Comment by ricardobeat
2 days ago
A note to the developers in the project, if anyone is reading: your repositories are in violation of the new Codeberg policy that forbids AI-generated code [1].
[1] https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
It's self-hosted on https://code.overheid.nl/ & they mirror a subset of it on Codeberg.
That might still be in violation but I would imagine it's low on Codeberg's radar since they're not making primary contributions there (& if I were DAWO I'd also be interested in limiting direct community agentic contrib).
They have "migrated to codeberg" which is written in the repo itself.
However Codeberg actual "fuzzy" policy is less strict than "no LLM used ever".
And Codeberg also blocks real people from accessing it, for who knows what reason. I just get "Access denied." with no more info.
But they do let me visit blog.codeberg.org
They block some user-agents, maybe that's it?
From [1]
> We must regularly implement temporary security measures to ensure the availability of Codeberg's resources and prevent abuse.
> The 403 you have received is expected based on the UA.
From [2]
> What is the version of your chromium? AFAICT <=137 gets 403 Forbidden: [...] while >= 138 works ok: [...]
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/3084
[2] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/3078
Had that issue with HTTP accessed repo, switching to SSH solved it for me.
It’d make the most sense for the Dutch government (or DAWO) to have their own Forgejo instance if the goal is data sovereignty.
edit: looks like this was originally the case and then they moved?
They use both. https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK?q=dawo&sort=alphabetically as the official source, and https://codeberg.org/DAWO for the community parts.
clearly shows the need for federated forges, where you get to decide on your own rules but you still benefit from interacting with a broader set of collaborators.
That's likely to end up Balkanized like the fediverse, where every instance has a list of other instances they refuse to federate with, often because politics or petty drama. Though to be fair to the fediverse, sometimes it's because those other instances are full of child porn and most people just don't want to see that.
It amuses me that Mastodon Central uses corpo-friendly labels for the sites they won't federate with, e.g. (https://mastodon.social/about)
Whereas the more free-wheeling sites, like the ones Mastodon Central blocks, tell it exactly how it is: (https://tsundere.love/about)
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That's a recipe for drama as shown with mastodon when they got publicity few years ago
Yeah, waiting for this too, feels like the final piece of the puzzle. Tracking issue from Codeberg + more general information about the effort around the the ecosystem:
- https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/issues/59 ("[FEAT] implement federation")
- https://forgefed.org/
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We can insist everyone self-hosts everything, but is it worth it? Do you have your own email? It's quite normal for a government agency to contract a third party to supply e.g. furniture, instead of chopping its own wood.
But furniture is a one time sale, not an ongoing service. That's a bad comparison.
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Their instance is self hosted right, so this doesn't apply I think.
Codeberg does not forbid AI-generated code. It forbids AI-generated projects. You would know this if you read the policy.
The specific language is:
> projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools
And "mostly" here seems egregiously undefined to me
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...
implies for me >50% - instead of >0% as suggested by @ricardobeat
The hardest part of policy isn't coming up with smart policy, it's figuring out where and how to draw the lines.
As much as I hate vibe-coded "slop". I feel like this is idiotic. I and most good engs with decades of experience do use AI now to type nearly all the actual "code", but we read EVERY SINGLE line, always fix and rework every feature before a commit to make it clean, optimized, and de-slopified.
But still, we wouldn't be allowed to use codeberg because "generative ai" was used significantly for most lines of code?
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What do you think "mostly" could mean?
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> And "mostly" here seems egregiously undefined to me
and yet we seem to be convinced that English is the appropriate spec language of the modern times
Is it on Codeberg? I looked self-hosted to me.
https://code.overheid.nl/MinBZK/DAWO-NixOS says:
> DAWO Core has moved from https://code.overheid.nl to Codeberg to facilitate community collaboration.
Does this mean European governments have or will have an alternative(s) to GitHub as well?
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Codeberg is trying to solve the right problem with the wrong solution. But hey, it's democratic!
I like Codeberg's solution (hard written policy, light good-faith based enforcement), what would you suggest as a better solution?
Hard policy, light enforcement in practice means there is an actual shadow policy that you don't know, which is pretty bad to the point that it would be illegal if the government did it.
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Their contention seems mainly focused on the heavy resource use of AI tooling.
They run a service: they could impose limits on the number of submissions, builds, branches, scans, etc, and give additional usage credits to the large community projects they want to encourage.
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Every single issue they brought up in their blog post starts with even just 1% AI code. If they actually believed the absolutely absurd stuff they spew, banning it all would be the only logical solution.
The current solution solves none of the issues, AND pisses off most sane people (mostly because their arguments are fabrications). They dropped the cake and shit on it too.
I predict that Codeberg will soon realize that they have no choice but to loosen and allow AI generated code.
There is no point in being on the extreme end around banning all code generated by AI.
Regardless, there is AI generated code in many repositories on Codeberg anyway.
I've seen so much commentary on the apparent strictness & extreme nature of Codeberg's approach & no actual examples of it.
