Yikes! I've been a software engineer for over a decade, and I've never had more fun in my career. Running an AI assistant on a cloud machine to pair with me, explore my ideas, learn new tricks, and even write code that I would never write due to timelines and deadlines has been fantastic.
Using coding agents to search for patterns, understanding why our abstractions might not be working because of how users integrate, etc etc.
Not everything vibe coded is bad software, not all bad software is vibe coded.
To echo another reply in the thread, but with an example: have you seen the stats for OpenClaw on GitHub just for this week?: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/pulse
What does vibe coding mean to you? I use the term vibe code to mean software produced by conversation with an agent, with minimal or no understanding of the code / project structure by the person.
Your process doesn’t sound like vibe coding to me, though maybe this part is “and even write code that I would never write”. If you’re just generating snippets as black boxes and putting that into a project you’re otherwise maintaining general understanding of, this isn’t what I refer to as vibe coding. (Not that I’d use this process in a community with clearly stated rules against AI use.)
I think the term vibe coded is unclear. I use agents to do most of my coding work now. Some might call it vibe coded. I use spec driven development of my own design. While the applications are relatively simple, they are reasonably well architected and maintainable.
Some would say I a, vibe coding since I don’t really write the code. I say I’m not because I’m thinking through the features more than vibe coders.
I mean it's good you are having fun, but that way of working will not be accepted in some communities, its inevitable so just find the place that accepts your preferred way of working.
Why would you ever care about looking at code? Code forges aren't really a useful tool going forward. As agents replace people writing code, the features of code forges really aren't that useful. Nobody will be reviewing agent code other than agents, and you don't need a pull request and code review model for that.
Coding is just going to be asking for a result and manually testing it, no real thought about what code has been generated, and no human should ever need to look at or review it. Even some versioned tarball on s3 will do for the storage.
So, really, who cares about what they do when their entire business model (and Github's) is speedrunning becoming obsolete?
Basically, the future of tools like github is a platform for manual testing, where the AI proposes a change and you can experiment with the UI and attach notes for the next iteration. The whole idea of coders carefully reviewing the output of LLMs is insane, it'd be like carefully poring over the output of GCC; we've made lines of code so cheap and skill-free that there's no point in these platforms that treat code like it's important to view.
When I wanted to get experience with vibe-coding, and build a gen-AI portfolio, among the decisions about what to use it for and how to do it, I very consciously chose the most AI-enthusiastic, popular Git repository service, which is GitHub.
I was a little surprised that some people were outraged that Codeberg (strong ideology/principles) banned generative AI output.
Now that Sourcehut (craft-oriented?) is considering doing similarly, will there be be similar pushback?
It's laughable to me, imagine a company saying that they would only host projects that were written in assembly. I mean, "sure" you do you, but I will not be doing business there.
These kinds of ideological purity tests and the weird bureaucracies and little fiefdoms associated with them are anathema the hacker ethos.
Vibe-coded projects, where the intent is to replace editing source code as the means of change with editing prompts as the means of change, is one of those situations where the intent of how the project incurs change conflicts with how socially-coded open-source projects have traditionally incurred change.
From that perspective, it makes sense to limit "vibe-coded" projects, since they don't fit in that traditional paradigm.
Now, there are big feelings around vibe-coding and a strong aversion to change, so I can imagine this is a rather jarring experience for folks that want to vibe-code and want to have the dopamine hit of sharing that with other folks in a forum that obstensibly is meant for folks to edit code together.
You make 10 commits over the weekend once a month for your fun side project, they won't police it (my assumption they can't and won't).
Your slop machines are running day and night, pushing hundreds of commits a day, day and night... You will get on their radar, take a look, then determine "yeah, this person can go somewhere else".
As more of these smaller forges get similar policies it makes me curious about the statistics behind vibecoded projects.
My anecdata tells me that most of these vibecoded projects are one offs or abandoned. That’s not to say they don’t have value to the people who put them together. What I’m wondering though is: “Do these have enough value to the community to justify the cost of more infrastructure?”
My guess is the answer is no. Then in which case, if you need a place for your pet projects, Forgejo or Gitea should work nicely for you.
> My anecdata tells me that most of these vibecoded projects are one offs or abandoned. That’s not to say they don’t have value to the people who put them together. What I’m wondering though is: “Do these have enough value to the community to justify the cost of more infrastructure?”
OK. After reading the post, it doesn't seem so bad. Although I still don't like their ban on analytics on websites. Otherwise I could've de-googled most of my personal life.
I've always found it difficult to break into medium and large sized opensource projects, because it takes so long. In one of my jobs, I worked with someone who knew the maintainer in one of the areas, and I realized that social coding is basically an uphill battle, unless you have a real life social connection.
