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.
Given a German court talked about not having the prompt logs making it hard in a specific case to prove it had sufficient human input, maybe someone could do an open source hosting service where the Claude Code logs were fully uploaded with each commit, so that could be later proven? It would be cool anyway to have such a service, so people could learn how to do LLM coding better from the examples.
This is good and I am saying this as someone using coding agents full on.
I am a software engineer and I do use coding agents and I do believe that there can be spaces which do not encourage or allow projects built by generative AI.
Detection may become harder as time passes by but that aside, I think the massive generation abilities of multiple LLM providers will simply make it tough for code hosts. But it is also a choice - there should be spaces where people post projects that they actually write by hand (or with minimal assistance of agents).
I am personally and professionally very much on the "generate code" side of the situation simply because I can deliver things faster. But I know that LLMs are basically large word prediction systems that have been built on existing knowledge. They remix very well but I do not think they create brand new algorithms. For someone like me who is focused solely on building ramen-profitable products or services, LLMs are great but I know that I am not going to spend time/effort in any new research. I am not saying that every hand-written project is going to innovate but we should encourage spaces to maintain the barrier, else we may even become complacent.
"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)."
Whatever "mostly" means. If you autocomplete a lot, and the code written is "mostly" written by AI by autocomplete - it seems you fall under this.
I wonder what the ratio needs to be. And I wonder if auto-refactoring in Intellij is also included, because Intellij created the code and then also has "unclear copyright status" if we follow the logic.
Together this opens up more questions to me than it answers.
However, they do this because of copyright status and harmful code:
"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). "
Why are all the vibe coders so upset? Places that have mostly non-polluted projects will be fantastic for future model training. Codeberg doing this will mean that it will be scraped and part of all future models' learning input, surely? They have never cared and will never care about anyone's rights.
Codeberg was never really intended as a place for small scale or one person teams to host vibe coded projects. It is more of a platform for opensource projects, medium and large teams, and people who take this work seriously. Many users also moved there after Github began pushing AI features so aggressively.
I created my account two years ago, but I have barely used it. I am gonna deleting it so that i do not take up space unnecessarily. Still, one thing should not be forgotten, those who fail to adapt eventually fall behind.
Another issue is what stance they would have taken if the vote had yielded the exact opposite result. I sense a whiff of a long-term self-serving approach in Codeberg’s stance. Who can guarantee that a platform with open-source, human-written code won’t eventually make that code available for use in models?
Unsurprising given that a large amount of posts on the front page are about or in support of projects that are entirely vibecoded with near zero human input beyond "hm it feels kind of slow, make faster?".
AI is used to launder a lack of care and skill, and people really love not caring and not having to put in any work.
vibe-coders should be pretty happy about the fact that places like this exist, given that's it's ultimately thanks to non-vibe-coded OSS that LLM can improve.
In a way it make sense. I don't think they have the capability/money to scale out the system to support a plethora of vibe coded project like Github does.
It seems the conflict between LLM/AI and programmers is getting hotter and hotter by the week. I wonder where all of this will lead. Our times are uncertain. Many people believe with certainity the future. But only one will come true.
Eh, if this would be true than we would have arrived at a single religion, a single language, a single economic system or a single political ideology. In reality things tend to diverge over time. LLM zealots will just be another tribe in the jungle.
I've actually been thinking it'd be nice to have something like GitHub, but only for hand-written code. If anything, for now I'd like to learn primarily from and perhaps contribute to projects that have human involved at all stages.
But I don't think it will be easy to detect AI written code especially with frequent releases of new models.
It does and it's unfortunate. Perhaps Codeberg might try to block AI crawlers access to the entire website. I know it's all jazz nowadays, but I'm not in favor of using other's people work to train AI without explicit consent.
I'm surprised it took them this long. Good on them.
I don't think this should have much impact either. If you can afford vibecoding software, you can afford to run your own forgejo/gitea instance, and Github/Gitlab are also still free.
Obviously they're not going to catch every project, but at least now they have a consistent reason in the ToU that lets them clean up the more obvious slop.
I'm tired of SlopHub but at the same time how do you realistically ban vibe coding? This will cause a bunch of infighting with people accusing each other.
