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.

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.

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.

1 - Where does vibe coding end and agent-assisted engineering start? Where's the line?

2 - How do you enforce this?

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

'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.

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

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.

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.

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/

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

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

Also see from Codeberg:

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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!

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.

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

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.

Hacker News has become a f*cking vibecoding community, the only post that agrees with the proposal has negative votes