They have a strict policy (which many have rightly pointed out is impossible to fully enforce), & their "enforcement" has mostly relied on good faith contributions to date. They're also accounting for the fact the ToS change came without advance notice for many of their users who were already making active use of agents, hence there remains many AI repos (I have yet to hear of any removals).
To me that seems like the best approach one can hope for - a lax policy is a slippery slope (presuming dissuading AI contrib is your goal), & wouldn't satisfy their legal concerns (hosting code of questionable copyright status), & strict enforcement isn't viable in any case (especially at their scale), so this seems to me to be the best compromise.
I don't think they're banning all AI generated code, just projects that are primarily AI-generated. They'll probably also object to PRs that are entirely AI generated. Or at least they will when they become a problem.
I was looking at alternative hosting for some of my projects that are going to be opensource. I've heavily used AI to speed up dev (I've been a software developer for about 20 years now) and it was quite disappointing to see that they made that decision.
AI generated code is allowed on Codeberg, but not if it's mostly ai generated
It may be more a measure against explosive growth than being anti-AI in principle.
This is less about the code and more about load. It's community funded so allowing agents to willy nilly push and pull will be very expensive.
Banning AI generated content works just fine, and arguing otherwise is nothing short of FOMO.
As a random example, AI generated content is banned from the /r/ProgrammingLanguages subreddit and any regular visitor that _isn't_ suffering from AI psychosis/FOMO will tell you it's for the better. In general it's not that difficult to moderate for it either as AI built projects consistently contain the same patterns _over and over_ such that 98% is easily detected.
People who act out of ideology very very rarely change their opinions.
They can however lose the means to enforce their opinions on others to the point those opinions don't matter.
> I predict that Codeberg will soon realize that they have no choice but to loosen and allow AI generated code.
I predict that eventually people will read the linked blog post and realize Codeberg already allows AI generated code. But this requires reading and nuance of course, which is hard to come by sometimes, so I guess we'll continue see misinformed comments like this until eventually the web is only autonomous agents.
It doesn't really. It allows it in very limited context which has overlap with other existing tools that predate AI.
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Did you read the actual policy? It isn't extreme in the slightest.
It's stricter than Debian's, which is one of the most conservative Linux distros out there.
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Fair note, but I'd avoid the cheap shot "more open". You'll just bring up the old flame wars about whether the MIT-style or GNU-style licenses are more open.
The same applies here, is it really "more open" to allow corporations to profit by removing the openness of your work?
Point taken, trimmed that. I do take issue with their position but not the place to start a new discussion.
Did you actually read through that post you linked? You realize not every project that was ever touched by a LLM is being thrown off? Read the "Some early, but informal guidelines" particularly, as you've seemingly missed that.
They're targeting slop and essentially spam, not everything that could possibly have been built by LLMs.
Quoting from the post:
All of the commits I browsed here seem to be LLM-assisted, so these projects are in this category. The policy being fuzzy is in itself a problem - "likely to be tolerated" is not a great policy to have your entire government depend on.
Personally, the refusal on "Projects heavily tied to the LLM ecosystem, e.g. LLM-written tools to ease LLM usage" is enough reason, as that's a good chunk of what I've been working on.
> "enough reason for me to move out"
And that's not a bad thing. That's why they are communicating, so if you feel that is you and you're uncomfortable about it, you can move out and it's a win win.
Not everything should service all of us, especially not the smaller services. It's OK for places to have their own rules and them being upfront about this is a *good* thing.
> The policy being fuzzy is in itself a problem
No, the policy being fuzzy is a feature, because they're not 100% against all LLM usage, they're against slop and AI-spam, which is what they're trying to combat.
Laws are fuzzy, and we're doing mostly fine with this, of course there are edge-cases. But that's exactly why laws are fuzzy in the first place.
If you have a "automated software factory" or whatever the vibe-coders are up to today, then yes, Codeberg is probably not for you. But if you sit with a agent TUI in one tab, review things closely and don't just "throw code over the wall" without reviewing it, you have nothing to worry about with hosting code on Codeberg.
Not OP, but I stand corrected. Thought it was 100% no generated code. Now I know better, thanks! Looks like codeberg aren't as mad as I thought.
In the future, consider reading a policy before complaining about it.
hahaha
Codeberg are going to have issues in the future when all code is AI generated (except for artisanal code of course, written for the love of the craft but not to achieve anything of merit).
>but not to achieve anything of merit
Educating oneself to provide better quality of work still requires writing code by hand, and by extend is an achievement of merit.
Assuming writing code by hand is slower (which I agree with), why can't it still have merit compared to code written via llm harness?
Because no one is going to hire developers who write code by hand, apart from a few niches. For the same reason that no one hires a courier who delivers by horse anymore, or a miller who uses windmills to grind their grain, or a cooper who continues to use wooden staves and iron hoops instead of forming plastic or metal containers, or...
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Policies are enacted for current reality, not fantasy futures. If your magical fantasy becomes reality (it won't), they can just... change their policy. Of course, you aren't thinking about practical effects of policies on platforms, only on how it's an insult to your LLM-bro way of life.
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