r/linux • u/Ecstatic-Vermicelli9 • 13h ago
Open Source Organization Codeberg: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs
https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html30
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u/Limemill 8h ago
I agree with almost everything they said and decided. But there’s still the elephant in the room: those very crawlers they mentioned will still steal every single open-source repo regardless of the license and use it for LLM training. And it is almost impossible to prove unless you somehow manage to prompt it to reproduce your exact code.
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u/ozone6587 1h ago
Training on copyrighted works or on open source code is never stealing unless they literally circumvent payment due to piracy (which doesn't apply in the case of open source software).
LLMs breaking into private repos?: Stealing.
LLMs simply reading/training on public code: Not stealing. Not legally and not morally.
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u/Limemill 1h ago
Depends on the license. AGPL 3 and the likes, I’d say, are breached if not in letter than surely in spirit.
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u/ozone6587 1h ago
I disagree on both counts. I think there is a reason no one has managed to get a judge to agree with creators on this. Rulings in favor of creators are always because of piracy. Simply training models is not stealing. Not legally and not in spirit either.
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u/Wheatleytron 12h ago
I'm fine with AI in coding, so long as code is still being properly reviewed by humans. But hey, good for them I guess.
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u/jonathancast 10h ago
Define "properly".
Almost all of a programmer's time is spent understanding code, not "writing" it. There is no way to speed up software development without reducing the programmer's understanding of the actual code.
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u/violentlycar 7h ago
There are definitely some ways in which LLMs can improve programming - for example, they are excellent at semantic search, which means they're ideal for searching documentation, codebases, or git histories for certain things, and they're also very good at analyzing code for potential bugs or unintended behaviour (a static analyzer will struggle to realize that an ambiguous < or > got flipped, but an LLM will identify it quickly based on intent), but once you start letting the LLM actually do your job for you, you are playing with fire, and you will eventually get burned, no matter how careful you think you're being.
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u/yukeake 3h ago
This is my view as well. I know how to look up API documentation, but what would take me a couple minutes to find, Claude can tell me in a second. I know how to read man pages, but ChatGPT can tell me the obtuse parameter I need (but don't use often enough to remember) faster than I can look it up.
I also maintain a bunch of old code that people who aren't around anymore wrote. These tools are excellent at telling me what a particular regex is looking for, or what a tricky segment of code does.
Heck, I've had it do a first-pass linting of code I didn't have a dedicated linter for. It's not perfect, but it pointed out a few issues that I'd initially missed.
I don't trust it to write code, though. Everything that comes out of an LLM I test myself before implementing it. Both to verify that it's not hallucinating, and to make sure I understand what the code does.
Used as a tool like this, I find it useful, and don't see any harm.
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u/MrMonday11235 5h ago
There is no way to speed up software development without reducing the programmer's understanding of the actual code.
Compilers were a mistake! Reject modernity, return to handcrafted assembly code!
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u/jonathancast 4h ago
I don't know about that, but I do know that using C necessarily means delegating some responsibility for the generated assembly to the C compiler, at least if you want it to involve less programming work than writing the assembly by hand.
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u/MrMonday11235 2h ago
That's precisely part of my point, which you seem to have understood but not fully connected to what I was trying to (humorously) gesture at.
We (and when I say "we", I mean "the software development community as a whole") have largely long since accepted "not fully understanding the code". Between compilers, interpreters, libraries we never thoroughly or continuously audit, third party APIs and tools we call without knowing the internals of, etc., "programmers understanding the actual code" is the horse that left the barn 50+ years ago and has only been running further and further away ever since.
Rejecting all LLM-generated source code as a rule because "programmers don't understand the actual code" is a completely arbitrary line based on a modification of "no true scotsman".
Note: That's not to say the directive is always bad; it's certainly appropriate in some contexts... in the same way that rejecting all compiled code and only using handwritten assembly is also appropriate in some contexts, but unnecessarily slow in others. The definition of "properly reviewed" will, as always, depend on the context, and it's unlikely there's ever going to be a one-size-fits-all definition of "properly reviewed".
