The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
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The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
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Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#2[dead]
Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#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 open source project was vibe coded. AI and technology in general makes personalization cheap and affordable. Whereas earlier you had to use something that was mass produced to be satisfactory for everyone, now you have the hope of getting something that's outstanding for just you. It also stimulates the labor economy, because you have lots of people everywhere reinventing open source projects with their LLMs.
Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#4[deleted]
Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#5No human should trust any bullshit made by bullshit machine.
Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#6> 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…
That only holds true for the smallest tier of open source projects. Past a certain point of complexity, it's unlikely you can expect the robot to read your mind well enough to provide something of high quality and 'outstanding for just you'.
The Zig project is certainly far beyond such capability.
Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#7[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, contributor vouches for the code it shouldn't matter if they hand crafted it on stone tablets, generated it with yarrow sticks, or used gpt-3.
Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#8Apparently, 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 has heavily influenced the design of the self-hosted Zig compiler. However, implementing this feature correctly has implications not only for the compiler implementation, but for the Zig language itself! Therefore, to implement this feature without an avalanche of bugs and inconsistencies, we need to make language changes.
Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#9[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…
Re: The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
#10One reason I love writing production code in Ur/Web is that LLMs are incapable of synthesising something even remotely resembling it. Keeps me on my toes.
I think this is a great policy by the Zig team.