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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

#161

Post by vehemenz »

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.

If you run your writing through an LLM, it can poke holes in your argument, organize your ideas better, or point out that your tone is hostile/dismissive. It doesn’t need to be a replacement for writing or thinking, especially if you’re learning along the way.

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

#162

Post by toofy »

automatic6131 wrote: post #120
kay_o wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Why do they think they are "helping" with hallucinated rubbish that can't even build? Because they can't tell the difference between what the machine is outputting, and what people have built. All they see is the superficial resemblance (long lines of incomprehensbile code) and the reward that the people writing the code have got, and want that reward too.

the target audience of the cyber typer terminal [0]

[0] https://hackertyper.net/

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

#163

Post by dannyw »

sesm wrote: post #143
nurettin wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can curb an LLM into doing what you want. Unfortunately people don't have the patience or the skill.

People who have skill can do the same without LLMs, maybe slightly slower on average but on more predictable schedule.

I wouldn’t say slightly slower; LLMs are massively useful for software engineering in the right hands.

For some personal projects I still stick to the basics and write everything by hand though. It’s kinda nice and grounding; and almost feels like a detox.

For any new software engineer, I’m a strong advocate of zero LLM use (except maybe as a stack overflow alternative) for your first few months.

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

#164

Post by dgellow »

ap99 wrote: post #151
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…

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 of the actual implementation crystallized in my mind, I need to check, was that thing implemented the way I thought it was or not? Wait, it’s actually wrong/not matching at all what I thought! It’s definitely becoming uncomfortable and makes me reconsider my use of Claude code pretty significantly

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

#165

Post by dgellow »

nurettin wrote: post #140
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…

You can curb an LLM into doing what you want. Unfortunately people don't have the patience or the skill.

The chat UX with a fake-human lying to you and framing things emotionally really doesn’t help. And it is pretty much not possible to get away from it, or at least I haven’t found yet how.

I would love to see a model trained to behave way more like a tool instead of auto-completing from Reddit language patterns…

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

#166

Post by Planktonne »

discreteevent wrote: post #110
feverzsj wrote: post #93

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…

> Programming was a domain that filtered out those people because they found it hard to succeed at it.

I think this is a very rosy view of programmers, not borne out by history. The people leading the vibe coding charge are programmers, rather than an external group.

I know it's popular to divide the world into the technically-literate and the credulous, but in this case the technical camp is also the one going all in.

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

#167

Post by xyzal »

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?

Probably in cognitive surrender. I have one such colleague and he is driving me crazy. "Claude sad that ..."

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

#168

Post by frumiousirc »

lccerina wrote: post #101

It seems that Zig people are following the path of ZeroMQ [1]: "To enforce collective ownership of the project, which increases economic incentive to Contributors and reduces the risk of hijack by hostile entities." A healthy contributor community is more important than mere code performance, quantity of features or lines of code, etc.. [1] https://zguide.zeromq.org/docs/chapter6

Unfortunately, those are largely words of a foregone era. The zeromq "community" today is tenuous. It has some really good people in it, the few that remain active, but the human-level processes and communication channels are ill defined and not well "staffed". In some ways, this lack of human activity and interactivity is perhaps okay and even justified given how stable libzmq and most of its bindings are (and the sub-ecosystem around particular bindings are a bit more active). Perhaps Hintjens' grand (and excellent, imo) vision got zeromq to where it is but the project feels to have gone adrift since we lost him. Somewhat ironic to his community-centric vision statement (the guide) it seems a project needs a charismatic and active leader to gain and retain a community. I guess that says more about human nature than it does about software development.

I'm not sure how to tie this all back to the zig story other than to point out the stated premise that zig is not short of PRs and so they can pre-select for no-LLM contributions. I think that is a good move for them and I get the "contributor poker" idea. But, the game changes when the premise breaks and the flow of newbies reduces to a trickle. At that point, if there are still active zig people who still want newbies, they may need to broaden their net. But if/when that happens, it may be too late to recover by opening to LLM-assisted contributions.

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

#169

Post by LaGrange »

discreteevent wrote: post #110
feverzsj wrote: post #93

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…

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.

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

#170

Post by SuperV1234 »

cuu508 wrote: post #160
SuperV1234 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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