Claude-written code is quite easy to spot - because it has this particular style of overly verbose "walls of text" comments, that 1. repeat verbatim what the code just below does, 2. include "list of things" that quickly go stale, 3. talk about "how things used to be before we changed it here" (useless to anyone reading the code now), 4. "talk to reviewer" in comments. And many other comment sins.
And even if you tell it to make it leaner, it'll maybe trim a little, but it'll still be a wall of text. Claude really likes to write its opuses and fables in comments.
And commit messages suffer from the same verbose prose.
And all of that happens even if you explicitly instruct in CLAUDE.md to keep things lean/concise. It's a disease.
Claude-written code is quite easy to spot - because it has this particular style of overly verbose "walls of text" comments, that 1. repeat verbatim what the code just below does, 2. include "list of things" that quickly go stale, 3. talk about "how things used to be before we changed it here" (useless to anyone reading the code now), 4. "talk to reviewer" in comments. And many other comment sins.
"quite easy to spot" this style in what sense? To a human? To an LLM? To a deterministic code scanner you wrote by hand yourself, per Codeberg policy?
They could, for example:
1. Rely on users flagging suspected repos (with human moderators reviewing afterwards).
2. Deploying AI agents to evaluate repos against known AI-generated-code patterns (also with human moderators afterwards). Of course, the irony of the situation - using slop machines to fight slop.
I'd guess that it only matters once shit hits the fan (e.g. a copyright dispute or license violation). E.g. when the project owner claims that he wasn't aware of the violation because LLMs wrote all the code, Codeberg can simply point to the terms of use before deleting the project, which from their point of view is a quick and clean solution to the problem.
It's rare to see terms of use that are all actively enforced. I think it makes sense to state the outlines to justify e.g. banning a user, or in potential legal matters (IANAL, just assuming).
Most people leave the “Co-authored-by: <name>” lines in their Git commits [1]. I’m not sure why exactly, but I suppose it's either laziness or a lack of care. Regardless, if I were Codeberg, that would be the first thing I’d detect, and then I might use a Random Forest Classifier to identify the rest.
As other have mentioned, and I'm the same. Leaving "Co-Authored by:" feels like open disclosure of how the project was created.
That way if a consumer does not want to use LLM generated/assisted software, it's easy for them to do that without having to search around in the codebase for "AI Tells".
Removing those would feel like I was mis-representing my coding abilities (LLMs are better at most coding than I am) :)
I feel it's a faux pas to pass off work entirely or partially done with AI as your own. I make sure I leave those lines in specifically for that reason.
AGENTS.MD and CLAUDE.MD also provide easy detection avenues. Trivial measures will probably catch 70-80% or more. You don't need a 100% enforcement rate for a rule to exist, indeed there are basically no rules anywhere in the world that achieve that.
Whilst they may provide a strong signal, I wouldn't call it a guarantee. If I wanted to avoid vibe-coded contributions I might add such files, but with instructions for the agents that they're not allowed to read or touch any of the files in the repository.
My hypothesis is that this particular kind of AI pushback originates from people who really are terminally online and can't separate their job (programming) from free time (also programming). Programmers are unusual in that regard, compared to most other professions.
How do you define vibecoding? Is using LLM-assisted autocomplete vibecoding? Is editing single files via an LLM vibecoding? When do we cross the threshold?
Just saying mostly written by generative AI is extremely broad as that can happen even with “human written” codebases via AI-assisted tools.
Are they also banning projects whose code was written with AI or just vibe coded projects? Roughly every serious codebase now and forevermore will be at least mostly AI written.
> Roughly every serious codebase now and forevermore will be at least mostly AI written.
There is a difference between AI written and AI authored, somewhat. Or maybe call it written vs designed.
A lot of the code written today is written by AI, even in serious projects, but the difference is that serious projects don't vibe code. They don't let the AI write whatever it thinks is best, they instead have clear requirements, established architecture, established testing frameworks, tests, CI/CD, linting and human code review.
The difference is intent; if you use AI to write the code you would have written, then nobody can tell, and it's still fully your code and you have reviewed it. That's not vibe coding.
If you let an agent autonomously plan and write code, that's different. The autonomous "Jesus take the wheel" approach results in code you wouldn't have written yourself, and might also have clear AI tells, fundamental issues (like security flaws by design, performance flaws by design, correctness flaws by design, and general maintainability issues).
