Regarding Codeberg’s Anti-LLM Statement

After Codeberg’s latest statement I have decided to migrate off the platform and hereby retract my former endorsement of the it. They’ve officially made a large number of projects persona non grata, notably including projects written and maintained with heavy use of LLMs. This does not currently include me, but it covers at least one awesome project a close friend of mine has poured hundreds, probably thousands, of man-hours into that is starting to see real adoption. That project does not use Codeberg, admittedly, but it’s a matter of principle.

I do understand that there is a lot of worthless single- or zero-user slop going around that has no place on a git forge. But there are also plenty of projects where although much of the code is LLM-written, the architecture, documentation, testing and design decisions are the product of extensive, loving human labour. I use and contribute to such a project through testing and feature requests. Codeberg’s statement does no justice to such projects, which they hardly seem to acknowledge exist, because their ideological stance that LLMs are a net negative blinds them to the practicality that good software engineering may be done with them.

I do, also, stand on the opposite end of this ideological divide, by the way; I think LLMs are incredibly useful, and only getting cheaper, so I consider them a powerful tool for democratization. I personally do believe that LLMs at the level of the current frontier will soon be easily self-hosted, which is a load-bearing part of my beliefs. I think purpose-specific, one-off tools are good, actually; I certainly have always kept a lot of those around myself! I do agree that it is silly to put that stuff on a git forge, though, yes.

Today, for $0.35 GLM 5.2 did in 20 minutes what would’ve taken me at least two hours to do. Little more needs to be said. With a modest budget and a week of work, competent non-experts can now solve problems that just a few years ago would’ve taken them months of study or required them to hire an expensive expert. This enlarges the digital divide, cry the experts! Your single-use software endangers our convivial collaboration!

You are elitists, wanting to keep the rabble out. That is fine; the rabble produces crap – that’s what makes them the rabble! Your stuff is better, cooler – that’s what makes you the expert! Let us not pretend otherwise.

The statement feels obsessed with software. The humans in the story are vessels to “collaborate and improve software together”, to nurture an “ecosystem”, to protect “the FOSS commons” from pollution. To me this feels fetishistic, as though our purpose is to write ever better, ever more elegant software; detached from software’s nature as a tool, an extension of the person.

For me as a developer, one question shines bright within my heart; does this empower people, or disempower them? How can we empower people to make their computers do what they want, when they want, how they want? And that, you are free to argue over, disagree about; and yes, there is disruption, there is loss, there is cost. But please, let there be patience.

Your accursed vibe coders, most of them quite silly, I do agree, are just trying to build stuff, solve problems, have fun. Playing pretend, perhaps, wishing to be those that they admire. You treat them as little more than parasites.