Ok, bye bye [LWN.net]

Ok, bye bye

Posted Jul 23, 2026 17:00 UTC (Thu) by rrolls (subscriber, #151126)
In reply to: Ok, bye bye by mb
Parent article: Codeberg: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

> Codeberg was a great idea, but this decision will kill it.

There are clearly a lot of people who disagree with you there, starting with the 358 people who voted for it!

From what I've read over the last ~year, there are a _lot_ of people who strongly believe that code should not be generated by LLMs (and it appears a fair subset of those believe that AI should not be used at all, for anything, ever). This decision will make Codeberg very attractive to these people, so I very much doubt it will "kill" it; rather, I think it will only make Codeberg even stronger within that market.

Just yesterday at $DAYJOB, the subject of the zig bun fiasco came up, during which I pointed out that the Zig project strictly disallows AI generated code contributions. A colleague immediately responded with something to the effect of "well, that's going to make sure no one uses Zig, then". To which I rebutted that no, it won't kill Zig, it will simply create a strong correlation between "those who use Zig" and "those who are against using AI for code generation". They didn't back down, so I left it at that; they seemed to have used exactly the same questionable logic as saying "being against AI will kill Codeberg".

And I say the above as someone who is (strangely?) more-or-less neutral in this whole AI "debate".

In practice I think this is a good decision. It will let them focus their limited resources on hosting projects that do more with less, rather than hosting generated content that objectively requires orders of magnitude more resources to do the same thing. As someone who has on numerous occasions struggled to access Codeberg with it being slow or completely unavailable for periods of time, I am very much on board with this movement.

It is worth taking note, by the way, of the following section of the Codeberg blog post, which confirms that you're not just going to be taken down for having "a tiny bit of LLM poison" in your repo:

> Some early, but informal guidelines
>
> 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

to post comments

Ok, bye bye

Posted Jul 23, 2026 17:12 UTC (Thu) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (4 responses)

>there are a _lot_ of people who strongly believe that code should not be generated by LLMs

Sure.
But why do they want to restrict what *other* people want to do?
Do they really think they are going to stop AI by banning people from Codeberg?

You know what will actually happen?
All these people will just go on using AI. Just not on Codeberg. Not a single one will stop using AI.
This will just strengthen proprietary platforms like Github.

It's a net loss.

>As someone who has on numerous occasions struggled to access Codeberg with it being slow
>or completely unavailable for periods of time, I am very much on board with this movement.

Yes, banning random people from the platform will enhance the performance. That's a no-brainer.

Ok, bye bye

Posted Jul 23, 2026 17:24 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (3 responses)

> Do they really think they are going to stop AI by banning people from Codeberg?

Where the hell did you read that? AFAICT, they just 1. don't want to be part of the problem 2. mitigate some overload and cost issues with both people and their machines.

Why do some people try to limit their own carbon emissions while their neighbors don't care? Take a guess.

I generally find the "anti-AI" people to be more emotional and irrational than the "pro-AI" ones. Thank you for providing a counter-example.

Ok, bye bye

Posted Jul 23, 2026 17:28 UTC (Thu) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (1 responses)

>Where the hell did you read that?

Nowhere. It was a question. Questions can also be answered with "no". But best would be "no, because...". Which you thankfully eventually did, between the personal attacks.
Thanks!

Ok, bye bye

Posted Jul 23, 2026 17:33 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

The "really" made it look like it was based on a fact.

Even without the "really", that rhetorical question was at best a distraction. Codeberg has provided an excellent explanation of why they are doing this. Instead of disagreeing with it and replying to it, you have preferred replying to your own, rhetorical questions instead.

Ok, bye bye

Posted Jul 23, 2026 21:02 UTC (Thu) by einar (guest, #98134) [Link]

> Why do some people try to limit their own carbon emissions while their neighbors don't care? Take a guess.

I'm perfectly fine with Codeberg taking that stance (I don't agree with it, FTR). After all, they support Forgejo and I can self-host it without worrying about a thing about their policies (in fact, I am doing that since many years, as I didn't want my private code on GitHub).

I would argue that they're preaching to the choir, though. They can be (will?) more attractive to those who don't like AI, but ultimately that's all they can do (and possibly protect themselves from bots, that's a legitimate concern). But from an ethical perspective, it won't matter much. It will certainly not bring any change.

(I have bigger disagreements on the ethics, but these are off-topic matters... perhaps something for another day, in another place).