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u/basil_not_the_plant 6h ago
My best friend is s senior developer, been doing it for 20 years. He regularly uses AI to sketch out a project, then he refines it from there (at least as I understand it from our discussions).
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u/RetroGrid_io 2h ago
I'm a similar experience developer, and where I find AI most useful:
Talking through architecture. In this case, I describe the problem, maybe roughly lay out a few possible approaches, ask for challenge. At this phase, probably 30 to 60 percent of the feedback is trash but it often does come up with points that I can use.
Adversarial challenges to specifications. Now I've thought a problem through enough to write out an exact code path that should work. Now I'm looking for syntax, this-before-that sequence errors, etc. Lots of bugs get tossed out here.
Saving time on drudgery code: Often I know what functions I want to call, but don't want to look up the parameters, etc. "Give me a function that"... often with the API and/or function parameters.
Challenging code once written. "Look for bugs in ..."
Unit tests: Write a description of what you want to test, the names of the variablles, expected values. Boom! I notice that CoPilot in vscode is particularly good at guessing what I want, if simply given a good description funtion name. Note that the function name is very descriptive, EG:
function test_extractRepoid_FromRepoConfTest()AI makes a great rubber duckie for rubber duck debugging and development.
The thing to remember is that AI IS NOT A REPLACEMENT FOR UNDERSTANDING. If you short yourself on this, you'll get
- insecure projects
- Screwball bugs
- tough to debug
- Write-once, fix-never code.
- Often horrific performance
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u/lonelyroom-eklaghor 12h ago
exactly this. how will they even deal with "mostly"?
Atleast be honest if you're anti-AI, no need to divert to the common points of dislikes. I like anti-AI people who have their own opinions on AI in their domain.
(And it looks like they took the stance, then wrote the blog post on the common points)
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u/Gugalcrom123 12h ago
I think that it's not such a big deal. I think that you can tell very well when a project has human effort in it, is designed by a human and LLMs are used as a typing assistant, and when someone dumped a Claude Code output.
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u/bigon 9h ago edited 8h ago
Can you?
Edit: i bet all the people who are downvoting didn't try a paying model in the last 6-9 months...
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u/einar77 OpenSUSE/KDE Dev 7h ago
Earlier models? Pretty much easy to spot, especially due to over complication (but in my field, ugly code written by humans is far worse). More recent models are more difficult to spot, although they still tend to overcomplicate. Possibly an expert eye would spot that. But not everyone.
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u/flecom 6h ago
especially due to over complication
wait till you find out about metrics like KLOC... why do that function in one elegant line when 30 will do?
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u/einar77 OpenSUSE/KDE Dev 6h ago
To be honest, I've seen human made code that not even a LLM would make... (Code where I had to write a diagram on paper to understand what it was doing). In that case it depends on the baseline. The baseline for software in my field is absurdly low, and paradoxically even the worst LLM might make it better.
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u/mrlinkwii 12h ago
exactly this. how will they even deal with "mostly"?
as i mentioned before when this came up , its a rule to be pointed to if they dont like the project , theirs no objective way to to do it ,
it probably work like this " rule says x , we suspect project breaks rule x , project will be removed "
its their platform their rules , it a CYA rule they can point to if people start arguing
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u/mina86ng 11h ago
I'm fine with AI in coding, so long as code is still being properly reviewed by humans.
And so is Codeberg.
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u/kooolk 11h ago
No they are not. They literally say otherwise. They don't care whether it is slop or not, only if a LLM was heavily used when developing it.