This matters. I doubt anyone wants to use or read projects done the latter way.
I'm all for banning vibe-coded projects because they are pure turds but I'm not for banning a codebase where AI is used to make the codebase better.
So what's the definition of a vibe-coded project?
I verify the code the latest SOTA/frontier models I pay for do generate and although I daily facepalm myself several times per day, it's still a tool allowing me to be more productive. That's why I've got countless examples of mediocre output to give: if people were to take a look, they'd notice the same.
The problem is the mindset "it runs, hence it's good" of fully vibe-coded crap.
I'm talking about stuff like "Add this information on the webpage next to that other info" and the model going on a tangent and pulling in new libraries to then do a computation on the server-side and then using client/server communication to send the info to then display it.
It works. It did what I prompted. We've got intelligent machines in 2026. Yay!
Except all that nonsense was totally unnecessary and the information was already on the client and all that was needed was to display it.
But the model saw a pattern: can you believe that? A pattern of information being exchanged between the client and the server. So of freaking course my prompt had to be solved by following the same pattern.
So what's that about? Full AI ban or ban of fully AI-generated turds? I'm all for the later but don't ban everything: AI can produce acceptable stuff at a rate that's making it a productivity enhancement tool.
Models have also only been getting better and better: as of 2026 fully vibe-coded projects are pure turds but what about 2028? 2030?
It's not because these things are introducing bugs in every five line of Bash code they write and generate what looks like an infinite amount of slop to solve things which should have required 1/10th of code that it's always going to be like that.
Well, that's their prerogative, I guess. But the burden of proof will be on them, of course. They can't expect users to prove a negative. There are simple tells that would reveal a lot of projects. Claude Code's moronic defaults of littering commit messages with both a CC author trailer as well as a session link will reveal some, but those are easy to disable. Then there is stuff like prolific comments, em-dashes in comments, etc.. but none of those are real proof that a project was built with agents.
Either way, I was never interested in codeberg and this just means that I'm less interested.
That legalistic "I can do whatever I want as long as it's not breaking the law" argumnet lasts until the first time they ban wrongfully ban someone for it and get huge negative PR
This is a bit strange. Are they saying that Codeberg no longer accepts vibe coded projects at all?
If so, it seems kind of short sighted. Within a very short period of time all code will be AI code. What then?
And as the models improve, along with better code will come better bug fixing etc etc. So the quality of AI code will absolutely surpass that of human code. What then?
Will the repositories demand proof of programming ability? Why, when AI will be handling everything anyway. It would be rather like driving schools mandating that all drivers can strip an engine before they're allowed to drive? Very odd.
It's not strange to ban chess computers at a chess tournament, and it's equally not strange to ban AI code on a code hosting platform.
The costs involved with hosting a bunch of vibe coded stuff that no one is really invested in or cares about would undermine the mission of Codeberg, so it makes sense for them. Other code hosting platforms can go a different route.
"All code will be AI written" is like saying "all code will be written in an IDE". That in itself doesn't matter, nobody should care,and it doesn't make a difference.
The workflow, or complete lack of a workflow, for vibe coded projects in terms of design, architecture, vision, etc.is the problem. The lack of oversight is the problem, and the lack of thinking by an actual human capable of thinking, is the problem.
Concerned Citizen: Someone keeps lighting the town hall on fire, can someone arrest them!
Police Officer: #WONTFIX Town hall will be fireproof in the next version
Concerned Citizen: But it's still a crime. And what of the paper and desks inside the building how can that possibly be fireproofed!?
Mayor: Now now Citizen, fireproofing technology has come along way, besides, we've repurposed the Jail House into a Molotov cocktail factory; we couldn't arrest them even if we wanted to.
Concerned Citizen: You did WHAT!? Why would you do that when the Town Hall is burning down every other week!?
Molotov Salesman: Why because this town needs Molotovs to test their fireproofing tech of course. We've set up the arson test pipeline for the good of all in town!
I suppose, if your completely insane fantasy ever becomes reality, they could simply reverse the policy. Codeberg currently lives in the real world, not your fantasy world, so it makes sense to determine policy based on the state of the real world.
