Rule number one when vibe coding is not to take yourself or your code too seriously. If you do, it’s not vibe coding; it’s software development, or vibe engineering.
When it comes to licensing your slop code, we should first discuss whether it can even be licensed. But that is a complicated question, so let’s not worry about it.
To embrace this uncertainty about licensing, or whether the project works at all, we should not pick a boring licence like MIT or GPL, as it is unclear whether those can be applied. Instead, you should pick one of these.
Good Luck With That
Did you let the LLM do everything? You have no idea whether it works. Maybe it will delete all your files or blow something up. If so, this is a good licence to pick.
GLWT(Good Luck With That) Public License
Copyright (c) Everyone, except Author
Everyone is permitted to copy, distribute, modify, merge, sell, publish,
sublicense or whatever they want with this software but at their OWN RISK.
Preamble
The author has absolutely no clue what the code in this project does.
It might just work or not, there is no third option.
GOOD LUCK WITH THAT PUBLIC LICENSE
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION, AND MODIFICATION
0. You just DO WHATEVER YOU WANT TO as long as you NEVER LEAVE A
TRACE TO TRACK THE AUTHOR of the original product to blame for or hold
responsible.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER
DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
Good luck and Godspeed.
Passive Aggressive
Another one that is great for those projects you are not really sure are safe (sensing a theme here, are we?), but where you still want to claim ownership to pad your GitHub profile. This looks like the usual MIT licence, except it does not allow anyone to run, execute or use the software. So clearly they are at fault when it burns down their house for some reason. It was meant for looking at, not using. Duh.
Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies
of the Software, but NOT including the right to run, execute or use the
Software or any executable binaries built from the source code.
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE
Hot Potato Licence
And another one. This is also sneaky, but in a different way. It’s the licence for when you want the project to become someone else’s problem. Someone contributed a patch? Congrats, buddy. Now it’s your responsibility to triage all the AI slop PRs, at least until you accept one of them.
HOT POTATO LICENSE
Version 2, September 2021
All rights reserved by the last person to commit a change to this
repository, except for the right to commit changes to this repository,
which is hereby granted to all inhabitants of the Milky Way Galaxy for
the purpose of committing changes to this repository.
More
If you found these funny, I sincerely recommend checking out the lovely bad-licenses collection.