4 ms·

Proposal to prohibit vibe coded projects from being hosted on Sourcehut

35 points by surprisetalk 2mo ago

sscaryterry 2mo ago
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.
- voakbasda 2mo ago
  Social coding has been dying for a while. I see it as a direct consequence of broadly decreasing levels of trust across society.
  - websap 2mo ago
    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.
- acedTrex 2mo ago
  "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.
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
  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.
ydlr 2mo ago
"Protected by go-away" so I went away.
- g-b-r 2mo ago
  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)
  - mplanchard 2mo ago
    It took a pretty long time for me (like 15 seconds)
boxed 2mo ago
> 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!
- a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
  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?
  - boxed 2mo ago
    New projects aren't just ripoffs of open source projects. And in the case it is, a lot of open source projects are mostly ripoffs of commercial projects, which are ripoffs of older (now non-existent) commercial projects. It's ripoffs all the way down. But like.. the idea that it's "most" of the usage is absolutely absurd on its face.
websap 2mo ago
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.
- cautiouscat 2mo ago
  I don’t think their concern is “vibecode = bad” but more like they can’t handle the volume.
  - chinathrow 2mo ago
    > 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?
    - acedTrex 2mo ago
      "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
      - atmanactive 2mo ago
        There are other ways to slow the traffic down.
        acedTrex 2mo ago
        Sure there are other ways to do this same thing, they picked this option. Not particularly noteworthy of a thing
      - warkdarrior 2mo ago
jmclnx 2mo ago
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.
acedTrex 2mo ago
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.
jorisw 2mo ago
1 - Where does vibe coding end and agent-assisted engineering start? Where's the line? 2 - How do you enforce this?
- serial_dev 2mo ago
  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".
  - piloto_ciego 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    - orwin 2mo ago
      > These folks aren't ok And people who feel entitled to free compute/storage are way worse.
      - piloto_ciego 2mo ago
        <rolls eyes>
      - yjftsjthsd-h 2mo ago
        Sourcehut isn't a free service.
    - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
      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.
colesantiago 2mo ago
Also see from Codeberg: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html 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 https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware
arjie 2mo ago
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.
- hiAndrewQuinn 2mo ago
  Same here, thought it was Mullvad at first causing issues but I guess it's more common than that
cautiouscat 2mo ago
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.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2mo ago
  > 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?
  - cautiouscat 2mo ago
    Sometimes, but definitely not to the same volume.
gortok 2mo ago
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.
seviu 2mo ago
'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.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2mo ago
  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.
  - g-b-r 2mo ago
    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.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2mo ago
      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.
      - g-b-r 2mo ago
        NIH? Anyhow you kind of cause more use of AI also if it seems that everyone is using it, and thus you should adopt it too. And nothing actually prevents a vibecoder to clone a repository on SourceHut, they just would be less able to add a ton of crap to it and spit it back on SourceHut (they'll just spit it back on GitHub).
        yjftsjthsd-h 2mo ago
Zenul_Abidin 2mo ago
This is silly. It would destroy traffic to their site significantly
dpmartinez 2mo ago
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/ https://drewdevault.com/blog/AI-in-Linux/ (2.) https://drewdevault.com/blog/Forking-vim/ https://drewdevault.com/blog/Forking-vim/
- orwin 2mo ago
  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'.
dec0dedab0de 2mo ago
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.
LoganDark 2mo ago
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.
- iamnothere 2mo ago
  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.
  - LoganDark 2mo ago
    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.
    - iamnothere 2mo ago
      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.
unsungNovelty 2mo ago
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.
warkdarrior 2mo ago
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.
neilv 2mo ago
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?
- piloto_ciego 2mo ago
  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.
  - orwin 2mo ago
    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
    - piloto_ciego 2mo ago
      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.
      - orwin 2mo ago
        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.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo ago
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
VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago
This is fantastic. We need more of this. If you want garbage code, GitHub is the place for you.
g-b-r 2mo ago
[flagged]
dogleash 2mo ago
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.
- iamnothere 2mo ago
  It’s general purpose except for what the BDFL (Drew) takes a dislike to, with a veneer of consulting the community. Sourcehut is a rare case of a BDFL-led project making horrible missteps. 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, even after his attacks on RMS, 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.
danirod 2mo ago
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.
- mplanchard 2mo ago
  I don’t vibe code, or use AI much when programming, but if I want to experiment with it, I’d like to be able to track my code in the code hosting service I’m paying for, without my repos being subjected to arbitrary scrutiny or ideological purity tests. It would be different if we were talking about a service I did not pay for: in that case, they can do whatever they like, and I have little to no right to complain.

