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
GitHub seems to be struggling to support agentic and bot-driven software development. OpenClaw is an extreme example, but there are other projects like it that employ the same methods for development. If I were building a source forge in 2026 and wanted to compete with GitHub I would either:
* Not allow these types of projects at all, like sourcehut, or
* Embrace and charge for the capacity/infrastructure it would take to support it, like cursor's play with origin seems to be.
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.)
The people in support of these bans generally aren't interested in "good vibe coded" software. They oppose LLMs altogether on various grounds, not just the output quality.
FWIW, if an LLM is writing significant code, I'd consider it vibe coding regardless of your understanding of the code or expert guidance and almost certainly ban-AI people would too. The scale people seem care about when this comes up is code percentage that's LLM-written to hand-written, not code ignorance to full understanding by the author.
> The people in support of these bans generally aren't interested in "good vibe coded" software. They oppose LLMs altogether on various grounds, not just the output quality.
I think you're very wrong.
I think many of the people who "support these bans" do recognize value in LLM's and use them as tools in the kit applied to their workflows but recognize that rampant abuse and misuse of those same tools threatens to ruin (or already has ruined) many community projects that had previously been healthy and thriving.
And so they find themselves insisting upon unambiguous firewalls as an existential necessity for the communities they have invested years or decades of their lives into.
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.
The original definition, as put forth by Karpathy [1], was that you explicitly did not look at the code ever (diffs, errors, etc.). All development, review, etc. is driven entirely through the LLM agent.
But at this point, the term has been diluted down to basically being meaningless.
Right!!! LLMs are yet another step up the abstraction ladder. Before LLMs I would write code in C or Perl; I didn't care about the machine code it eventually was translated into---the compilers/interpreters evolved to handle that correctly and transparently. Note that this was not always the case; when I started to use computers, we all aspired to master assembly like the apocryphal Mel ( https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html ) --- we had to pay attention to machine code and assembly language, because the compilers often didn't generate performant code and were occasionally buggy.
People say that LLMs are not like compilers because they are unreliable. I think with time they will get fixed.
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.
I find it fulfilling to write and read code. It’s also a powerful technology. That doesn’t just change just because there’s another technology more powerful in certain ways. These are some level 0 reasons to want to read code, but there are lots.
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".
"we're the real hackers with the real skillz! so we're going to create an artificial hierarchy and bureaucratic process to make sure any poser hackers don't get in" <tips fedora>
That's literally all I see out of these types of moves by people/organizations. A will to power and a sort of childlike insecurity that they might be replaced. These folks aren't ok.
Exactly; being replaced is inevitable, the machines are going to end up more intelligent than us. At some point in the near to moderate future, selling the output of your brain is no longer going to be economically viable. I hope we'll figure out some equitable society before that, but I'm not going to bet on it, so I'll do what I can to be on the side of the winners.
I don’t think they’re silly, though I don’t think it’s right to vilify the end users just because the people who’ve created the technology are criminals and the technology has lots of bad effects overall. Do you think it’s silly if these people protest the technology without vilifying people who choose to use it?
I don't understand the comments section for this post, just like I did not understand the reactions when Codeberg did the same proposal a few weeks ago.
The kind of person who does the research and chooses to use Sourcehut or Codeberg vs just following the masses and using GitHub is exactly the kind of person who would know exactly what they're doing with computers and thus the kind of person that would not be afraid of just actually programming without the use of tools.
I don't have a Sourcehut account (nor a Codeberg account), but I follow a lot of projects that are hosted on those platforms and it's not just platform policies. The ethos is full of "we don't want that thing here". Lots of FOSS projects hosted on both platforms have their own "no AI" policy on the README or similar files.
Which is something that you would already know if you actually used any of these services.
To me, all these "oh my god, I can't believe they are not letting me host all this slop that I generated to fix my exact use case that is unique and will not be useful for anyone else" feels just performative drama.
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.
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.
