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The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy

simonwillison.net

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Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy

#31

Post by daishi55 »

hitekker wrote: post #8

Apparently, the noise around the AI policy came from Bun's developers saying that policy blocks upstreaming their performance PR. But the real reason seems to be that PR's code itself isn't in great shape, and introduces unhealthy complexity https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-s-zig-fork-got-4x-faster-compilatio... > Parallel semantic analysis has been an explicitly planned feature of the Zig compiler for a long time, and it ha…

What’s the point in debating the PR quality? The policy explicitly forbids all LLM code, so that policy is of course the “real reason”.

Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy

#32

Post by jillesvangurp »

It's a good rationale. But it points the finger at a real bottleneck in open source development: the burden of manually reviewing contributions. And the need to automate that with AI as well. Reviews were already becoming a problem before AI. Lots of projects have been dealing with a large influx of contributions from inexperienced developers from all over the world looking to boost their CVs by increasing their Github statistics. It's the same dynamic that destroyed Stackoverflow. Which, thanks to AI has been largely sidelined now. And now that AI is there, those same inexperienced developers are using that at scale to generate even more garbage contributions.

Doing manual reviews of everything is very labor intensive and not scalable. However, AIs are pretty good at doing code reviews and verifying adherence to guard rails, contributor guidelines, and other rules. It's not perfect, but it's an underused tool. Both by reviewers and contributors. If your contribution obviously doesn't comply with the guidelines, it should be rejected automatically. The word "obviously" here translates into "easy to detect with some AI system".

Projects should be using a lot of scrutiny for contributions by new contributors. And most of that scrutiny should be automated. They should reserve their attention for things that make it past automated checks for contribution quality, contributor reputability, adherence to whatever rules are in place, etc. Reputability is a good way to ensure that contributions from reputable sources get priority. If your reputation is not great, you should expect more scrutiny and a lower priority.

Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy

#33

Post by chromacity »

jart wrote: post #3

> This makes a lot of sense to me. It relates to an idea I've seen circulating elsewhere: if a PR was mostly written by an LLM, why should a project maintainer spend time reviewing and discussing that PR as opposed to firing up their own LLM to solve the same problem? The same argument applies to open source itself. Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own? It's especially true if the…

I remember hearing the same arguments in the early 2010s, when the "3D printing revolution" was just around the corner. Why would anyone buy anything anymore if you can download a model and print it in the privacy of your home? And make it infinitely customizable?

The whole point of having a civilization is that most things in life can be made someone else's problem and you can focus on doing one thing well. If I'm a dentist or if I run a muffler shop, there are only so many hours in a day, so I'd probably rather pay a SaaS vendor than learn vibecoding and then be stuck supervising a weird, high-maintenance underling that may or may not build me the app with the features I need (and that I might not be able to articulate clearly). There are exceptions, but they're just that, exceptions. If a vendor is reasonable and makes a competent product, I'll gladly pay.

The same goes for open source... even if an LLM could reliably create a brand new operating system from scratch, would I really want it to? I don't want to maintain an OS. I don't want to be in charge of someone who maintains an OS. I don't necessarily trust myself to have a coherent vision for an OS in the first place!

Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy

#35

Post by lelanthran »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #7
jwzxgo wrote: post #2

[dead]

> unless it's coming from a known and trusted developer. That's exactly the sketchy part here. They turned down known, working and tested, code that came from a partner (bun) due to this policy. Code that 4x'd compile speed. A general ban makes sense based on their rationalization ("contributor poker"[0]). A total and inflexible ban can lead to a worse outcome for everyone though. If a senior, experienced, contributo…

> That's exactly the sketchy part here. They turned down known, working and tested, code that came from a partner (bun) due to this policy. Code that 4x'd compile speed.

No; they turned it down because the vibe-coded PR was crap.

> The rewritten type resolution semantics were designed to avoid these issues, but Bun’s Zig fork does not incorporate the changes (and has not otherwise solved the design problems), which means their parallelized semantic analysis implementation will exhibit non-deterministic behavior. That’s pretty much a non-starter for most serious developers: you don’t want your compilation to randomly fail with a nonsense error 30% of the time.

Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy

#36

Post by slopinthebag »

Very convenient of Mr. Willison to omit the fact that Bun's upstream changes are total garbage and would not be upstreamed regardless of any policies, omitting LLM generated code or not, since they are, as a zig core team member articulated in a classier way, shite.

Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy

#37

Post by jillesvangurp »

jart wrote: post #3

> This makes a lot of sense to me. It relates to an idea I've seen circulating elsewhere: if a PR was mostly written by an LLM, why should a project maintainer spend time reviewing and discussing that PR as opposed to firing up their own LLM to solve the same problem? The same argument applies to open source itself. Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own? It's especially true if the…

I've been seeing a drop in PRs against my repositories. I have a couple of repositories with around a hundred stars. Nothing spectacular but they were getting occasional PRs until last year. This year I've had almost none so far. My theory is that LLMs prefer sticking to mainstream projects. And since lots of developers are now leaning heavily on LLMs, they are biased to ignoring most of what I provide.

And you indeed get a lot of wheel reinvention by LLMs because that is now cheap to do. So rather than using some obscure thing on Github (like my stuff), it's easier to just generate what you need. I've noticed this with my own choices in dependencies as well. I tend to just go with what the LLM suggests unless I have a very good reason not to.

Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy

#39

Post by lelanthran »

daishi55 wrote: post #31
hitekker wrote: post #8

Apparently, the noise around the AI policy came from Bun's developers saying that policy blocks upstreaming their performance PR. But the real reason seems to be that PR's code itself isn't in great shape, and introduces unhealthy complexity https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-s-zig-fork-got-4x-faster-compilatio... > Parallel semantic analysis has been an explicitly planned feature of the Zig compiler for a long time, and it ha…

What’s the point in debating the PR quality? The policy explicitly forbids all LLM code, so that policy is of course the “real reason”.

> What’s the point in debating the PR quality?

Because the pro-group are whining that the policy is preventing the merge, when in actual fact even if the policy did not exist, the PR is crap anyway.

Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy

#40

Post by tovej »

simonw wrote: post #11
jart wrote: post #3

> This makes a lot of sense to me. It relates to an idea I've seen circulating elsewhere: if a PR was mostly written by an LLM, why should a project maintainer spend time reviewing and discussing that PR as opposed to firing up their own LLM to solve the same problem? The same argument applies to open source itself. Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own? It's especially true if the…

> Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own? I've been thinking about this a bunch recently, and I've realized that the thing I value most in software now isn't robust tests or thorough documentation - an LLM can spit those out in a few minutes. It's usage. I want to use software which other people have used before me. I want them to have encountered the bugs and sharp edges and sanded…

An LLM most definitely cannot spit out robust tests or thorough documentation. It can spit out some tests or some documentation, but they will not cover the user perspective or edge cases unless those are already documented somewhere. That's verified by both experience and just thinking about it for two seconds.

The sanding down you refer to is what generates those tests and documentation.

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