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I'm a member of Codeberg and was allowed to vote on these amendments. There was the annual assembly meeting before the ballots were sent by email. Each proposal

by Aachen 3mo ago

I'm a member of Codeberg and was allowed to vote on these amendments. There was the annual assembly meeting before the ballots were sent by email. Each proposal had a short presentation and a few minutes of Q&A. It wasn't a discussion (the text was final at this point), it was just to ask for clarifications. In the meeting I asked about the server load that they mentioned in their presentation, but misphrased it and got some answer about (AI?)bots scraping Codeberg and not if auto-generated code being shared on Codeberg is actually an issue. It seemed pretty useless compared to commenting on the ticket where one could have a structured discussion. I also don't know how many of the >1000 members were in the meeting in the first place and how many just got the email "Wanna ban AI? Vote now!" Once the results were announced, the rest of the users came into the ticket and started asking questions https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19869436 https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19... This was then shut down and if you have questions you should join the chat room on Matrix

vintagedave 3mo ago
Troubling, though I see it's a typical internet half-off-topic discussion. What kind of conversation has been present in the chat room?
- Aachen 3mo ago
  I didn't join the chat so I don't know that. It's final now anyway, nobody can change the text (next year you can propose another vote). No idea what the point would be of ephemeral conversations about it
- embedding-shape 3mo ago
  > What kind of conversation has been present in the chat room? The original reply that closes the issue is this: > This is not a place to continue or start a new discussion about AI or not AI and its copyright status in the world, it will not change the results or how its going to be interpreted. I'm closing this issue, you're more than welcome to continue this at https://matrix.to/#/#codeberg-offtopic:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/#codeberg-offtopic:matrix.org Make of the room topic what you will.
  - tulio_ribeiro 3mo ago
    Needs to be a member of parent #codeberg, which is invite only. I wonder if they gated the room after public backlash?
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      By "public" you mean "people with no repositories on codeberg"?
boramalper 3mo ago
> I also don't know how many members were in the meeting in the first place and how many just got the email "Wanna ban AI? Vote now!" Was that actually the subject of the email? If so that's nuts.
- Aachen 3mo ago
  Sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression that was literal. I just assume that's how most people read the proposal. Looking it up, the email was: > Subject: New poll on polls.codeberg.org > A new poll has been created on polls.codeberg.org: > Poll Question: > Disallow vibe-coded projects (Terms of Use amendment) Do you agree to the changes from the Pull Request https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253/files https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253/files being accepted? > Plese vote with token [my_vote_token] here: https://... > This vote is completely anonymous, voting slips are not stored, only a counter is incremented, your token is not associated with you or your IP address in any way and neither this mail nor your token when voting will be written to any log file. > [some more info about how to use your token] The voting URL is disabled now (or at least it currently shows me a blank page) but I remember it quoting the proposed amendment text and you could click agree, disagree, or abstain
  - boramalper 3mo ago
    Ah okay, and no problem!
Tepix 3mo ago
There was also a discussion on the codeberg forum. Anyway, I hope this new rule will be overturned in the future. I think it invites arbitrariness and besides, whether or not a project was vibecoded (and how much) doesn't really decide how useful or even how well-written it is.
- klardotsh 3mo ago
  [flagged]
- saidnooneever 3mo ago
  it would be better to encourage people not to have agents create repositories. i think that is the actual issue they want to tackle, while people manually making projects and then having AI write code should obviously be allowed at this point. it will only evolve more, and people can trivially hide it by instructing the LLM and doing manual commits :/
Aachen 3mo ago