I was kind of thinking of switching to codeberg, but now I am questioning their decisions here.
How do you distinguish a vibe coded project from a heavily AI assisted project? The output is AI generated code. The difference between vibe and agentic coding is how selective you are about the end result and not whether it is AI generated or not.
In Codeberg's case, they have chosen not to distinguish between those. Their bright line is "mostly", as in, if your project "mostly" consists of LLM output then it is not allowed. The definition of "mostly" is, of course, vague, and people are going to argue about where the line should be drawn. But there's at least something vaguely approaching an objective measure: they might look through commits and count how many have an LLM listed as a co-author, or they might count the number of lines of code changed by those commits. Who knows, at this point, what they will end up doing. But they're not trying to judge "how well did you curate the output of the LLM"? They have, instead, decided to judge "how many lines/commits/something created by LLMs have ended up in your code?"
“Vibe coded” does not appear in the patch to the terms of use.
“You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools” would seem to clearly prohibit both vibe coded projects as well as heavily AI assisted projects, assuming both result in mostly AI generated code.
This appears to be mostly due to fringe / activist views about copyright, rather than anything to do with quality or principle. If it was the latter I could get on board, as in instituting some standards against slop. But in reality it’s just letting activists hijack with their agenda.
All vibe coded projects are in the public domain by definition.
The question is if the massive copyright infringement that all the major labs engaged in means that all work derived from llms is under the copyright of the original owners of the work.
It is quite possible to keep track of what piece of training data changed the value of what weight to the point that the activations for any piece of code can be attributed back to the original copyright holder, including the random initial values which are public domain. I've done this on a toy project for gpt2.
The discussion doesn't appear to have been in public at all; all there is on the linked issue is a bunch of first-time posters who wouldn't have been able to vote.
How do they define "vibe coded"? I believe "vibe coded" was originally defined as letting AI write code without human review. But I often see it used for all AI assisted code.
Germany copyright law feels like the relevant thing here - Codeberg is a non-profit based in Germany.
Best quick English language overview of status that I could find: https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2026/germany/when-can-a...
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.
Given a German court talked about not having the prompt logs making it hard in a specific case to prove it had sufficient human input, maybe someone could do an open source hosting service where the Claude Code logs were fully uploaded with each commit, so that could be later proven? It would be cool anyway to have such a service, so people could learn how to do LLM coding better from the examples.
This is good and I am saying this as someone using coding agents full on.
I am a software engineer and I do use coding agents and I do believe that there can be spaces which do not encourage or allow projects built by generative AI.
Detection may become harder as time passes by but that aside, I think the massive generation abilities of multiple LLM providers will simply make it tough for code hosts. But it is also a choice - there should be spaces where people post projects that they actually write by hand (or with minimal assistance of agents).
I am personally and professionally very much on the "generate code" side of the situation simply because I can deliver things faster. But I know that LLMs are basically large word prediction systems that have been built on existing knowledge. They remix very well but I do not think they create brand new algorithms. For someone like me who is focused solely on building ramen-profitable products or services, LLMs are great but I know that I am not going to spend time/effort in any new research. I am not saying that every hand-written project is going to innovate but we should encourage spaces to maintain the barrier, else we may even become complacent.
What is a vibe coded project? Where does it start? Cursor autocomplete? One shot Github project copies?
[Edit] The pull link is https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253/files and says
"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)."
Whatever "mostly" means. If you autocomplete a lot, and the code written is "mostly" written by AI by autocomplete - it seems you fall under this.
I wonder what the ratio needs to be. And I wonder if auto-refactoring in Intellij is also included, because Intellij created the code and then also has "unclear copyright status" if we follow the logic.
Together this opens up more questions to me than it answers.
“You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex).”
Seems pretty clear to me?
What is mostly? >50%? >75%?
What does "written by generative AI" means? Autocomplete? IDE-with-AI-normal-classname-completion? Everything not typed by a human.
I personally don't find this clear at all and see many unhappy discussions in the future for Codeberg.
I think it's reasonable to assume >50% by default, unless the source clarifies what they mean by "mostly".
It's reasonable not to assume what they meant. They have a clear stance on the subject instead of letting us guess
To me majority != mostly.