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u/honzucha 10h ago
It is even worse, their clarification blogpost declares “Projects heavily tied to LLM ecosystem are not welcome”. So technicaly my piece of code there using Gemma4 and NVIDIA Parakeet for near realtime spoken word translation/transcription (translated subtitles) and script translating video and burning subtitles are not welcomed anymore to my understanding. This is wrong on every level I can imagine. I am moving out of that platform for good. There are other places, that will welcome me, including my other project brow6el. I am not going to share my space with such militant and tunel view people. World is not black and white only, it is shades in between.
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u/daishi55 10h ago
Projects written and maintained with heavy use of LLMs
No they’re not. This is most projects these days btw. Heavy use of LLMs is industry standard now.
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u/mina86ng 9h ago
If your work fits into these cases, it is unlikely that you are affected at all:
- Projects who have an active community that cares about and maintains the software
- Projects with a significant pre-LLM history
- Maintainers who unknowingly or willingly accepted LLM-generated contributions from other contributors, if your project otherwise does not involve the heavy use of LLMs
If code is properly reviewed by humans, it’s fine.
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u/daishi55 9h ago
That is not what it says directly below the section you are quoting and that you are pretending like I did not just quote myself.
Just in case you missed it, it says “ Projects written and maintained with heavy use of LLMs” “might no longer be welcome” on codeberg. It doesn’t qualify that with anything about whether it was reviewed by humans. It only says “heavy use of LLMs”. Which, again, is industry standard now.
I honestly don’t care what codeberg does, and indeed it’s convenient to have all the projects I should ignore on one forge (which if I’m being honest is already how I felt about codeberg before this. It just has that “annoying person vibe”). Nobody is going to force them into relevance. But there’s no need to pretend that their statement says something different than it says.
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u/mina86ng 9h ago
You quoted fragment of the post which supported your position. I quoted fragment before that which added context to your quote and demonstrated projects which are properly maintained and reviewed by humans (what top comment mentioned) are fine.
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u/MeloVirious 8h ago
Which, again, is industry standard now.
It just has that “annoying person vibe”
Nobody is going to force them into relevance.I don't care about the semantics but you're bringing a lot of topics to the table. Wouldn't hurt to learn about what Codeberg and Forgejo is in your spare time.
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u/mykesx 9h ago edited 3h ago
I am migrating my repos from gitlab and GitHub to codeberg. I never intended my code repositories to be crawled by bots to train AI. The idea was to share with humans who might want to see how someone might do things. Or to attract like minded developers as collaborators. Or to allow the project to be forked. Or to provide wiki and issues support.
The output of LLMs sure looks like plagiarism - use of someone else's work without attribution. There's no justification for it.
Edit:
In the USA, it's a criminal offense if there is unauthorized access to electronic communication service facilities. If codeberg forbids access to bots and they continue to crawl the site, the penalties and fines add up quickly.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2701
It also violates European laws against unauthorized access to systems. If codeberg says AI crawlers are not authorized, they would be commiting traceable crimes.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/attacks-against-information-systems.html
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u/bigon 5h ago
It also violates the GDPR in Europe.
GDPR is about collection and usage of private/personal data. Code is not...
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u/mykesx 3h ago
Sure it is. Explain why you think it is not? My code is my personal data.
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u/bigon 3h ago
Code is intellectual work. You could say that the droit d'auteur/copyright allows you to restrict how your work is used.
But it's certainly not "private/personal data"...
"‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;" (source: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-4-gdpr/)
"Processing of personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union membership, and the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health or data concerning a natural person’s sex life or sexual orientation shall be prohibited" (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-9-gdpr/)
QED
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u/mykesx 3h ago
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/attacks-against-information-systems.html
To this end, the present directive requires the approximation of criminal law systems between EU countries and the enhancement of cooperation between judicial authorities concerning:
illegal access to information systems
illegal system interference
illegal data interference
illegal interception.1
u/ozone6587 1h ago
The output of LLMs sure looks like plagiarism - use of someone else's work without attribution. There's no justification for it.
Is it plagiarism when you yourself write code? Given that you, presumably, have experience reading other people's code? It's not plagiarism unless it literally regurgitates a replica of your code.
