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

>As always, the most ethical thing to do is to just ignore any anti-LLM policies and not disclose anything

How does this have anything to do with ethics? Its their project not yours, they can reject your PR for whatever reason, including you using LLMs for developing that PR. Also they're not assuming autonomous agents submitting PRs. They're saying that they do not accept PRs where any part of the thinking process was outsourced to a LLM.

Even if you disagree with their opinion, the ethical thing to do is to not interact and move on. Not to try to sneak in your LLM assisted PRs without the maintainers consent.

On multiple occasions over the last months, I have been wishing the Zig/ZSF team would use LLMs. I've found many copy&paste errors that simply wouldn't exist if mundane tasks were delegated to a good LLM. It's even in the Zig community, I've seen PRs to some projects I'm interested in boosting how it was all human made, and containing all kinds of trivial logical errors that even the worst LLM would catch.

True.

I have worked during several decades in many companies, located in many countries, in a few continents, from startups to some of the biggest companies in their fields. Therefore I have seen many proprietary programs.

On average, proprietary programs are not better than open-source programs, but usually worse, because they are reviewed by fewer people and because frequently the programmers who write them may be stressed by having to meet unrealistic timelines for the projects.

The proprietary programs have greater quantity, not quality, by being written by a greater number of programmers working full-time on them, while much work on open-source projects is done in spare time by people occupied with something else.

Many proprietary programs can do things which cannot be done by open-source programs, but only because of access to documentation that is kept secret in the hope of preventing competition.

While lawyers, and other people who do not understand how research and development is really done, put a lot of weight in the so-called "intellectual property" of a company, which they believe to be embodied in things like the source code of proprietary programs or the design files for some hardware, the reality is that I have nowhere seen anything of substantial value in this so-called IP. Everywhere, what was really valuable in the know-how of the company was not the final implementation that could be read in some source code, but the knowledge about the many other solutions that had been tried before and they worked worse or not at all. This knowledge was too frequently not written down in any documentation. Knowing which are the dead ends is a great productivity boost for an experienced team, because any recent graduate could list many alternative ways of solving a problem, but most of them would not be the right choice in certain specific circumstances.

I did.

You have to be wilfully blind, then. It gets rather frequently praised on HN (as much as any niche language can be), and they certainly don't make black-and-white moral judgements often.