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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

#131

Post by maccard »

vga1 wrote: post #49
omnimus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When somebody comments PR with “Incredible work, Jacob. It is an honor to call you my colleague.” then it's safe to assume it's out of the ordinary contribution. Pretty much falling outside of the “in all likelyhood”. 3000 line LLM commit is not that.

How would you differentiate a 3000 line LLM commit made by the best models and good AI processes from a 3000 line commit made by the best human developer? edit Okay, I set the bar too high here with "best human developer" and vague "good AI processes". My bad. Yes, LLM is not quite there yet.

The post that inspired this post [0] says:

> So while one could in theory be a valid contributor that makes use of LLMs, from the perspective of contributor poker it’s simply irrational for us to bet on LLM users while there’s a huge pool of other contributors that don’t present this risk factor.

> The people who remarked on how it’s impossible to know if a contribution comes from an LLM or not have completely missed the point of this policy and are clearly unaware of contributor poker.

The point isn't about the 3000 line PR, it's about do we think the submitter is going to stick around.

[0] https://kristoff.it/blog/contributor-poker-and-ai/

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

#133

Post by dakolli »

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…

LLMs really can't do as much as you people think they can.

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

#134

Post by bvan »

branko_d wrote: post #91

From https://kristoff.it/blog/contributor-poker-and-ai/ : "Unfortunately the reality of LLM-based contributions has been mostly negative for us, from an increase in background noise due to worthless drive-by PRs full of hallucinations (that wouldn’t even compile, let alone pass CI), to insane 10 thousand line long first time PRs. In-between we also received plenty of PRs that looked fine on the surface, some of which…

Fake it ‘till you make it. Seems like LLM’s have caught-on to that too.

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

#135

Post by dakolli »

kennykartman wrote: post #112
julenx wrote: post #47

The article explains Zig's stance in further detail, but the quoted part on its own caught my attention because my reading of it is rather "pro human communication" instead of "anti-AI".

They're banning all AI though, so it looks pretty much anti-AI to me.

Good, pro AI people produce poor quality in everything they do. They are the least creative and worst problem solvers. I don't want them near me or my work.

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

#137

Post by LAC-Tech »

discreteevent wrote: post #110
feverzsj wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much sums up the LLM fanbase.

I don't think it's the complete fanbase. However, there are lots of people in the world who live their whole life by vibing. It's a viable way to live and sometimes it's the only way to live. But they have a very loose relationship with truth and reason. Programming was a domain that filtered out those people because they found it hard to succeed at it. LLM's have changed that and it's a huge problem. It's hard to kn…

> It's hard to know if LLMs will end up being a net win for the industry. They may speed up the good programmers a little, but those people were able to program anyway without LLMs. They will speed up the bad programmers a lot and that's where the balance sheet goes into the red.

If you will forgive an appeal to authority:

The hard thing about building software is deciding what one wants to say, not saying it. No facilitation of expression can give more than marginal gains.

- Fred Brooks, 1986

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

#138

Post by SuperV1234 »

dakolli wrote: post #135
kennykartman wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're banning all AI though, so it looks pretty much anti-AI to me.

Good, pro AI people produce poor quality in everything they do. They are the least creative and worst problem solvers. I don't want them near me or my work.

[flagged]

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

#140

Post by nurettin »

branko_d wrote: post #91

From https://kristoff.it/blog/contributor-poker-and-ai/ : "Unfortunately the reality of LLM-based contributions has been mostly negative for us, from an increase in background noise due to worthless drive-by PRs full of hallucinations (that wouldn’t even compile, let alone pass CI), to insane 10 thousand line long first time PRs. In-between we also received plenty of PRs that looked fine on the surface, some of which…

You can curb an LLM into doing what you want. Unfortunately people don't have the patience or the skill.
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