Comment by consumer451
4 days ago
I am not well informed on this Codeberg story, but could this simply be a way for them to avoid some of the destructive loads that GitHub has been experiencing since "vibe coding" became a thing? Maybe the code origin purity test is just a way to explain it?
It appears to be just that:
> The vote follows ongoing efforts by Codeberg to prevent automated software (bots) from taxing its infrastructure with excessive network requests. Authors Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, Otto Richter, and William Zijl argue that AI companies are shifting costs to others and damaging online communities in the process.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/23/codeberg-gi...
(1) Cache the non logged-in pages. You can even host static pages in an unmetered way. They maintain their web service software. They should just do that. If an account is knocking over infra by scraping, ban the account. Make it slightly harder to sign up or something, if necessary.
(2) Vibe coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, Copilot and the grok thing all prefer local copies of a project to scraping web services. Why would a developer using LLMs be hammering their own codeberg site?
(3) If they are worried about AI companies shifting costs (What costs though? See point 1), they should block training scrapers, or - even better - offer a service that resells zero-log-retention / enclaved open-weight LLM inference. This cuts off the revenue stream to the AI companies, and probably lets codeberg skim a bit to expand their own services.
We used to use github at work. It was falling over well before cursor was a thing. Blaming AI for their 1-2 nines of availability is... questionable.
Yes, I am not trying to make any excuses for GitHub, however I recall one tweet that made my eyes bug-out:
> Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
> GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.
This had to spill over into Codeberg as well, right?
https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
https://xcancel.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
> Why would a developer using LLMs be hammering their own codeberg site?
Because a significant percentage of "developers using LLM" have no clue what they are doing?
They said vibe coded projects are consuming excessive CI resources
The Codeberg blog post does mention those costs, but also a lot of other objections they have to LLMs so not simply away to avoid the loads. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
This policy does not help them to avoid the load of LLM crawling (except insofar it reduces the amount of code they host). They could limit other excessive loads more directly - e.g. no pushes or pull requests to be made by LLMs, rate limits per contributor, etc.