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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

#151

Post by ap99 »

ZaoLahma wrote: post #145
feverzsj wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much sums up the LLM fanbase.

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.

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

#152

Post by grokys »

My issue with AI-generated OSS contributions is:

If an AI improves developer productivity so much, why would maintainers of an OSS project want unknown contributors to sit in between the maintainer and the LLM? They'd be typing these queries into Claude Code themselves. To quote my colleague:

> We do not need a middleman to talk to AI models. We are not bottlenecked by coding.

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

#153

Post by wallst07 »

feverzsj wrote: post #93
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…

Pretty much sums up the LLM fanbase.

Fanbase, maybe. Software engineers using these projects? Probably forking and updating themselves.

FWIW, I've opened a half dozen PRs from LLMs and had them approved. I have some prompts I use to make them very difficult to tell they are AI.

However if it is a big anti-llm project I just fork and have agents rebase my changes.

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

#154

Post by 0xpgm »

ZaoLahma wrote: post #145
feverzsj wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much sums up the LLM fanbase.

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?

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

#155

Post by daishi55 »

lelanthran wrote: post #39
daishi55 wrote: post #31

Earlier 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”.

> What’s the point in debating the PR quality? Because the pro-group are whining that the policy is preventing the merge, when in actual fact even if the policy did not exist, the PR is crap anyway.

I don’t see how it could be that bad (incorrect, specifically), considering bun is probably the most widely-used production use case of zig. But regardless, let’s say it’s a bad PR for the sake of argument - it’s beside the point. It cannot be merged no matter how good it is, due to the strict no-LLM policy.

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

#156

Post by chenzhekl »

grokys wrote: post #152

My issue with AI-generated OSS contributions is: If an AI improves developer productivity so much, why would maintainers of an OSS project want unknown contributors to sit in between the maintainer and the LLM? They'd be typing these queries into Claude Code themselves. To quote my colleague: > We do not need a middleman to talk to AI models. We are not bottlenecked by coding.

maybe you are not bottlnecked by coding. but there is high probability that you will be bottlenecked by verifying the correctness of LLM-generated code.

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

#157

Post by grokys »

chenzhekl wrote: post #156
grokys wrote: post #152

My issue with AI-generated OSS contributions is: If an AI improves developer productivity so much, why would maintainers of an OSS project want unknown contributors to sit in between the maintainer and the LLM? They'd be typing these queries into Claude Code themselves. To quote my colleague: > We do not need a middleman to talk to AI models. We are not bottlenecked by coding.

maybe you are not bottlnecked by coding. but there is high probability that you will be bottlenecked by verifying the correctness of LLM-generated code.

That is indeed the point I was making.

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

#158

Post by jech »

adrian_b wrote: post #96
Antibabelic wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I promise you, "the code that institutions had been keeping to themselves" is not nearly as special or good as you are implying here.

True. I have worked during several decades in many companies, located in many countries, in a few continents, from startups to some of the biggest companies in their fields. Therefore I have seen many proprietary programs. On average, proprietary programs are not better than open-source programs, but usually worse, because they are reviewed by fewer people and because frequently the programmers who write them may be…

> On average, proprietary programs are not better than open-source programs, but usually worse, because they are reviewed by fewer people and because frequently the programmers who write them may be stressed by having to meet unrealistic timelines for the projects.

There's also the fact that when you write open-source code, you're writing for a friendly audience. I've often found myself writing the code, letting it rest for a few hours, then rewriting it so that it is easier to read. Sometimes, the code gets substantially rewritten before I push.

There's no cooling period when you write code during your 9-5 job: it works, it has the required test coverage, ship it and move on to the next task.

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

#159

Post by codeflo »

dakolli wrote: post #130
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…

> 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 don't get that impression at all. LLMs would have avoided the stylistic repetition of "live". Asking an LLM to reformulate the sentences you quoted yields this slop:

> There are a lot of people who go through life by vibing. And honestly: that’s not automatically “bad.” Sometimes it’s even the only workable way to get through things. The issue is that “vibe-first” people tend to have a pretty loose relationship with truth, rigor, and being pinned down by specifics. They’ll confidently move forward on what sounds right instead of what they can verify.

I'll finish this post with a sentence containing an em-dash -- just to confuse people -- and by remarking on how sad I find it that people latch onto dashes and complete sentences as the signifiers of LLM use, instead of the inconsistent logic and general sloppiness that's the actual problem.

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

#160

Post by cuu508 »

SuperV1234 wrote: post #144
cuu508 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please elaborate?

https://claude.ai/share/f38ee8a6-56f1-408a-a536-211eb34c7045 I mostly agree with the assessment. IMHO: hard, inflexible rules like these are always deeply rooted in biases and personal convictions, not in facts. The suggested policy amendment by Claude at the end is much more honest, logical, and palatable.

> The argument assumes that unassisted PR authorship is what builds trustworthy contributors, and that LLM assistance prevents that growth.

No, I don't think that was the argument. As I understood it, unassisted contributions have higher chances to grow a trusted contributor. Not 100% vs 0% chances, but statistically higher. So, given limited resources, it makes sense to prefer unassisted over assisted contributions.

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