Did you check the number of open PRs and commit/hour of vibecoded projects? If course they are banned from small community-funded hosts, they eat compute and data for free. Honestly, my vote would have been to make vibe-coded pay per commit, but I guess introducing money is taboo for those communities
Look at what happens in codeberg. Small non-commercial, AI driven and even vibe-coded projects are still on the platform. I don't care about what people say, I care about how they act. And to me, codeberg act appropriately.
> I guess introducing money is taboo for those communities
Sourcehut is a subscription service with multiple tiers of access.
I think the different tiers are just for show, but I could imagine that if they felt there was a subset of projects they liked that were putting extra stress on their system they wouldn't be above differentiation at that point.
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?”
It could be useful to have repositories that are comprised of only "AI"-generated code and repositories that are comprised of only non-"AI"-generated code
If this happens, one could imagine that the former will seek to use the code from the later for "training AI"
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Vibecoders like to make all kinds of things that already exist, often don't care (or notice) if the AI rewrites everything instead of using what exists, and LLMs love to do that.
Okay, you can pick between 90% NIH with some sharing or 95% NIH because you tried to stop the sharing. The amount doesn't matter; you're still causing more AI use.
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 like codeberg approach. If you're a small project that doesn't spam ( a commit a day, a few PR a day) you can be as vibe-coded as you want despite their 'guidelines'.
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 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.
There’s a big chunk of the FOSS community that has dedicated itself to the cultural left “omnicause,” which seems to require full agreement with the consensus as one of its membership criteria. The thing is, even though I agree with many (but not all) of its tenets on paper, I don’t really agree with the methods used or the insistence on full agreement.
I also just despise ordinary politicking, and prefer slow procedure-driven decision making (like Debian) or projects driven by a visionary leader (like OpenBSD). This makes me an outsider by default. Projects that attract these people tend to engage in vicious struggle sessions any time there’s a serious disagreement.
I think the biggest schism I have with these people is over identity. I prefer to have no identity. Anonymous (or pseudonymous), faceless. They want to enforce a strong identity, even if it’s a constructed identity. It can’t just be about trust, given how often identifiable people break each others’ trust. I suspect it’s about enforcing ingroup signaling as a criteria of membership, in order to make the group look stronger and drive out dissenters.
> I think the biggest schism I have with these people is over identity. I prefer to have no identity. Anonymous (or pseudonymous), faceless.
Same here. I don't even have just one identity in the first place (thanks to DID), but not a single one identifies as a "real human". I suspect these people have some sort of idea of what constitutes a "real human" to them, and in this case it seems to be making a full canonical identity directly available. I don't do that; my life (and brain) is incredibly compartmentalized and I don't use the body's likeness online, nor do I make my personal email address available to the public, so even if I did identify with humanity I feel like I would probably still not be "real human" enough.
> I suspect these people have some sort of idea of what constitutes a "real human" to them, and in this case it seems to be making a full canonical identity directly available.
That’s a great point. They want to be able to dig through your history to make sure that you’re co-aligned, and maybe to find something they can use if they need to influence or target you. To that I say, no thanks.
In my discussion with Drew, it was framed as an issue of trust: "You've set yourself up in a position of not trusting your peers. They offer you this courtesy, but you deny it to them." To me, whether or not to trust others is a purely individual decision. If others choose to be trusting, that is their choice. It is likewise my choice not to give out trust so freely, and somehow that is treated as selfish and unfair. I want to contribute my thoughts and work to the community, but apparently, I am not trusting enough to be a part of it.
I choose to support the inverse; that is, I will explicitly tell others that they have no need to trust me whatsoever. I try to make arguments, contribute work and generally conduct myself in such a way that any merit is self-evident, and that there is no need to trust me. It is not an issue when someone does, of course, but there is certainly an issue when they try to demand my trust in return.
In my opinion, we live in a dystopia, and we should generally strive towards protocols and "cultures" that do not demand so much "trust". If full trust is required to participate, you will suffer from bad actors that pretend to trust, while excluding honest actors who do not. The same problem exists with things like ID verification, because bad actors have access to unlimited IDs, while honest people may not have access to, or be willing to surrender, any at all.