"Social Coding" was dead the moment LLMs showed emergent programming capabilities. This is the remaining communities attempting to defend themselves from the hordes of low effort slop coders.
From first principles a community that relied on high friction knowledge attainment as the barrier to entry does not survive contact with LLMs. That extends far beyond "programming" as well.
We're seeing the death of people writing code. There's no reason for a human to care about what the computer executes, as long as it does the right thing, so why would anyone care about reviewing the code?
Coding is turning into burger flipping -- you ask the computer to do something, then you do a bunch of manual testing. There's a little bit of jargon needed to ask for the right thing, but it's closer to flipping burgers than it is to rocket science.
This for me the main source of concern. I am having a blast vibe coding. I understand my job is at risk. But I am totally oblivious to the fact that they are accelerating climate change.
If that's the main concern, wouldn't banning them from code sharing sites be harmful? If a person can create a project using AI and share it, then people can use their code without having to reinvent it. If it can't be shared, then anybody who wants that functionality will recreate it from scratch, and if they use AI to do so then you have now burned ~2x the compute=electricity=impact.
It seems like they're using the term vibe coded as a pejorative to describe all llm use, which is disingenuous. They want to ban LLMs because of political reasons that I mostly agree with, but the term vibe coding invokes being lazy and not even looking at the bad code you generated. But it's just an email subject, so maybe im thinking too much about it.
I saw somewhere that one of the issues with github is all the commits made by the various AI "things".
The other sites may not be able to afford the infrastructure to support vibe coded projects. Maybe that is one of the reasons Sourcehut has this proposal.
I am sad to see this. Drew personally told me that I should use my real personal email to contribute ("Services like Firefox Relay are not compatible with the spirit of SourceHut. You should be using your real email address with the mailing lists") -- which I don't do because I don't trust others with it, let alone the general public -- so I was already excluded, but I still had some respect for the project as a whole. I am rethinking that now, and it is a real shame. All the GitHub alternatives are becoming too bigoted to be worth the trouble, because of these anti-LLM absolutists. Can no one see the middle ground? It's like saying that visiting StackOverflow at all is just as bad as copy-pasting solutions from it.
Ironically this “real email” policy (was not aware of this btw) is just as unenforceable as a blanket no-LLM policy. Is “joeschmoe354266@icloud.com” your real email or not, and how do you prove it?
I don’t even use LLMs, but these puritanical stands are a real turn-off. I got into FOSS because I don’t want anyone telling me what to do, not so I can be the one who tells other people what to do.
I was a bit turned off by Drew's constant talk about "real humans" while I was in discussion with him. He seems to have certain ideas about how he wants his world to work, and while I don't fault him for that on its own, the way he talks about it and pushes it on others feels very exclusive. He says it's just culture, and that it's my responsibility to figure out how to conform to it. I've never really felt part of human culture, and it sucks to be turned away over things like this. All the places where I've fit in have shut down or sold out.
> LLMs are harmful to the free software ecosystem as a
whole, as their main use-case in software is to appropriate free
software regardless of license and regurgitate it new new projects
without any respect for the copyright, provenance, or obligations of the
source material.
Well, yes -- obviously; it takes a huge amount of training data and generates new projects. I guess you could argue that it's not just for new projects -- it's used for old projects too?
Frankly this policy does not go far enough. What about coders whose thoughts were impure because they used ChatGPT to brainstorm or whose brains are ruined because they used Nano Banana to illustrate their blog? I'll hold off from storing my code anywhere until a more righteous service comes online.
Yikes! I've been a software engineer for over a decade, and I've never had more fun in my career. Running an AI assistant on a cloud machine to pair with me, explore my ideas, learn new tricks, and even write code that I would never write due to timelines and deadlines has been fantastic.
Using coding agents to search for patterns, understanding why our abstractions might not be working because of how users integrate, etc etc.
Not everything vibe coded is bad software, not all bad software is vibe coded.
To echo another reply in the thread, but with an example: have you seen the stats for OpenClaw on GitHub just for this week?: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/pulse
They are trying to avoid that.
Why is that bad?
I guess they want to save on storage, so providing the service without really providing it.
What does vibe coding mean to you? I use the term vibe code to mean software produced by conversation with an agent, with minimal or no understanding of the code / project structure by the person.
Your process doesn’t sound like vibe coding to me, though maybe this part is “and even write code that I would never write”. If you’re just generating snippets as black boxes and putting that into a project you’re otherwise maintaining general understanding of, this isn’t what I refer to as vibe coding. (Not that I’d use this process in a community with clearly stated rules against AI use.)
I don’t think their concern is “vibecode = bad” but more like they can’t handle the volume.