So I voted against, partly because I feel that the text doesn't to justice to such a multifaceted topic. If all projects on Codeberg were human-written, that would be a big seal of quality! There are a lot of projects coming out now where someone feels like they've made a cool thing but it breaks on the first edge case and is entirely unmaintainable. Many are built on wrong principles because the prompt authors aren't savvy and don't know better. Some authors (I've encountered this in the OpenStreetMap community) even have the gall to pretend that their code is a gift that we now have to host and maintain. Aside from these quality and community issues, build and test pipelines also take a lot of compute resources, and with large growth in projects, that will increase as well. That the author of the proposal wants to avoid this makes a ton of sense to me. But it also drives a lot of projects away because maybe you later want to use LLM assistance (imagine LLMs got twice as good as they are today), or maybe the auto-generated tests might become >50% of the code. You'd have to migrate your repository and community away from Codeberg. Why take that risk? It's just not a worry I feel that developers need. They're looking to get away from Microsoft (GitHub) for their open source project and that's the point where Codeberg should be a no-brainer We're an open source community and so the mass stealing of all our work to feed LLM training which heats the world and causes (at least temporarily) giant price hikes in consumer hardware... there's a lot to say for more ethical training and use of LLMs, but does it matter at all if Codeberg bans LLM output? Won't we just make ourselves obsolete? Idk. It's multifaceted and this proposal seems too vague and blunt for me. That's not an option that's set in stone btw, just my current understanding of the different aspects
- therealpygon 3mo ago
  A big seal of quality because it is human written? Maybe in narrow spaces but in general, I’d put money on the average developer being significantly worse at writing code with bugs than an AI. It’s codebergs infra so their choice, but it seems like an overly simplistic solution to a complicated advancing technology, in that it is a threadbare line between “vibe-coded” and “complex agent harness with human oversight and review”. Also, I’m actually quite happy with some of the vibe-coded apps I use. Handy is an example, which started as a vibecoded app, and is fantastic for STT/dictation. It seems like a literal baby with the bath water approach.
nozzlegear 3mo ago
[flagged]
- Aachen 3mo ago
  Sort of yeah! I got used to it by now. At the local hackerspace we have a voorzitter, penningmeester, and secretaris -> president, treasurer, and secretary I think would be the English terms. All sounding fancy and together they're the board. But they don't dress up or anything, it's just terms that are commonplace for small organisations here, in Germany (like with Codeberg) as in the Netherlands (like our hackerspace). In practice people just do as they see fit, the titles are often just a formality and not taken seriously unless you can use it to teasingly redirect work onto another person :)
  - mcv 3mo ago
    That's normal for any "vereniging", "Verein", union or association. My VVE (HOA) has that too. So did both of the student unions I've been a member of. There are organisations for playing games that have the same structure. As soon as you've got any kind of money or responsibility involved, you need some governance structure, or you're just giving your money to some guy.
    - tosti 3mo ago
      And the complexity of the governance structure is related to the amount of money involved. The weirdest thing is when the money of a non-profit NGO exceeds roughly 10e6, the decisions made by upper management tend to make an inversionally proportionate amount of sense. Reason being, it's not their money to spend. Took me a while to figure this out but now it's everywhere.
- CodesInChaos 3mo ago
  I think German non profit organizations are required by law to have a certain level of governance structure.
  - 3mo ago
cmrdporcupine 3mo ago
I had a project on there. The vote result was clearly already a foregone conclusion the moment it was announced. Any voices that even asked for clarification were shouted down on multiple forums. I had never joined as a formal community member to get involved in voting on there, but saw no point in doing so prior to the vote. The tone on external forums (Mastodon, etc.) was just brutal, and the discussion on the PR confined and curtailed. I've already been downvoted to oblivion and insulted galore on yesterday's thread for commenting on this so I don't have much energy for it today but I'll say this: Nobody can reasonably fault a community if they want to define their own limits and terms to engagement with their resources. They can legitimately be angry and frustrated if you do so retroactively and without clarity. I put a lot of work into moving onto Codeberg in the first place -- because I (thought I) shared their values. There was not a single note or concern about agentic tool use then, nor in the 10 months I was on there. Further the actual blog post that finally described the terms and how they will do enforcement came after the vote on the rather narrow clause in the PR. So, again, no, this is not a healthy democratic process. And then I had to put a lot of work into moving off. That's my time and energy and the energy of my contributors wasted and it's just strikes me as poor behaviour driven by a crowd with pitchforks that wants to wave them and had a priori defined an in and out group. ... But at least I had an LLM minion to help me with the moving off part.
- Ferret7446 3mo ago
  The problem with politically radical communities is that sooner or later you'll find yourself on the other side. "I didn't speak out because I wasn't X" and all that. I never liked codeberg because I saw the writing on the wall. GitHub is flawed, but it is at least more tolerant of dissenting values. You can both host anti AI and pro AI content side by side; imagine that!
throw1234567891 3mo ago
Sounds very disingenuous and manipulative in nature. Thanks for letting us know.