If 'mostly' means over 50% you could call this clear.
Otherwise I don't think this is clear at all.
Otherwise, what is mostly?
Mostly at the outset, or at any given time? Must the project move out when it goes from 49% to 51% AI-assisted code?
"Mostly at any given time?"
Yes, old project with 1M LOC of pre-AI code + 100% AI 100k LOC generated coded for the last three months, is that mostly?
If you have to ask then the answer is no.
> projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools
I guess if you auto complete line by line and actually read the code it should be gucci.
Edit: Oh, you found it as well now. Disregard my post.
"I guess if you auto complete line by line and actually read the code it should be gucci."
Not from their wording.
They are a non-profit with a mission to support free software:
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/en/bylaws....
However, they do this because of copyright status and harmful code:
"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). "
So 'mostly' is the clearest they get here. Meaning more than 50% of lines of code? At any given time?
Why are all the vibe coders so upset? Places that have mostly non-polluted projects will be fantastic for future model training. Codeberg doing this will mean that it will be scraped and part of all future models' learning input, surely? They have never cared and will never care about anyone's rights.
Codeberg was never really intended as a place for small scale or one person teams to host vibe coded projects. It is more of a platform for opensource projects, medium and large teams, and people who take this work seriously. Many users also moved there after Github began pushing AI features so aggressively.
I created my account two years ago, but I have barely used it. I am gonna deleting it so that i do not take up space unnecessarily. Still, one thing should not be forgotten, those who fail to adapt eventually fall behind.
Another issue is what stance they would have taken if the vote had yielded the exact opposite result. I sense a whiff of a long-term self-serving approach in Codeberg’s stance. Who can guarantee that a platform with open-source, human-written code won’t eventually make that code available for use in models?
Surprising to find a comment thread full of vibe coders being extremely defensive.
Unsurprising given that a large amount of posts on the front page are about or in support of projects that are entirely vibecoded with near zero human input beyond "hm it feels kind of slow, make faster?".
AI is used to launder a lack of care and skill, and people really love not caring and not having to put in any work.
One has to wonder how many of these vibe coding accounts are being defensive themselves, rather than having their LLMs be defensive for them.
Sarcasm?
Depressing rather than surprising.
It would be cool if they just admitted that this is ideologically motivated rather than hide behind pragmatic excuses.
1) "unclear copyright status"
Even if the copyright concern was legitimate (highly doubt so), Codeberg would be fully protected under safe harbor laws.
2) "little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code"
Inclusion of harmful code is no more likely than human-extruded code (probably less actually).
vibe-coders should be pretty happy about the fact that places like this exist, given that's it's ultimately thanks to non-vibe-coded OSS that LLM can improve.
I'm a member of Codeberg e.V., and like that its members decide this.
I was against this, but the people have spoken!
In a way it make sense. I don't think they have the capability/money to scale out the system to support a plethora of vibe coded project like Github does.
Especially being a non-profit, and a free product.
wow this is murky water, I love the abstraction of AI, I feel like the director of an orchestra creating beautiful music in code.
I always resented having to write the same code over and over, now automated by AI
but also support free and open software, as all knowledge should be
> I always resented having to write the same code over and over,
Those problems had been solved in the 1970s and don't need LLMs. One solution is called 'copy-paste', the other 'software libraries/components' ;)
It seems the conflict between LLM/AI and programmers is getting hotter and hotter by the week. I wonder where all of this will lead. Our times are uncertain. Many people believe with certainity the future. But only one will come true.
> But only one will come true.
Eh, if this would be true than we would have arrived at a single religion, a single language, a single economic system or a single political ideology. In reality things tend to diverge over time. LLM zealots will just be another tribe in the jungle.
Maybe a bit petty but I am fine with it their infrastructure really struggled in the last few months.
Good job
But how to check which projects are vibe coded?
I've actually been thinking it'd be nice to have something like GitHub, but only for hand-written code. If anything, for now I'd like to learn primarily from and perhaps contribute to projects that have human involved at all stages.
But I don't think it will be easy to detect AI written code especially with frequent releases of new models.
It also creates a perfect set of training data for future LLMs
It does and it's unfortunate. Perhaps Codeberg might try to block AI crawlers access to the entire website. I know it's all jazz nowadays, but I'm not in favor of using other's people work to train AI without explicit consent.