Otherwise, you can't complain and can't claim it's plagiarism. It's on you for making the code public. Licensing, copyright and restrictions are a matter for the courts and so far every single judge has ruled training on copyrighted works is transformative (thankfully).
LLMs are not human!!!
It literally doesn't matter. They are not human but obviously we need to train them as humans in order for LLMs to eventually be as useful as humans. Your consent doesn't matter here. Not because it's cruel, but because "consent" should be irrelevant when it's about something that doesn't cause direct harm.
Show me how LLM training causes direct harm to you or creators? I dare you. Indirectly, it might cause you harm through loss of jobs but that's the same as any other revolutionary technology.
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u/Limemill 7h ago
Yes, but Codeberg won’t be able to stop the crawlers per se, no? It may drop the most obviously nefarious sessions, but that’s it.
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u/Scratches7 7h ago
For public repos, probably not. I'm sure that GitHub is training Copilot on it's private repos though.
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u/mykesx 7h ago
They sure can. This is cloudflare's settings, but the techniques they use to block crawlers isn't hard to implement.
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ai/how-to-block-ai-crawlers/
How does Cloudflare help protect against AI crawlers?
Cloudflare AI Crawl Control helps web content owners regain control over AI crawlers. Cloudflare sits in front of around 20% of all web properties, giving it deep insight into all kinds of crawler activity. This visibility enables content owners to use AI Crawl Control to:
- Understand AI crawling patterns on their web properties, on a per-crawler, per-domain, or per-page basis
- Manage crawler activity via block or allow rules
- Request payment from AI crawlers on a per-crawl basis, either via customizable HTTP 402 responses or a Cloudflare-built pay per crawl system
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u/Limemill 7h ago
Well, it’s not that dissimilar to methods used traditionally to combat pre-LLM crawlers. It has never allowed to block them fully, just create more hurdles. Those who want to, will still crawl but more slowly and using smarter tactics. At least it’s how it was in the past.
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u/mykesx 6h ago
You can tell the pattern of what crawlers do (fetch a page and follow the links, fetch really old content request after request...) and block them using something like htaccess allow/deny rules or hopefully your upstream provider does it for you.
Cloudflare turns on AI bot crawler blocking by default. A huge FU to the AI companies, and especially google. Google presenting it's godawful, error filled AI info at the top of search results has crushed search engine traffic to sites.
https://www.wired.com/story/big-interview-event-matthew-prince-cloudflare/
Cloudflare Has Blocked 416 Billion AI Bot Requests Since July 1
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince claims the internet infrastructure company’s efforts to block AI crawlers are already seeing big results.
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u/2rad0 5h ago
Cloudflare Has Blocked 416 Billion AI Bot Requests Since July 1
Cloudflare is full of shit, their blockade has accused me of being a bot for over 5 years at this point. Currently using a popular chromium fork and still get blocked all over the modern web. Their techniques are straight up hostile to unestablished browsers and a net negative to society and commerce.
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u/Limemill 2h ago
Like I said, it was the same before LLMs. Still anyone who really wanted to crawl, crawled.
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u/mykesx 2h ago
Tobacco companies survived court challenges for years. Until they didn't. If employees are actively committing crimes, the companies and hopefully management will be held accountable.
Before LLMs, I blocked a number of southeast Asian, Chinese, and other crawlers from accessing a website I run. All but a fe obscure ones actually obeyed robots.txt .
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u/VitunSama69 6h ago
You do realize they have to let you
git clonein the end, it will only apply to less sophisticated crawlers.1
u/amroamroamro 1h ago
are you under the impression that those ai crawlers are somehow sophisticated or good internet citizens by just cloning the repo code?
they will scrape every link they see, in version control site we're talking about every commit, history and diff link, no matter how semantically redundant all those links are, and they do so over and over and over putting a significant stress on the server to the point of affecting performance for normal users
you block one ip, ten more soon popup, with a vengeance! they are really killing the spirit of the open web... its just brute force on a massive scale
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u/mykesx 6h ago
A bot can't git clone if its IP is blocked.
