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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

#121
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the best AI models are the same or better than the best[1] human developers, what then? We're already at the point talking about best vs. best.

If that happens and we have a way of reliably knowing if some code is produced to that high quality, then I think we probably can accept that AI coding is the only sensible option. We definitely are not close to that point though and it's unclear if/when we will get there.

It seems to me that people might be arguing from conflicting hidden premises here. "AI Coding" is a spectrum that could mean something as simple as letting the LLM proofread your changes and then act on those with your own human brain, or it could mean just telling the agent what you want and let it rip and tear until it is done.

If I do the latter and submit a PR to something like Zig, I'll be certainly caught doing it and rightfully chastised. If I do the former, my PR will be better without anybody besides myself having any way of knowing how it got better. Probably I do something in between when I contribute to open-source these days.

Blanket banning all of these seems like a bad idea to me. It actively gates people like myself from contributing, because I respect these people and projects that much. It feels like I would be doing something they find disgusting if my work has touched an LLM and I obviously don't want to do that to people I respect. But it's fine, there are plenty of things to do in the world even when some doors are closed.

I do not presume to have any say on Zig project's well argued decisions[0] -- I'm not really even their user let alone someone important like a contributor. Their point of preferring human contact is superb, frankly. Probably a different kind of problem in an open-source project staffed with a lot of remote working people, where human contact is scarce.

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

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

#122
post #22
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own? I've been thinking about this a bunch recently, and I've realized that the thing I value most in software now isn't robust tests or thorough documentation - an LLM can spit those out in a few minutes. It's usage. I want to use software which other people have used before me. I want them to have encountered the bugs and sharp edges and sanded…

I value software that reveals knowledge. The frontier LLMs were trained on all the code that institutions had been keeping to themselves. So they're revealing programing know-how on a scale that just wasn't possible with open source. LLMs are the ultimate Prometheus. Information is more accessible and useful now than it's ever been.

[deleted]

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

#123
post #11
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…

> Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own? I've been thinking about this a bunch recently, and I've realized that the thing I value most in software now isn't robust tests or thorough documentation - an LLM can spit those out in a few minutes. It's usage. I want to use software which other people have used before me. I want them to have encountered the bugs and sharp edges and sanded…

> an LLM can spit those out in a few minutes.

It may be able to spit out text that purports to be that, in a few minutes. But for most software, an LLM will not be able to spit out robust tests - let alone useful documentation. (And documentation which just replicates the parameter names and types is thorough...ly useless.)

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

#124

It's a good rationale. But it points the finger at a real bottleneck in open source development: the burden of manually reviewing contributions. And the need to automate that with AI as well. Reviews were already becoming a problem before AI. Lots of projects have been dealing with a large influx of contributions from inexperienced developers from all over the world looking to boost their CVs by increasing their Gith…

> the burden of manually reviewing contributions... [a]nd the need to automate that with AI as well.

I suggest we also automate the distribution and the use of software with AI as well, and then just all go to the beach and sip on some cocktails or something.

Or in other words: Good luck with that.

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

#125
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.

I wonder - has it been confirmed that no LLMs for PRs literally means no AI assistance for code?

While I haven't codified it anywhere, the policy I would like is for issues and PR descriptions to have no LLMs - there is no reason to ban code completely though IMO. I would say that would be pro human-communication and a stance I would like a lot.

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

#126
post #115

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…

"Main character energy". What they're really doing is protecting their view of themselves as smart, and they're making a contribution for the sake of trying to perform being an OSS dev rather than out of need or altruism.

AI is absolutely terrible for people like that, as it's the perfect enabler.

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

#127
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OTOH why bother to polish the PR if it won't get accepted anyway? As the Zig maintainer so patiently explained, no amount of "polish" can fix the PR because it is misaligned to the correctness that they require. IOW, that PR is so far off the reservation, unless it is completely rewritten, it won't be accepted.

it could have been rewritten, rewriting PRs is cheap today, but that isn't the question. the question is, would it have been accepted had it met all the quality and engineering standards and full disclosure that it was 90%+ LLM generated?

> it could have been rewritten, rewriting PRs is cheap today

Rewriting PRs with LLMs is cheap, but often the output is no better than the previous revision (fixing one issue only to cause another one is very common IME). And reviewing each revision of the PR is not cheap.

I've had good experiences with people submitting AI generated PRs who then actually take the time to understand what's going on and fix issues (either by hand or with a targeted LLM generated fix) that are brought up in review. But it's incredibly frustrating when you spend an hour reviewing something only to have someone throw your review comments directly back at the LLM and have it generate something new that requires another hour of review.

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

#128
Presumably this only applies to newcomers? The thrust of their policy is to nurture new contributors. Once one has established oneself as a meaningful contributor — which the Bun team surely must have done by now — then it doesn’t matter where the code came from.

…in theory. In reality, I’m sure a policy like this can’t be selective and fair at the same time. Pick one!

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

#130

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…

> 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.

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