I'm surprised it took them this long. Good on them.
I don't think this should have much impact either. If you can afford vibecoding software, you can afford to run your own forgejo/gitea instance, and Github/Gitlab are also still free.
Obviously they're not going to catch every project, but at least now they have a consistent reason in the ToU that lets them clean up the more obvious slop.
I'm tired of SlopHub but at the same time how do you realistically ban vibe coding? This will cause a bunch of infighting with people accusing each other.
i wonder how they will detect it though. is there some good tool to tell them if code files someone submit were outputs or altered by LLMs?
Claude-written code is quite easy to spot - because it has this particular style of overly verbose "walls of text" comments, that 1. repeat verbatim what the code just below does, 2. include "list of things" that quickly go stale, 3. talk about "how things used to be before we changed it here" (useless to anyone reading the code now), 4. "talk to reviewer" in comments. And many other comment sins.
And even if you tell it to make it leaner, it'll maybe trim a little, but it'll still be a wall of text. Claude really likes to write its opuses and fables in comments.
And commit messages suffer from the same verbose prose.
And all of that happens even if you explicitly instruct in CLAUDE.md to keep things lean/concise. It's a disease.
Claude-written code is quite easy to spot - because it has this particular style of overly verbose "walls of text" comments, that 1. repeat verbatim what the code just below does, 2. include "list of things" that quickly go stale, 3. talk about "how things used to be before we changed it here" (useless to anyone reading the code now), 4. "talk to reviewer" in comments. And many other comment sins.
"quite easy to spot" this style in what sense? To a human? To an LLM? To a deterministic code scanner you wrote by hand yourself, per Codeberg policy?
That doesn't really answer the question of how they're going to detect it at scale. Ban repositories with long comments?
They could, for example: 1. Rely on users flagging suspected repos (with human moderators reviewing afterwards). 2. Deploying AI agents to evaluate repos against known AI-generated-code patterns (also with human moderators afterwards). Of course, the irony of the situation - using slop machines to fight slop.
I'd guess that it only matters once shit hits the fan (e.g. a copyright dispute or license violation). E.g. when the project owner claims that he wasn't aware of the violation because LLMs wrote all the code, Codeberg can simply point to the terms of use before deleting the project, which from their point of view is a quick and clean solution to the problem.
For starters they (those who submit) should not hide the fact. If they do, it is quite obvious to spot LLM generated code for anyone competent.
It's rare to see terms of use that are all actively enforced. I think it makes sense to state the outlines to justify e.g. banning a user, or in potential legal matters (IANAL, just assuming).
Most people leave the “Co-authored-by: <name>” lines in their Git commits [1]. I’m not sure why exactly, but I suppose it's either laziness or a lack of care. Regardless, if I were Codeberg, that would be the first thing I’d detect, and then I might use a Random Forest Classifier to identify the rest.
[1] https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/how-tos/commit-chan...
As other have mentioned, and I'm the same. Leaving "Co-Authored by:" feels like open disclosure of how the project was created.
That way if a consumer does not want to use LLM generated/assisted software, it's easy for them to do that without having to search around in the codebase for "AI Tells".
Removing those would feel like I was mis-representing my coding abilities (LLMs are better at most coding than I am) :)
I feel it's a faux pas to pass off work entirely or partially done with AI as your own. I make sure I leave those lines in specifically for that reason.
honesty?
AGENTS.MD and CLAUDE.MD also provide easy detection avenues. Trivial measures will probably catch 70-80% or more. You don't need a 100% enforcement rate for a rule to exist, indeed there are basically no rules anywhere in the world that achieve that.
But that just means they probably used AI to help code, not that it is vibe coded, no?
Whilst they may provide a strong signal, I wouldn't call it a guarantee. If I wanted to avoid vibe-coded contributions I might add such files, but with instructions for the agents that they're not allowed to read or touch any of the files in the repository.
Then the linux repo is also banned. I don't think that's a good way to detect "vibe coding"
even i wonder,its hard to detect it.
GOOD! Now I'm seriously considering moving to coderberg. Their website is also 10 times faster than github already.
I already did move everything there. The responsiveness is great.