Fully agree. Trust is earned, not given, and trust is also contextual. I’ve certainly known pseudonymous internet users that I came to trust for certain things, based on their reliability over time. Would I trust them in a different context? Probably not, at least until I got to know them in that context.
I’ve been burned by freely giving trust when it wasn’t deserved, assuming that it would be respected and reciprocated. As you said, that’s just not the world we live in.
> 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?
I thought sourcehut was general purpose git hosting, not open source mission focused like codeberg?
obv they're going to have content restriction, but there is a spectrum from "actually illegal" to "wonderful chaps whom I love but happen to disagree with philosophically." Slop coding is neither of those, but is closer to the latter than I'd expect a general purpose host to draw a line.
It’s general purpose except for what the BDFL (Drew) takes a dislike to, with a veneer of consulting the community.
The Drew from the Wayland/Sway era is not the same person he once was. It’s sad to see the lost potential here. I used to defend him, but I won’t be moving forward.
Slop is slop but people have a right to churn out slop if they want it. Paid users should be allowed to experiment if they aren’t exceeding limits. (IMHO slop will soon be a self-correcting problem, we’re already seeing normie slop fatigue.)
I don’t want my source forge banning anything that isn’t blatantly illegal or abusing resources, because there’s no guarantee that I won’t be next on the chopping block.
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?
GitHub seems to be struggling to support agentic and bot-driven software development. OpenClaw is an extreme example, but there are other projects like it that employ the same methods for development. If I were building a source forge in 2026 and wanted to compete with GitHub I would either:
* Not allow these types of projects at all, like sourcehut, or
* Embrace and charge for the capacity/infrastructure it would take to support it, like cursor's play with origin seems to be.
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.)
The people in support of these bans generally aren't interested in "good vibe coded" software. They oppose LLMs altogether on various grounds, not just the output quality.
FWIW, if an LLM is writing significant code, I'd consider it vibe coding regardless of your understanding of the code or expert guidance and almost certainly ban-AI people would too. The scale people seem care about when this comes up is code percentage that's LLM-written to hand-written, not code ignorance to full understanding by the author.
> The people in support of these bans generally aren't interested in "good vibe coded" software. They oppose LLMs altogether on various grounds, not just the output quality.
I think you're very wrong.
I think many of the people who "support these bans" do recognize value in LLM's and use them as tools in the kit applied to their workflows but recognize that rampant abuse and misuse of those same tools threatens to ruin (or already has ruined) many community projects that had previously been healthy and thriving.
And so they find themselves insisting upon unambiguous firewalls as an existential necessity for the communities they have invested years or decades of their lives into.
How do we figure out who's right?
The tab completion feature a lot of people were using before the term ‘vibecoding’ was coined by the AI dude is or isn’t vibecoding in your view?
Yes, relying on auto complete was frowned upon back then.
I’m aware of that. I’m just polling for opinions on the meaning of vibecoding, not whether or not AI is bad.
Are you actually retaining that information though? You're not writing the code, the LLM is. You might not even be reviewing it properly.
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.
The original definition, as put forth by Karpathy [1], was that you explicitly did not look at the code ever (diffs, errors, etc.). All development, review, etc. is driven entirely through the LLM agent.
But at this point, the term has been diluted down to basically being meaningless.
https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383
Right!!! LLMs are yet another step up the abstraction ladder. Before LLMs I would write code in C or Perl; I didn't care about the machine code it eventually was translated into---the compilers/interpreters evolved to handle that correctly and transparently. Note that this was not always the case; when I started to use computers, we all aspired to master assembly like the apocryphal Mel ( https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html ) --- we had to pay attention to machine code and assembly language, because the compilers often didn't generate performant code and were occasionally buggy.
People say that LLMs are not like compilers because they are unreliable. I think with time they will get fixed.
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.
I find it fulfilling to write and read code. It’s also a powerful technology. That doesn’t just change just because there’s another technology more powerful in certain ways. These are some level 0 reasons to want to read code, but there are lots.
Ok, sure. Hobbyist purposes excluded.
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".
