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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

#171

Post by MattDaEskimo »

kay_o wrote: post #115
discreteevent wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> However, there are lots of people in the world who live their whole life by vibing Why are they often so desperate to lie and non-consensually harass others with their vibing rather than be honest about it? Why do they think they are "helping" with hallucinated rubbish that can't even build? I use LLMs. It is not difficult to: ethically disclose your use, double check all of your work, ensure things compile without…

I wonder how many are account farming.

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

#172

Post by ZaoLahma »

0xpgm wrote: post #154
ZaoLahma wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm firmly in the LLM fanbase. Not because I can't type code (was doing it for over 17 years, everywhere from low level hardware drivers in C to web frontend to robot development at home as a hobby - coding is fun!), but because in my profession it allows me to focus more on the abstraction layer where "it matters". I'm not saying that I'm no longer dealing with code at all though. The way I work is interactively wit…

> Engineers who refuse to, or can't, or won't utilize the benefits that LLMs bring will be left behind. It's just the way it is. I'm already seeing it happening. Any examples how you see some engineers being left behind?

I'm starting to notice how those who don't use AI end up having to hand tasks over to people who can get them done quicker.

It is anecdotal for sure, but it's a pattern that seems to be emerging around me that expectations of velocity increases, and those who don't use AI can't keep up.

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

#173

Post by bvrmn »

The funny thing LLM's are amazingly good with writing in Zig. They could inspect stdlib source code to fix compatibility issues with newer compilers and quite prolific with idioms.

For example I got a working application with minimal prompt like "I need an X11 tray icon app showing battery charge level". BTW result: https://github.com/baverman/battray/

Now I'm trying to implement a full taskbar to replace bmpanel2. Results are very positive. I've got feature parity app in 1h with solid zig code.

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

#175

Post by hirako2000 »

discreteevent wrote: post #149
dakolli wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 This response 1000% was crafted with input from an LLM, or the user spends too much time reading output from llms.

I have never used an LLM to write. Writing forces me to think (and I edited the comment a couple of times when writing it which helped me clear up my thinking). "It's a viable way to live and sometimes it's the only way to live" is a personal realization that has taken me some time to understand. You can go back through my comment history to the time before LLMs to check if my style was different then.

It says a lot that most readers can't distinguish good writing from something an LLM spat out.

Ray Kroc's genius was to make people forget that you get what you pay for.

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

#176

Post by blenderob »

future_crew_fan wrote: post #174

Rule should be anti-fully-autonomous-PRs. (LLMs dont push bad code. People use LLMs to push bad code and DDoS the maintainers mental bandwidth)

Rule should be whatever the people running the project think the rule should be. If you've got your own project, do implement the anti-fully-autonomous-PRs rule for your project. But the creators of Zig do not owe you or me the rule we like.

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

#177

Post by dgellow »

> Zig values contributors over their contributions. Each contributor represents an investment by the Zig core team - the primary goal of reviewing and accepting PRs isn't to land new code, it's to help grow new contributors who can become trusted and prolific over time.

> LLM assistance breaks that completely. It doesn't matter if the LLM helps you submit a perfect PR to Zig

That’s the best rational I’ve seen so far, and fully support Zig decision here. I really appreciate their long term vision for both the community and actual project. I don’t think LLMs have such a great place in more collaborative efforts to be honest. Though we will see how things evolve, but I do see that when getting AI generated PRs I basically have to redo it myself (using LLMs, ironically… something I’m really starting to feel conflicted about)

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

#178

Post by jcgrillo »

LaGrange wrote: post #169
discreteevent wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For at least the last 3 decades programming was a field that rewarded utter mediocrity with (relatively to other fields) massive remuneration. It has been filled with opportunists for as long as I remember.

This is an excellent point. LLMs might merely be exposing and amplifying behaviors that were always there. This can be an opportunity, in that shining light on it may allow us to cleanse ourselves of it. It's fundamentally about integrity, and sadly it's becoming clearer how few possess it (if it ever wasn't!). But maybe we'll get better at measuring integrity, and make hiring/collaboration decisions based on it.

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

#179

Post by secondcoming »

pelasaco wrote: post #146
discreteevent wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. True, regardless of that, for sure with LLM we are borrowing Technical debt like never before.

"Claude, don't create any technical debt please"

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

#180

Post by dgellow »

bonzini wrote: post #12
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…

A single PR for a 3000-line addition would, in all likelihood, be rejected anyway.

Really depends the author and context. Large PRs are often justified for compiler work, you have a lot of pieces to touch at the same time
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