I only keep github as a front to showcase projects I want for CV reasons but I host no code there
My hypothesis is that this particular kind of AI pushback originates from people who really are terminally online and can't separate their job (programming) from free time (also programming). Programmers are unusual in that regard, compared to most other professions.
How do you define vibecoding? Is using LLM-assisted autocomplete vibecoding? Is editing single files via an LLM vibecoding? When do we cross the threshold?
Just saying mostly written by generative AI is extremely broad as that can happen even with “human written” codebases via AI-assisted tools.
Are they also banning projects whose code was written with AI or just vibe coded projects? Roughly every serious codebase now and forevermore will be at least mostly AI written.
> Roughly every serious codebase now and forevermore will be at least mostly AI written.
There is a difference between AI written and AI authored, somewhat. Or maybe call it written vs designed.
A lot of the code written today is written by AI, even in serious projects, but the difference is that serious projects don't vibe code. They don't let the AI write whatever it thinks is best, they instead have clear requirements, established architecture, established testing frameworks, tests, CI/CD, linting and human code review.
The difference is intent; if you use AI to write the code you would have written, then nobody can tell, and it's still fully your code and you have reviewed it. That's not vibe coding.
If you let an agent autonomously plan and write code, that's different. The autonomous "Jesus take the wheel" approach results in code you wouldn't have written yourself, and might also have clear AI tells, fundamental issues (like security flaws by design, performance flaws by design, correctness flaws by design, and general maintainability issues).
This matters. I doubt anyone wants to use or read projects done the latter way.
I'm all for banning vibe-coded projects because they are pure turds but I'm not for banning a codebase where AI is used to make the codebase better.
So what's the definition of a vibe-coded project?
I verify the code the latest SOTA/frontier models I pay for do generate and although I daily facepalm myself several times per day, it's still a tool allowing me to be more productive. That's why I've got countless examples of mediocre output to give: if people were to take a look, they'd notice the same.
The problem is the mindset "it runs, hence it's good" of fully vibe-coded crap.
I'm talking about stuff like "Add this information on the webpage next to that other info" and the model going on a tangent and pulling in new libraries to then do a computation on the server-side and then using client/server communication to send the info to then display it.
It works. It did what I prompted. We've got intelligent machines in 2026. Yay!
Except all that nonsense was totally unnecessary and the information was already on the client and all that was needed was to display it.
But the model saw a pattern: can you believe that? A pattern of information being exchanged between the client and the server. So of freaking course my prompt had to be solved by following the same pattern.
So what's that about? Full AI ban or ban of fully AI-generated turds? I'm all for the later but don't ban everything: AI can produce acceptable stuff at a rate that's making it a productivity enhancement tool.
Models have also only been getting better and better: as of 2026 fully vibe-coded projects are pure turds but what about 2028? 2030?
It's not because these things are introducing bugs in every five line of Bash code they write and generate what looks like an infinite amount of slop to solve things which should have required 1/10th of code that it's always going to be like that.
Well, that's their prerogative, I guess. But the burden of proof will be on them, of course. They can't expect users to prove a negative. There are simple tells that would reveal a lot of projects. Claude Code's moronic defaults of littering commit messages with both a CC author trailer as well as a session link will reveal some, but those are easy to disable. Then there is stuff like prolific comments, em-dashes in comments, etc.. but none of those are real proof that a project was built with agents.
Either way, I was never interested in codeberg and this just means that I'm less interested.
There is no burden of proof for them as they have no obligation to provide a service to anyone.
That legalistic "I can do whatever I want as long as it's not breaking the law" argumnet lasts until the first time they ban wrongfully ban someone for it and get huge negative PR
Anyone else feel like this is pushing shit up a hill?
I'll add my comment from a previous thread:
This is a bit strange. Are they saying that Codeberg no longer accepts vibe coded projects at all?
If so, it seems kind of short sighted. Within a very short period of time all code will be AI code. What then?
And as the models improve, along with better code will come better bug fixing etc etc. So the quality of AI code will absolutely surpass that of human code. What then?
Will the repositories demand proof of programming ability? Why, when AI will be handling everything anyway. It would be rather like driving schools mandating that all drivers can strip an engine before they're allowed to drive? Very odd.