"we're the real hackers with the real skillz! so we're going to create an artificial hierarchy and bureaucratic process to make sure any poser hackers don't get in" <tips fedora>
That's literally all I see out of these types of moves by people/organizations. A will to power and a sort of childlike insecurity that they might be replaced. These folks aren't ok.
Exactly; being replaced is inevitable, the machines are going to end up more intelligent than us. At some point in the near to moderate future, selling the output of your brain is no longer going to be economically viable. I hope we'll figure out some equitable society before that, but I'm not going to bet on it, so I'll do what I can to be on the side of the winners.
I think we will, tbh.
But I also think these people saying, “how dare you use AI to write code” for ideological reasons or some variation on that theme are silly.
I don’t think they’re silly, though I don’t think it’s right to vilify the end users just because the people who’ve created the technology are criminals and the technology has lots of bad effects overall. Do you think it’s silly if these people protest the technology without vilifying people who choose to use it?
> These folks aren't ok
And people who feel entitled to free compute/storage are way worse.
Sourcehut isn't a free service.
<rolls eyes>
I don't understand the comments section for this post, just like I did not understand the reactions when Codeberg did the same proposal a few weeks ago.
The kind of person who does the research and chooses to use Sourcehut or Codeberg vs just following the masses and using GitHub is exactly the kind of person who would know exactly what they're doing with computers and thus the kind of person that would not be afraid of just actually programming without the use of tools.
I don't have a Sourcehut account (nor a Codeberg account), but I follow a lot of projects that are hosted on those platforms and it's not just platform policies. The ethos is full of "we don't want that thing here". Lots of FOSS projects hosted on both platforms have their own "no AI" policy on the README or similar files.
Which is something that you would already know if you actually used any of these services.
To me, all these "oh my god, I can't believe they are not letting me host all this slop that I generated to fix my exact use case that is unique and will not be useful for anyone else" feels just performative drama.
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.
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.
Did you check the number of open PRs and commit/hour of vibecoded projects? If course they are banned from small community-funded hosts, they eat compute and data for free. Honestly, my vote would have been to make vibe-coded pay per commit, but I guess introducing money is taboo for those communities
I actually would have been fine with this move too, “look, first 5 commits per day are free, after that it’s $cost” would have been fine.
But look at the comments and discourse around this. I guarantee you it ain’t about the money.
Look at what happens in codeberg. Small non-commercial, AI driven and even vibe-coded projects are still on the platform. I don't care about what people say, I care about how they act. And to me, codeberg act appropriately.
> I guess introducing money is taboo for those communities
Sourcehut is a subscription service with multiple tiers of access.
I think the different tiers are just for show, but I could imagine that if they felt there was a subset of projects they liked that were putting extra stress on their system they wouldn't be above differentiation at that point.
I mean, I get it; they've got a dying business model, and unless you're paying per commit, you're not a customer, you're a cost center.
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.
It could be useful to have repositories that are comprised of only "AI"-generated code and repositories that are comprised of only non-"AI"-generated code
If this happens, one could imagine that the former will seek to use the code from the later for "training AI"
The later might charge the former a license fee
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.
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.
"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.
'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.
Vibecoders like to make all kinds of things that already exist, often don't care (or notice) if the AI rewrites everything instead of using what exists, and LLMs love to do that.
Okay, you can pick between 90% NIH with some sharing or 95% NIH because you tried to stop the sharing. The amount doesn't matter; you're still causing more AI use.
"Protected by go-away" so I went away.
I don't know if it's not working, I couldn't pass it without making an account (yeah I found out I didn't have a SourceHut account yet)
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.
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
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/
I like codeberg approach. If you're a small project that doesn't spam ( a commit a day, a few PR a day) you can be as vibe-coded as you want despite their 'guidelines'.
This is fantastic. We need more of this. If you want garbage code, GitHub is the place for you.
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
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 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.
I feel the same way.
There’s a big chunk of the FOSS community that has dedicated itself to the cultural left “omnicause,” which seems to require full agreement with the consensus as one of its membership criteria. The thing is, even though I agree with many (but not all) of its tenets on paper, I don’t really agree with the methods used or the insistence on full agreement.