by Aachen 3mo ago

vintagedave 3mo ago

Troubling, though I see it's a typical internet half-off-topic discussion. What kind of conversation has been present in the chat room?

Aachen 3mo ago
I didn't join the chat so I don't know that. It's final now anyway, nobody can change the text (next year you can propose another vote). No idea what the point would be of ephemeral conversations about it
embedding-shape 3mo ago
> What kind of conversation has been present in the chat room? The original reply that closes the issue is this: > This is not a place to continue or start a new discussion about AI or not AI and its copyright status in the world, it will not change the results or how its going to be interpreted. I'm closing this issue, you're more than welcome to continue this at https://matrix.to/#/#codeberg-offtopic:matrix.org https://matrix.to/#/#codeberg-offtopic:matrix.org Make of the room topic what you will.
- tulio_ribeiro 3mo ago
  Needs to be a member of parent #codeberg, which is invite only. I wonder if they gated the room after public backlash?
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    By "public" you mean "people with no repositories on codeberg"?

boramalper 3mo ago

> I also don't know how many members were in the meeting in the first place and how many just got the email "Wanna ban AI? Vote now!" Was that actually the subject of the email? If so that's nuts.

Aachen 3mo ago
Sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression that was literal. I just assume that's how most people read the proposal. Looking it up, the email was: > Subject: New poll on polls.codeberg.org > A new poll has been created on polls.codeberg.org: > Poll Question: > Disallow vibe-coded projects (Terms of Use amendment) Do you agree to the changes from the Pull Request https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253/files https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253/files being accepted? > Plese vote with token [my_vote_token] here: https://... > This vote is completely anonymous, voting slips are not stored, only a counter is incremented, your token is not associated with you or your IP address in any way and neither this mail nor your token when voting will be written to any log file. > [some more info about how to use your token] The voting URL is disabled now (or at least it currently shows me a blank page) but I remember it quoting the proposed amendment text and you could click agree, disagree, or abstain
- boramalper 3mo ago
  Ah okay, and no problem!

Tepix 3mo ago

There was also a discussion on the codeberg forum. Anyway, I hope this new rule will be overturned in the future. I think it invites arbitrariness and besides, whether or not a project was vibecoded (and how much) doesn't really decide how useful or even how well-written it is.

klardotsh 3mo ago
[flagged]
saidnooneever 3mo ago
it would be better to encourage people not to have agents create repositories. i think that is the actual issue they want to tackle, while people manually making projects and then having AI write code should obviously be allowed at this point. it will only evolve more, and people can trivially hide it by instructing the LLM and doing manual commits :/

Aachen 3mo ago

So I voted against, partly because I feel that the text doesn't to justice to such a multifaceted topic. If all projects on Codeberg were human-written, that would be a big seal of quality! There are a lot of projects coming out now where someone feels like they've made a cool thing but it breaks on the first edge case and is entirely unmaintainable. Many are built on wrong principles because the prompt authors aren't savvy and don't know better. Some authors (I've encountered this in the OpenStreetMap community) even have the gall to pretend that their code is a gift that we now have to host and maintain. Aside from these quality and community issues, build and test pipelines also take a lot of compute resources, and with large growth in projects, that will increase as well. That the author of the proposal wants to avoid this makes a ton of sense to me. But it also drives a lot of projects away because maybe you later want to use LLM assistance (imagine LLMs got twice as good as they are today), or maybe the auto-generated tests might become >50% of the code. You'd have to migrate your repository and community away from Codeberg. Why take that risk? It's just not a worry I feel that developers need. They're looking to get away from Microsoft (GitHub) for their open source project and that's the point where Codeberg should be a no-brainer We're an open source community and so the mass stealing of all our work to feed LLM training which heats the world and causes (at least temporarily) giant price hikes in consumer hardware... there's a lot to say for more ethical training and use of LLMs, but does it matter at all if Codeberg bans LLM output? Won't we just make ourselves obsolete? Idk. It's multifaceted and this proposal seems too vague and blunt for me. That's not an option that's set in stone btw, just my current understanding of the different aspects