It's not strange to ban chess computers at a chess tournament, and it's equally not strange to ban AI code on a code hosting platform.
The costs involved with hosting a bunch of vibe coded stuff that no one is really invested in or cares about would undermine the mission of Codeberg, so it makes sense for them. Other code hosting platforms can go a different route.
See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49004041
"All code will be AI written" is like saying "all code will be written in an IDE". That in itself doesn't matter, nobody should care,and it doesn't make a difference.
The workflow, or complete lack of a workflow, for vibe coded projects in terms of design, architecture, vision, etc.is the problem. The lack of oversight is the problem, and the lack of thinking by an actual human capable of thinking, is the problem.
> Within a very short period of time all code will be AI code.
This is unlikely. Perhaps “most code”, but not “all”.
People can overwhelmingly shift to a new technology, but the old one usually remains in use, even if niche.
Once most code is AI slop, then the training data is tainted -- you know what happens when you eat your own crap ...
It would be rather more like driving schools disallowing autopilot.
Not to say that I agree that the metaphor makes sense here in the first place
Concerned Citizen: Someone keeps lighting the town hall on fire, can someone arrest them!
Police Officer: #WONTFIX Town hall will be fireproof in the next version
Concerned Citizen: But it's still a crime. And what of the paper and desks inside the building how can that possibly be fireproofed!?
Mayor: Now now Citizen, fireproofing technology has come along way, besides, we've repurposed the Jail House into a Molotov cocktail factory; we couldn't arrest them even if we wanted to.
Concerned Citizen: You did WHAT!? Why would you do that when the Town Hall is burning down every other week!?
Molotov Salesman: Why because this town needs Molotovs to test their fireproofing tech of course. We've set up the arson test pipeline for the good of all in town!
I suppose, if your completely insane fantasy ever becomes reality, they could simply reverse the policy. Codeberg currently lives in the real world, not your fantasy world, so it makes sense to determine policy based on the state of the real world.
I was kind of thinking of switching to codeberg, but now I am questioning their decisions here.
How do you distinguish a vibe coded project from a heavily AI assisted project? The output is AI generated code. The difference between vibe and agentic coding is how selective you are about the end result and not whether it is AI generated or not.
In Codeberg's case, they have chosen not to distinguish between those. Their bright line is "mostly", as in, if your project "mostly" consists of LLM output then it is not allowed. The definition of "mostly" is, of course, vague, and people are going to argue about where the line should be drawn. But there's at least something vaguely approaching an objective measure: they might look through commits and count how many have an LLM listed as a co-author, or they might count the number of lines of code changed by those commits. Who knows, at this point, what they will end up doing. But they're not trying to judge "how well did you curate the output of the LLM"? They have, instead, decided to judge "how many lines/commits/something created by LLMs have ended up in your code?"
“Vibe coded” does not appear in the patch to the terms of use.
“You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools” would seem to clearly prohibit both vibe coded projects as well as heavily AI assisted projects, assuming both result in mostly AI generated code.
I seriously hope we codeberg users will be able to survive without your presence.
This appears to be mostly due to fringe / activist views about copyright, rather than anything to do with quality or principle. If it was the latter I could get on board, as in instituting some standards against slop. But in reality it’s just letting activists hijack with their agenda.
All vibe coded projects are in the public domain by definition.
The question is if the massive copyright infringement that all the major labs engaged in means that all work derived from llms is under the copyright of the original owners of the work.
It is quite possible to keep track of what piece of training data changed the value of what weight to the point that the activations for any piece of code can be attributed back to the original copyright holder, including the random initial values which are public domain. I've done this on a toy project for gpt2.
Fringe / activist views about copyright pretty much describes open source / free software so why do you think that is an argument against doing this?
The discussion doesn't appear to have been in public at all; all there is on the linked issue is a bunch of first-time posters who wouldn't have been able to vote.
That's just open source and software freedom views though
How do they define "vibe coded"? I believe "vibe coded" was originally defined as letting AI write code without human review. But I often see it used for all AI assisted code.
Baffling.
Why are they the arbiters of what is made? Also does this break s230?
They are arbitrers of what projects they allow hosting on their servers. What's baffling about that?
Create your own server and pay for it and they won't have anything to say about what you do with it.