I also just despise ordinary politicking, and prefer slow procedure-driven decision making (like Debian) or projects driven by a visionary leader (like OpenBSD). This makes me an outsider by default. Projects that attract these people tend to engage in vicious struggle sessions any time there’s a serious disagreement.
I think the biggest schism I have with these people is over identity. I prefer to have no identity. Anonymous (or pseudonymous), faceless. They want to enforce a strong identity, even if it’s a constructed identity. It can’t just be about trust, given how often identifiable people break each others’ trust. I suspect it’s about enforcing ingroup signaling as a criteria of membership, in order to make the group look stronger and drive out dissenters.
> I think the biggest schism I have with these people is over identity. I prefer to have no identity. Anonymous (or pseudonymous), faceless.
Same here. I don't even have just one identity in the first place (thanks to DID), but not a single one identifies as a "real human". I suspect these people have some sort of idea of what constitutes a "real human" to them, and in this case it seems to be making a full canonical identity directly available. I don't do that; my life (and brain) is incredibly compartmentalized and I don't use the body's likeness online, nor do I make my personal email address available to the public, so even if I did identify with humanity I feel like I would probably still not be "real human" enough.
> I suspect these people have some sort of idea of what constitutes a "real human" to them, and in this case it seems to be making a full canonical identity directly available.
That’s a great point. They want to be able to dig through your history to make sure that you’re co-aligned, and maybe to find something they can use if they need to influence or target you. To that I say, no thanks.
In my discussion with Drew, it was framed as an issue of trust: "You've set yourself up in a position of not trusting your peers. They offer you this courtesy, but you deny it to them." To me, whether or not to trust others is a purely individual decision. If others choose to be trusting, that is their choice. It is likewise my choice not to give out trust so freely, and somehow that is treated as selfish and unfair. I want to contribute my thoughts and work to the community, but apparently, I am not trusting enough to be a part of it.
I choose to support the inverse; that is, I will explicitly tell others that they have no need to trust me whatsoever. I try to make arguments, contribute work and generally conduct myself in such a way that any merit is self-evident, and that there is no need to trust me. It is not an issue when someone does, of course, but there is certainly an issue when they try to demand my trust in return.
In my opinion, we live in a dystopia, and we should generally strive towards protocols and "cultures" that do not demand so much "trust". If full trust is required to participate, you will suffer from bad actors that pretend to trust, while excluding honest actors who do not. The same problem exists with things like ID verification, because bad actors have access to unlimited IDs, while honest people may not have access to, or be willing to surrender, any at all.
Fully agree. Trust is earned, not given, and trust is also contextual. I’ve certainly known pseudonymous internet users that I came to trust for certain things, based on their reliability over time. Would I trust them in a different context? Probably not, at least until I got to know them in that context.
I’ve been burned by freely giving trust when it wasn’t deserved, assuming that it would be respected and reciprocated. As you said, that’s just not the world we live in.
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?
I thought sourcehut was general purpose git hosting, not open source mission focused like codeberg?
obv they're going to have content restriction, but there is a spectrum from "actually illegal" to "wonderful chaps whom I love but happen to disagree with philosophically." Slop coding is neither of those, but is closer to the latter than I'd expect a general purpose host to draw a line.
It’s general purpose except for what the BDFL (Drew) takes a dislike to, with a veneer of consulting the community.
The Drew from the Wayland/Sway era is not the same person he once was. It’s sad to see the lost potential here. I used to defend him, but I won’t be moving forward.
Slop is slop but people have a right to churn out slop if they want it. Paid users should be allowed to experiment if they aren’t exceeding limits. (IMHO slop will soon be a self-correcting problem, we’re already seeing normie slop fatigue.)
I don’t want my source forge banning anything that isn’t blatantly illegal or abusing resources, because there’s no guarantee that I won’t be next on the chopping block.
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.
This is silly. It would destroy traffic to their site significantly
Hacker News has become a f*cking vibecoding community, the only post that agrees with the proposal has negative votes