therealpygon 3mo ago
A big seal of quality because it is human written? Maybe in narrow spaces but in general, I’d put money on the average developer being significantly worse at writing code with bugs than an AI. It’s codebergs infra so their choice, but it seems like an overly simplistic solution to a complicated advancing technology, in that it is a threadbare line between “vibe-coded” and “complex agent harness with human oversight and review”. Also, I’m actually quite happy with some of the vibe-coded apps I use. Handy is an example, which started as a vibecoded app, and is fantastic for STT/dictation. It seems like a literal baby with the bath water approach.

nozzlegear 3mo ago

[flagged]

Aachen 3mo ago
Sort of yeah! I got used to it by now. At the local hackerspace we have a voorzitter, penningmeester, and secretaris -> president, treasurer, and secretary I think would be the English terms. All sounding fancy and together they're the board. But they don't dress up or anything, it's just terms that are commonplace for small organisations here, in Germany (like with Codeberg) as in the Netherlands (like our hackerspace). In practice people just do as they see fit, the titles are often just a formality and not taken seriously unless you can use it to teasingly redirect work onto another person :)
- mcv 3mo ago
  That's normal for any "vereniging", "Verein", union or association. My VVE (HOA) has that too. So did both of the student unions I've been a member of. There are organisations for playing games that have the same structure. As soon as you've got any kind of money or responsibility involved, you need some governance structure, or you're just giving your money to some guy.
  - tosti 3mo ago
    And the complexity of the governance structure is related to the amount of money involved. The weirdest thing is when the money of a non-profit NGO exceeds roughly 10e6, the decisions made by upper management tend to make an inversionally proportionate amount of sense. Reason being, it's not their money to spend. Took me a while to figure this out but now it's everywhere.
CodesInChaos 3mo ago
I think German non profit organizations are required by law to have a certain level of governance structure.
- 3mo ago

cmrdporcupine 3mo ago

I had a project on there. The vote result was clearly already a foregone conclusion the moment it was announced. Any voices that even asked for clarification were shouted down on multiple forums. I had never joined as a formal community member to get involved in voting on there, but saw no point in doing so prior to the vote. The tone on external forums (Mastodon, etc.) was just brutal, and the discussion on the PR confined and curtailed. I've already been downvoted to oblivion and insulted galore on yesterday's thread for commenting on this so I don't have much energy for it today but I'll say this: Nobody can reasonably fault a community if they want to define their own limits and terms to engagement with their resources. They can legitimately be angry and frustrated if you do so retroactively and without clarity. I put a lot of work into moving onto Codeberg in the first place -- because I (thought I) shared their values. There was not a single note or concern about agentic tool use then, nor in the 10 months I was on there. Further the actual blog post that finally described the terms and how they will do enforcement came after the vote on the rather narrow clause in the PR. So, again, no, this is not a healthy democratic process. And then I had to put a lot of work into moving off. That's my time and energy and the energy of my contributors wasted and it's just strikes me as poor behaviour driven by a crowd with pitchforks that wants to wave them and had a priori defined an in and out group. ... But at least I had an LLM minion to help me with the moving off part.

Ferret7446 3mo ago
The problem with politically radical communities is that sooner or later you'll find yourself on the other side. "I didn't speak out because I wasn't X" and all that. I never liked codeberg because I saw the writing on the wall. GitHub is flawed, but it is at least more tolerant of dissenting values. You can both host anti AI and pro AI content side by side; imagine that!

throw1234567891 3mo ago

Sounds very disingenuous and manipulative in nature. Thanks for letting us know.