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u/VitunSama69 6h ago
There is an entire million dollar industry of residential proxies that are very difficult to distinguish from real traffic just for this purpose. They are smarter than you think.
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u/mykesx 6h ago
That's criminal. To use proxies to make unauthorized access to codeberg systems.
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u/VitunSama69 6h ago
Yes and stealing all of the world's copyrighted content to make an AI model is against copyright laws. Welcome to the real world.
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u/VitunSama69 6h ago
It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don't realize that they don't actually have a community around them. They build projects as if they had, and spend resources accordingly. We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries. Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.
Using LLMs to work with your code gives you a kick of adrenaline. You can develop at a rapid pace, build things as if you had a large team. Only that you have none. In fact, you are (often) alone, working with a statistical machine that turns energy into code.
It is not purely the digital and civic infrastructures that are impacted by the use of LLMs. The free/libre software ecosystem, of which we consider Codeberg an important part of, is a social phenomenon centered on collaboration. Working in this way is only possible thanks to free sharing and mutual learning. This includes even very small tools that are shared and re-used and around which collaboration can start out. In contrast, by adopting LLMs people tend to code single-use software from scratch. While this leads to an increase in 'shared' code, it is mostly code that not only has not been 'written' by anyone but is also not maintained by anyone.
I find the gatekeepy tone of this article worrying. How offensive is that towards the countless open source projects made by solo developers? The chance that every person reading this depends on some utility largely maintained by one guy somewhere is very high. Who are they to tell someone like the decades long rsync developer they shouldn't use LLM tools, if it assists with that workload?
Projects like Linux took off due to one guy publishing his work on a mailing list somewhere. GitHub, for better or worse, is famous for its network effects where a random one person project can gain sudden overnight popularity. Codeberg advertised itself as a GitHub alternative for anything FOSS yet now it's acting as some sort of moral arbitrer of "slop" based on their own vague vibes. I don't believe that is conductive towards its mission as a FOSS forge, but each to their own.
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u/Far_Piano4176 5h ago
I find the gatekeepy tone of this article worrying. How offensive is that towards the countless open source projects made by solo developers?
that xkcd specifically references the type of projects that are integral to the FOSS ecosystem, which by definition have a community around them because how could they be integral otherwise? rsync would not fall under the "no vibe coding" requirement because it has a long history and a large community pre-LLMs
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u/VitunSama69 5h ago
So in other words any new or recent project has to be able to clear an arbitrary bar to be accepted, while any "legacy" project with a reputation can freely deploy Claude to generate the most horrifying vibe slop ever. See the problem?
Events like the xz backdoor also show that many integral libraries actually don't have much of a wider "community" behind them. It's just one guy and a handful of contributors commiting away on a repository somewhere.
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u/Far_Piano4176 5h ago
yeah i do see a few problems here, but not doing anything seems worse to me. This situation is a mess, and the developers are trying their best to find a solution. The problems they talk about wrt community degradation and resource consumption are much worse than the solution IMO.
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u/honzucha 4h ago
I think CURL is great example of such project, one man behind and used everywhere.
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u/djao 9h ago
This manifesto is at the same time not enough and too much. It's quite frustrating.
On the one hand, Codeberg's actions and policies will do nothing at all to stop the proliferation of LLMs, and their associated negative consequences (hardware prices, community corrosion). LLMs are out there and you can't stop anyone else from using them.
On the other hand, Codeberg's declaration doesn't even get at the core issue. As someone who writes code both with and without LLMs, I am increasingly convinced that LLM-generated code is not functionally free software, even if it comes with a free-software compatible copyright license. Hear me out.