> I don’t think their concern is “vibecode = bad” but more like they can’t handle the volume.
Then they should not be in the business of hosting repos?
"if you cannot handle a 10x load over the historical standard of generally low quality content you should not be hosting repos"
A ridiculous take
There are other ways to slow the traffic down.
Sure there are other ways to do this same thing, they picked this option. Not particularly noteworthy of a thing
X serves lots of low-quality content at scale and it's running off Elon's laptop from what I can tell. So why can't these guys do the same?
I think the term vibe coded is unclear. I use agents to do most of my coding work now. Some might call it vibe coded. I use spec driven development of my own design. While the applications are relatively simple, they are reasonably well architected and maintainable.
Some would say I a, vibe coding since I don’t really write the code. I say I’m not because I’m thinking through the features more than vibe coders.
I mean it's good you are having fun, but that way of working will not be accepted in some communities, its inevitable so just find the place that accepts your preferred way of working.
Why would you ever care about looking at code? Code forges aren't really a useful tool going forward. As agents replace people writing code, the features of code forges really aren't that useful. Nobody will be reviewing agent code other than agents, and you don't need a pull request and code review model for that.
Coding is just going to be asking for a result and manually testing it, no real thought about what code has been generated, and no human should ever need to look at or review it. Even some versioned tarball on s3 will do for the storage.
So, really, who cares about what they do when their entire business model (and Github's) is speedrunning becoming obsolete?
Basically, the future of tools like github is a platform for manual testing, where the AI proposes a change and you can experiment with the UI and attach notes for the next iteration. The whole idea of coders carefully reviewing the output of LLMs is insane, it'd be like carefully poring over the output of GCC; we've made lines of code so cheap and skill-free that there's no point in these platforms that treat code like it's important to view.
When I wanted to get experience with vibe-coding, and build a gen-AI portfolio, among the decisions about what to use it for and how to do it, I very consciously chose the most AI-enthusiastic, popular Git repository service, which is GitHub.
I was a little surprised that some people were outraged that Codeberg (strong ideology/principles) banned generative AI output.
Now that Sourcehut (craft-oriented?) is considering doing similarly, will there be be similar pushback?
It's laughable to me, imagine a company saying that they would only host projects that were written in assembly. I mean, "sure" you do you, but I will not be doing business there.
These kinds of ideological purity tests and the weird bureaucracies and little fiefdoms associated with them are anathema the hacker ethos.
Vibe-coded projects, where the intent is to replace editing source code as the means of change with editing prompts as the means of change, is one of those situations where the intent of how the project incurs change conflicts with how socially-coded open-source projects have traditionally incurred change.
From that perspective, it makes sense to limit "vibe-coded" projects, since they don't fit in that traditional paradigm.
Now, there are big feelings around vibe-coding and a strong aversion to change, so I can imagine this is a rather jarring experience for folks that want to vibe-code and want to have the dopamine hit of sharing that with other folks in a forum that obstensibly is meant for folks to edit code together.
1 - Where does vibe coding end and agent-assisted engineering start? Where's the line?
2 - How do you enforce this?
Probably they go by volume...
You make 10 commits over the weekend once a month for your fun side project, they won't police it (my assumption they can't and won't).
Your slop machines are running day and night, pushing hundreds of commits a day, day and night... You will get on their radar, take a look, then determine "yeah, this person can go somewhere else".
As more of these smaller forges get similar policies it makes me curious about the statistics behind vibecoded projects.
My anecdata tells me that most of these vibecoded projects are one offs or abandoned. That’s not to say they don’t have value to the people who put them together. What I’m wondering though is: “Do these have enough value to the community to justify the cost of more infrastructure?”
My guess is the answer is no. Then in which case, if you need a place for your pet projects, Forgejo or Gitea should work nicely for you.
> My anecdata tells me that most of these vibecoded projects are one offs or abandoned. That’s not to say they don’t have value to the people who put them together. What I’m wondering though is: “Do these have enough value to the community to justify the cost of more infrastructure?”
Isn't that true of human authored code?
Sometimes, but definitely not to the same volume.
OK. After reading the post, it doesn't seem so bad. Although I still don't like their ban on analytics on websites. Otherwise I could've de-googled most of my personal life.
We are seeing the slow death of social coding. This policy is not inclusive in any way, and paints everyone and everything with the same brush.
Social coding has been dying for a while. I see it as a direct consequence of broadly decreasing levels of trust across society.
I've always found it difficult to break into medium and large sized opensource projects, because it takes so long. In one of my jobs, I worked with someone who knew the maintainer in one of the areas, and I realized that social coding is basically an uphill battle, unless you have a real life social connection.