35 points by surprisetalk 2mo ago

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.

voakbasda 2mo ago
Social coding has been dying for a while. I see it as a direct consequence of broadly decreasing levels of trust across society.
- websap 2mo ago
  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.
acedTrex 2mo ago
"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.
a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
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.

ydlr 2mo ago

"Protected by go-away" so I went away.

g-b-r 2mo ago
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)
- mplanchard 2mo ago
  It took a pretty long time for me (like 15 seconds)

boxed 2mo ago

> 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!

a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
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?
- boxed 2mo ago
  New projects aren't just ripoffs of open source projects. And in the case it is, a lot of open source projects are mostly ripoffs of commercial projects, which are ripoffs of older (now non-existent) commercial projects. It's ripoffs all the way down. But like.. the idea that it's "most" of the usage is absolutely absurd on its face.

websap 2mo ago

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.

cautiouscat 2mo ago
I don’t think their concern is “vibecode = bad” but more like they can’t handle the volume.
- chinathrow 2mo ago
  > 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?
  - acedTrex 2mo ago
    "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
    - atmanactive 2mo ago
      There are other ways to slow the traffic down.
      - acedTrex 2mo ago
        Sure there are other ways to do this same thing, they picked this option. Not particularly noteworthy of a thing
    - warkdarrior 2mo ago

jmclnx 2mo ago

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.

acedTrex 2mo ago

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.

jorisw 2mo ago

1 - Where does vibe coding end and agent-assisted engineering start? Where's the line? 2 - How do you enforce this?

serial_dev 2mo ago
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".
- piloto_ciego 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - orwin 2mo ago
    > These folks aren't ok And people who feel entitled to free compute/storage are way worse.
    - piloto_ciego 2mo ago
      <rolls eyes>
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2mo ago
      Sourcehut isn't a free service.
  - a2ff6eeb0 2mo ago
    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.

colesantiago 2mo ago

Also see from Codeberg: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html 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 https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware

arjie 2mo ago

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.

hiAndrewQuinn 2mo ago
Same here, thought it was Mullvad at first causing issues but I guess it's more common than that

cautiouscat 2mo ago

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.

yjftsjthsd-h 2mo ago
> 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?
- cautiouscat 2mo ago
  Sometimes, but definitely not to the same volume.

gortok 2mo ago

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.

seviu 2mo ago

'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.

yjftsjthsd-h 2mo ago
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.
- g-b-r 2mo ago
  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.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2mo ago
    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.
    - g-b-r 2mo ago
      NIH? Anyhow you kind of cause more use of AI also if it seems that everyone is using it, and thus you should adopt it too. And nothing actually prevents a vibecoder to clone a repository on SourceHut, they just would be less able to add a ton of crap to it and spit it back on SourceHut (they'll just spit it back on GitHub).
      - yjftsjthsd-h 2mo ago

Zenul_Abidin 2mo ago

This is silly. It would destroy traffic to their site significantly

dpmartinez 2mo ago

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/ https://drewdevault.com/blog/AI-in-Linux/ (2.) https://drewdevault.com/blog/Forking-vim/ https://drewdevault.com/blog/Forking-vim/

orwin 2mo ago
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'.

dec0dedab0de 2mo ago

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.

LoganDark 2mo ago

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.

iamnothere 2mo ago
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.
- LoganDark 2mo ago
  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.
  - iamnothere 2mo ago
    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.

unsungNovelty 2mo ago

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.

warkdarrior 2mo ago

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.

neilv 2mo ago

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?

piloto_ciego 2mo ago
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.
- orwin 2mo ago
  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
  - piloto_ciego 2mo ago
    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.
    - orwin 2mo ago
      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.

deleted 2mo ago

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1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo ago

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

VCFundedGenYer 2mo ago

This is fantastic. We need more of this. If you want garbage code, GitHub is the place for you.

g-b-r 2mo ago

[flagged]

dogleash 2mo ago

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.

iamnothere 2mo ago
It’s general purpose except for what the BDFL (Drew) takes a dislike to, with a veneer of consulting the community. Sourcehut is a rare case of a BDFL-led project making horrible missteps. 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, even after his attacks on RMS, 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.

danirod 2mo ago

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.

mplanchard 2mo ago
I don’t vibe code, or use AI much when programming, but if I want to experiment with it, I’d like to be able to track my code in the code hosting service I’m paying for, without my repos being subjected to arbitrary scrutiny or ideological purity tests. It would be different if we were talking about a service I did not pay for: in that case, they can do whatever they like, and I have little to no right to complain.