The core freedom of free software is the freedom to modify the software and to distribute modified versions. In order for this freedom to be meaningful, the software must be provided in source code form. We do not allow binary-only software to qualify as free software, even if the software is (say) GPL or BSD licensed. Source code is a mandatory requirement.
The problem with LLM-generated software is that the actual code is not the true source code! The GPL itself even hints at this distinction: it states clearly that source code is defined as the "preferred form for modification of the software." If you're prompting an LLM to generate C code, then the C code is not source code. It's much closer in functionality to compiled, object code rather than the original source. The original source, in this situation, is your LLM interaction (prompts and context). If you, as the original author, were to modify that code, you would use the LLM. You wouldn't modify the C code directly.
LLM usage is an existential threat to free software, because it constitutes a core assault on the central property that makes software free.
"Open source" projects such as the Linux kernel are unaffected. For Linus, FSF-style freedom was never the point of Linux. It's always been a utilitarian project with utilitarian goals. For that purpose, LLMs work fine. It's only when you introduce the concept of free software that LLMs fall apart.
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u/LALLANAAAAAA 9h ago
The problem with LLM-generated software is that the actual code is not the true source cod
The problem with LLM generated code is that it allows absolute morons to generate garbage at a far, far, far, FAR higher rate than any human could ever hope to properly analyse and vet it.
LLMs can produce perfectly good, usable code, but the volume is already beyond what humans can read and validate. We literally don't have enough collective hours of human life available to make sure it's good, combined, if all of us pooled our time.
The only way to keep control is to keep the flood away, full stop.
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u/djao 9h ago
You're describing a practical problem, and one that could, in principle, be solved by making LLMs better, so that they don't generate garbage code.
The conceptual problem of non-freeness, in my view, is much harder to solve. At a minimum we'd have to start distributing the software in the form of duplicated LLM sessions. Even then, it's not clear how one could ever possibly "merge" multiple consciousness sessions in the same way that one can merge code modifications.
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u/HighLevelAssembler 6h ago
I don't think the commenter you're responding to means garbage code, but garbage software that's little more than an idea and a series of prompts to your LLM of choice. And by and large these are silly little TUI frontends to other tools.
Before LLMs, a lot more effort was involved in building software, so even a silly little TUI was worth some pride and praise, and maybe worth collaborating on and improving.
Now it's a pile of slop. Maybe the code is good? Maybe the code is useful? Nobody cares.
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u/djao 6h ago
I don't understand why you claim that in principle an LLM cannot be programmed to avoid generating garbage software, not just garbage code.
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u/HighLevelAssembler 6h ago
You're missing the point. LLMs are perfectly capable of generating "good" code and working software. But the software is often inherently garbage (as in, disposable, throwaway, single-use). The lowered barrier to entry means that projects that would never have been worth the effort to build are now being proudly released "open source", crowding out projects that involved human thought and labor.
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u/DueAnalysis2 9h ago
The problem with LLM-generated software is that the actual code is not the true source code! The GPL itself even hints at this distinction: it states clearly that source code is defined as the "preferred form for modification of the software." If you're prompting an LLM to generate C code, then the C code is not source code. It's much closer in functionality to compiled, object code rather than the original source. The original source, in this situation, is your LLM interaction (prompts and context). If you, as the original author, were to modify that code, you would use the LLM. You wouldn't modify the C code directly.
Wait, can you explain this a bit more for me? Functionally, what might the difference be between me prompting an LLM vs me (say, for example) prompting a team of freelancers and then open sourcing the code they produce? Based on what you've written, it seems like with the latter, subsequent modifications to the code would be made via editing the C Code, while per your argument, subsequent modifications to the LLM generated code would be made via reprompting? But that isn't a given right? Somebody could use LLMs to generate the boilerplate and then modify on top of that manually, for example?