"Social Coding" was dead the moment LLMs showed emergent programming capabilities. This is the remaining communities attempting to defend themselves from the hordes of low effort slop coders.
From first principles a community that relied on high friction knowledge attainment as the barrier to entry does not survive contact with LLMs. That extends far beyond "programming" as well.
We're seeing the death of people writing code. There's no reason for a human to care about what the computer executes, as long as it does the right thing, so why would anyone care about reviewing the code?
Coding is turning into burger flipping -- you ask the computer to do something, then you do a bunch of manual testing. There's a little bit of jargon needed to ask for the right thing, but it's closer to flipping burgers than it is to rocket science.
'They are an environmental catastrophe'
This for me the main source of concern. I am having a blast vibe coding. I understand my job is at risk. But I am totally oblivious to the fact that they are accelerating climate change.
If that's the main concern, wouldn't banning them from code sharing sites be harmful? If a person can create a project using AI and share it, then people can use their code without having to reinvent it. If it can't be shared, then anybody who wants that functionality will recreate it from scratch, and if they use AI to do so then you have now burned ~2x the compute=electricity=impact.
"Protected by go-away" so I went away.
What is considered vibe coded and slop?
Where is the line?
Drew draws the line of any introduction of AI in any OSS project. (1.) (2.)
Vim, Linux, OpenBSD have AI in them now, even a small tinge of it, so that would be considered slop.
Is it now with some effort with AI assistance that is acceptable or unacceptable or is it still slop?
Or is it more extreme that an OSS project should absolutely not have ANY AI at all to comply with not being slop?
(1.) https://drewdevault.com/blog/AI-in-Linux/
(2.) https://drewdevault.com/blog/Forking-vim/
Interstitial does not work on chrome or brave on iOS. Flagging for unreadable.
If it’s because it’s a source code storage service, that’s just not an interesting function. Run your own on a cheap vps with backups to R2.
Same here, thought it was Mullvad at first causing issues but I guess it's more common than that
It seems like they're using the term vibe coded as a pejorative to describe all llm use, which is disingenuous. They want to ban LLMs because of political reasons that I mostly agree with, but the term vibe coding invokes being lazy and not even looking at the bad code you generated. But it's just an email subject, so maybe im thinking too much about it.
I saw somewhere that one of the issues with github is all the commits made by the various AI "things".
The other sites may not be able to afford the infrastructure to support vibe coded projects. Maybe that is one of the reasons Sourcehut has this proposal.
Personally I agree with what codeberg did.
I am sad to see this. Drew personally told me that I should use my real personal email to contribute ("Services like Firefox Relay are not compatible with the spirit of SourceHut. You should be using your real email address with the mailing lists") -- which I don't do because I don't trust others with it, let alone the general public -- so I was already excluded, but I still had some respect for the project as a whole. I am rethinking that now, and it is a real shame. All the GitHub alternatives are becoming too bigoted to be worth the trouble, because of these anti-LLM absolutists. Can no one see the middle ground? It's like saying that visiting StackOverflow at all is just as bad as copy-pasting solutions from it.
Ironically this “real email” policy (was not aware of this btw) is just as unenforceable as a blanket no-LLM policy. Is “joeschmoe354266@icloud.com” your real email or not, and how do you prove it?
I don’t even use LLMs, but these puritanical stands are a real turn-off. I got into FOSS because I don’t want anyone telling me what to do, not so I can be the one who tells other people what to do.
I was a bit turned off by Drew's constant talk about "real humans" while I was in discussion with him. He seems to have certain ideas about how he wants his world to work, and while I don't fault him for that on its own, the way he talks about it and pushes it on others feels very exclusive. He says it's just culture, and that it's my responsibility to figure out how to conform to it. I've never really felt part of human culture, and it sucks to be turned away over things like this. All the places where I've fit in have shut down or sold out.
[delayed]
Also see from Codeberg:
https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
And a repo of tainted projects and untainted alternatives.
https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware
The programming community will continue to schism down these ideological lines, its inevitable.
May everyone find their niche but inclusion does not work when barrier to entry is reduced to near zero.
> LLMs are harmful to the free software ecosystem as a whole, as their main use-case in software is to appropriate free software regardless of license and regurgitate it new new projects without any respect for the copyright, provenance, or obligations of the source material.
This is a new one. "Main use" indeed!
Well, yes -- obviously; it takes a huge amount of training data and generates new projects. I guess you could argue that it's not just for new projects -- it's used for old projects too?
This is silly. It would destroy traffic to their site significantly
Frankly this policy does not go far enough. What about coders whose thoughts were impure because they used ChatGPT to brainstorm or whose brains are ruined because they used Nano Banana to illustrate their blog? I'll hold off from storing my code anywhere until a more righteous service comes online.