in the anti-LLM crowd.

I hate LLMs because they have inverted the effort it takes to generate some content versus consuming and considering that content. I am being drowned in a sea of garbage created by people in professional contexts who hand a few sparse notes to an LLM and ask it to generate a "professional email" or a "blog post" or a "technical document", and the quality on the overwhelming majority of this is terrible. It is having a severe and direct adverse effect on my ability to do work.

I hate LLMs because, after quietly observing differences between people who are at the far end of pro-LLM versus those at the far end of anti-LLM, I believe there's a consistent pattern of cognitive decline in the pro-LLM folks. I acknowledge this could just be me observing my own bias, but some literature is beginning to appear supporting it.

I hate LLMs because I love authenticity and creativity and constructive human endeavors, and LLMs are eating away at all of these and producing a homogeneous mass of superficial probabilistic crud. I have serious concerns about the future of art, creativity, and culture. They have been ever-changing and large parts of modern culture would be unrecognizable to someone 200 years ago, so this is more of a wait-and-see level of concern than a Big Hate, but so far, the Magic 8-Ball says, "Outlook not so good".

I hate LLMs because I'm strongly opposed to the idea that a few commercial companies, of whose finances I am deeply suspicious, should be made a required dependency in software development. This is an insane proposal to me. Even accounting for all of the upsides to LLM-driven development -- and I've followed all of that news just as much as all the negative takes -- it's nuts to me that there aren't more people worried about what this could mean for the future of software and technology. But, then again, I started my career during the height of Microsoft's domination of tech, so maybe that was formative for me.

I hate LLMs because I care about the environment that makes our existence possible and it's insane to me that so much of the tech sector suddenly stopped giving a shit about that. How can we, as a community, talk about the existential risk of climate change or the benefits of adopting renewable energy or cheer the development of ever-more-efficient power consumption while we also create a huge forcing function to convert as much electrical energy into thermal energy as possible? It's as if, practically overnight, everyone went from, "we need to do everything we can to reduce our demands on the environment or we're cooked" to "oooh, shiny new toy, and it only ruins everything around it, cool!"

I hate LLMs because I have been a hobbyist archivist for over a decade and a home computing enthusiast since the mid-1980s and right now I can't afford to buy a badly-needed hard drive or RAM or build out a new machine to even maybe experiment with an LLM in my own workshop because voodoo financing by everyone in the LLM ecosystem has totally wrecked the hobbyist computing economy, and there's no relief in sight.

I hate LLMs because I strongly suspect that the future they want is one of subscription computing and I will retreat back to retro computing before I go willingly into that long moonless night.

I hate LLMs because I am under enormous pressure, from many different angles, to also use them. I'm being asked -- required, in some cases -- to ignore all of my concerns about them and use them anyway because everyone else does and "obviously" they are the future. Because, somehow, all of my positions against LLMs make me unreasonable and a less valuable member of society.

LLMs could have been done in so many ways that I would have gladly and enthusiastically jumped right into. They are a really neat technology! I would love to be experimenting with them and playing with them and finding all the right ways to balance their benefits against their risks. But, I can't do that, because the way they've been developed requires me to set aside too many of the above concerns to be able to adopt them at all.

If I'm ever able to build a reasonable enough home system for the purpose, I might be able to, one day, change all the above to "I hate commercial LLMs...", but I have no idea right now how far away that day is, or if it will ever come. And, even that scenario would likely be a Faustian bargain, as it's likely that I'd be using open weights that were created under most of the same conditions as my concerns above.

More like:

> You are creating software using a tool incurring massive risks and costs for the rest of us even though we don't use it ourselves, we don't want you here

.

> plenty of people are using open offline models to code

…that needed to be trained and required siphoning the web too.