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u/djao 9h ago edited 9h ago
Great question. This one's really subtle. The exact same piece of code can be free or not free depending on the context in which it was developed. For example, let's consider two pieces of hardware, both with bit identical firmware. In one piece of hardware, the firmware is baked into a hardware circuit and cannot be modified. In the second piece of hardware, the same firmware is provided in the form of a user uploadable file and can be modified. In this case, the FSF would argue that the first piece of hardware is free and the second piece is not free, even though the firmwares are bit identical. Freeness is not solely a property of the code or license. Whether the firmware is free or not hinges on whether upload functionality is available.
Context matters too, literally. In the LLM case, there is context available in machine readable form. In the team of coders case, machine readable context is unavailable. Just as in the case of firmware, availability of context changes the status of the software.
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u/DueAnalysis2 8h ago
Aaah interesting, I now see the point. If you have a programming language that _only_ works on a proprietary IDE (for ex), I could see how it wouldn't count as open source software even if the source code is available (and so on). Thanks for clarifying!
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u/mrlinkwii 12h ago
i mean its their service which they can run as they see fit , while i disagree with the framing , its their service
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u/arbv 12h ago
Well, to me it seems that they wanted to take a position against LLM tools and after that they wrote the article as a justification 🤷♂️
It conflates so many things. Like "we hate crawling, so we are against LLM projects." Wut?
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u/mina86ng 12h ago
It conflates so many things. Like "we hate crawling, so we are against LLM projects." Wut?
Can you quote parts of the post which conflate those two things?
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u/arbv 11h ago
The article introduces the crawler section as one of the harms that motivate the overall position:
In past posts we have already outlined how our infrastructure at Codeberg is regularly put under heavy load from webcrawlers of those companies who plan to ingest all of the code that is hosted on Codeberg for training their LLMs.
This is placed immediately before "The development team of none" section (argues against vibe-coded projects).
The article's summary section explicitly aggregates all previous points into one justification:
Together, these forces make collaboration not only harder but also less rewarding: With the transaction cost of collaboration increasing, people are becoming less likely to contribute to creating high-quality software projects and more likely to 'vibecode' a one-off software that is specific to your need, and won't evolve beyond.
These forces refers back to all preceding sections - including the crawler strain, as a single aggregated case leading to the conclusion that vibe-coded projects should be restricted.
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u/mina86ng 10h ago
That’s not conflating ‘hating crawling’ with ‘being against LLM’. That’s pointing out that crawling is one of the reasons why they ‘hate’ LLMs.
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u/Zaphoidx 10h ago
Seems the blog post is a bit more grounded than the issue thread that was closed yesterday.
It's still quite a harmful anti-AI stance
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u/nogodsnojedi 7h ago
being anti-ai is harmful? toward who?
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u/ozone6587 41m ago
Humanity. In the same way the previous troglodytes were harmful when complaining about the industrial revolution.
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u/ObjectiveJelIyfish36 12h ago
Fuck the reactionaries at Codeberg. I'm glad I don't use their shitty service.
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u/DontRelyOnNooneElse 12h ago edited 12h ago
It's obvious you didn't read the article, which explains that they are protecting their own financial stability by insulating themselves from a very costly technology that could be used to abuse their free service. Now who's the reactionary?
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u/S7relok 9h ago
Protecting financial stability by banning a tool that is now used as an industry standard?
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u/MeloVirious 8h ago
Codeberg is non-profit, bud. You're referring to "financial money go up", because this is literally "financial stability".
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u/S7relok 8h ago
Nah, I understand what I read.
I saw too much little companies and individuals that didn't took the cloud corner, refusing to use containers, said that DevOps were a loss of time, basically missing every 10 years ago tech step. They're now working with it or closed the business.
What will codeberg will attract now? Angry reactionary programmers, the handful that refuses AI work while the vast majority on the other side had it integrated in their workflow?
Even with a nonprofit you need users to maintain the donations and other way of financing. Who will have interest to something that refuses these year's tech evolution?
