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The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
221–230 of 496 posts
Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#222I'm not sure how you could really take a stance on this. If someone used the tool to expedite work its unlikely you'd ever know it.
If you use the tool to yeah, go one shot a ton of garbage then it will in fact be garbage.
Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#223Earlier 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 think a lot of people who haven't given it more thought might see it as an arbitrary rule or even some kind of gatekeeping or discrimination. They haven't seen why people would want to not deal with the output.
This might not be helped by the fact that there are a lot of seemingly psychotic commenters attacking anything which might have touched an LLM or any generative model at some point. Their slur and expletive filled outbursts make every critical response look bad by vague association.
Having sensible explanations like in TFA for the rules and criticism clearly visible should help. But looking at other similar patterns, I'm not optimistic. And education isn't likely to happen since we're way past any eternal september.
Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of which are parts of the writing and thinking skillset, no?
Right. It can enhance that skillset. Are you suggesting it can’t? This wouldn’t be a plausible position.
Rather that avoiding delegating it to LLM for these tasks helps you practice that skill.
That said, I think it depends how you use it. You can learn from explanations, and you'd better avoid "rewrite this for me and do nothing else" kind of approach.
Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#225Earlier 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…
This mindset is fine (it's mine essentially too). But it absolutely has to be combined with verification/testing at the same speed as code production.
One-off tasks and parts of the stack that already have lots of disposable code do not need the same scrutiny as everything else. Just as there is a broad continuum of code importance, there is a broad continuum of testing requirements, and this was the case before AI. Keeping this in mind, AIs can also do some verification and testing, too.
Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
This mindset is fine (it's mine essentially too). But it absolutely has to be combined with verification/testing at the same speed as code production.
I generally do have that mindset, but over the past 1y of Claude code I do notice that I’m clearly losing my understanding of the internals of projects. I do review LLM generated code, understand it, no problem reading/following through. But then someone asks me a question, and I’m like… wait, I actually don’t know. I remember the instructions I gave and reviewing the code but don’t actually have a fine-details model…
I've had this issue too, and I feel it was an important lesson—kind of like the first time getting a hangover.
On the other hand, LLM-generated code comments better than I do, so given a long enough time horizon, it could be more understandable at a later time than code I've written myself (we've all had the experience of forgetting how things work).
Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#227Apparently, 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”.
People forget that LLM code cannot be covered by copyright. So LLM code cannot be placed under an open source license
Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't believe that even the weakened version of the argument works -- it is based on an assumption, not fact. Why would a contributor that uses AI assistance have fewer chances to be trusted? I'm not talking about AI slop, but a contributor that takes time to understand a problem, find a solution, and discuss pros/cons alternatives. Using LLM assistance, of course.
Because you are at the whims of the bot they are at least partially dependent on.
You could extend that argument to any tool used by the developer, like a linter, sanitizer, the IDE itself, or even auto-completion. Why target LLMs specifically?
The more I think about it, the more nonsensical it is. - What if I do everything by hand, but have an LLM review my work at the very end? - What if I have an LLM guide me through the codebase just by specifying the files I should read and in what order, but I do all the reading myself? - What if I do everything by hand, but then use an LLM to optimize a small part of an algorithm?
You can easily see how absurd it is to completely ban LLMs.
What matters is the quality and correctness of the contribution. Even with heavy LLM usage, unless the developer understands what problem they're solving, the quality will be sub-par.
Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”.
People forget that LLM code cannot be covered by copyright. So LLM code cannot be placed under an open source license
This is overstated. Not all LLM code is produced the same way. Code produced through substantial human creative input still falls under copyright, at least the way things are now. Besides, nothing legally prevents placing code under a license. Enforceability is the question, not permission.
It's a bit like saying speed limits don't apply on private property, therefore you can't have any traffic rules on your private racetrack.
Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#230Earlier 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…
"They may speed up the good programmers a little, but those people were able to program anyway without LLMs." I don't think this is realistic. I'm a good programmer, and it speeds up my work a lot , from "make sense of this 10 repo project I haven't worked on recently" to "for this next step I need a vpn multiplexer written in a language I don't use" to, yeah, "this 10k line patch lets me see parts of design space we…
> to "for this next step I need a vpn multiplexer written in a language I don't use"
but that acceleration is exactly because you're not good at that language