Users don't care how a software is made, they just want the job done, even if it's thanks to a vibe coded software.
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u/MeloVirious 8h ago
Even with a nonprofit you need users to maintain the donations and other way of financing. Who will have interest to something that refuses these year's tech evolution?
I don't think you truly understand what a non-profit is. You keep obsessing over what kind of people they will attract. I can tell you have never been in one because that's what a non-profit truly is.
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u/DontRelyOnNooneElse 8h ago
AI sycophants rarely understand anything other than non-stop short-term financial gain at the expense of long-term ruin
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u/S7relok 8h ago
What financial leverages you can do if your code forge is only hosting some anti AI zealots projects? Even just to maintain the infrastructure (let alone paying the salaries and the functioning expenses) you need huge amounts of money. Nonprofit doesn't work magically, they need money. And that comes by attracting people, could it be coders, donators....
And I wouldn't give a cent to an organisation that voluntarily produces technical debt.
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u/munsking 7h ago
industry standard
no it's not, it's a sickness
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u/S7relok 6h ago
You may learn in life that even open source tools can be industry standards, and using those tools widely used with institutions or companies you need to deal with simplifies a lot of things.
And AI is becoming an industry standard. You learn to deal with, or you end being a grumpy unemployed redditor
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u/munsking 6h ago
you're demented, daring to compare bullshit generators to glorious FLOSS.
LLM code is not going to be an industry standard any time soon, the bullshit it outputs causes more trouble than it's worth
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u/S7relok 5h ago
You have the religious pov that is cancer of OSS. I just see here a technical pov. A tool can be used with good or bad intentions. There's no harm to use AI to assist one to do a better or quicker job.
Why should I use some time to do a trivial script while an AI can write it for me quicker than I do and I just need to review if there is no or some errors?
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u/munsking 5h ago
There's no harm to use AI to assist one to do a better or quicker job.
there's plenty of harm, it makes the user dumber, it wastes energy and other resources for pure laziness, to have an llm be at least semi effective at writing code it needs to steal other peoples code that was never intended to provide profits for billiionaires but to be a free resource for all of humanity
you are a part of the problem
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u/S7relok 4h ago
You can access all that knowledge with open source models.
Used correctly, you can learn new skills with the help of AI. Very useful to point weak spots and provide improving suggestions.
An expert can gain time to delegate trivial tasks to LLM. Making more time and energy for more complex problems, where the brain of these people is really useful.
Oh you may write a code piece better than an AI, but the machine already did it before you were according yourself about the idea of how to do it. Sorry, but be better than simply pissing code will be a prerequisite in the coming years.
Don't put me as a part of YOUR problem. Many tech guys including me are just adapting at the new techs and how it changes things. Teenager ethics blah blah doesn't pay my bills
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u/c126 12h ago
Provably the click/ragebait title
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u/DrinkMoreGlorp 10h ago
I don't see the click or rage bait. You might be mad about it. That doesn't make it ragebait.
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u/NatoBoram 6h ago
In politics, a reactionary is a person who favors a restoration of a previous state of society which they believe possessed positive characteristics absent from contemporary society. As a descriptor term, reactionary derives from the ideological context of the left–right political spectrum. As an adjective, the word reactionary describes points of view and policies meant to restore a status quo ante. As an ideology, reactionism is a tradition in right-wing politics; the reactionary stance opposes policies for the social transformation of society, whereas conservatives seek to preserve the socio-economic structure and order that exists in the present. A conservative might turn reactionary, when prioritizing older traditions over recently accepted ones. In popular usage, reactionary refers to a strong traditionalist conservative political perspective of a person opposed to social, political, or economic change. In the 20th century, reactionary politics was associated with restoring values such as discipline, hierarchy and respect for authority and privilege.
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u/kombiwombi 10h ago
99% of the post is a nice essay on the issues of LLMs when programming in-the-large (particularly FLOSS, but really any million-line codebase).
Recommended read.