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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

#181

Post by dgellow »

bvrmn wrote: post #173

The funny thing LLM's are amazingly good with writing in Zig. They could inspect stdlib source code to fix compatibility issues with newer compilers and quite prolific with idioms. For example I got a working application with minimal prompt like "I need an X11 tray icon app showing battery charge level". BTW result: https://github.com/baverman/battray/ Now I'm trying to implement a full taskbar to replace bmpanel2. R…

Also my experience. Though my actual ability to remember the language nuances and stdlib is suffering from this :(

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

#182

Post by dgellow »

jart wrote: 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…

> The same argument applies to open source itself. Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own

Because it takes hours/months/years of accumulated design decisions to get a great open source project. Something an AI agent can only approximate the surface of, unless you’re ready to spend a lot of time on it

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

#183

Post by brabel »

LaGrange wrote: post #169
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…

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.

You are talking about bad programmers who are at least able to fool their managers for at least several years. The people OP is talking about could not even do that and most likely would have dropped out in the first week trying to program full time since they just don’t have the aptitude and patience to get unblocked after their first compilation error. Now they can go very far with a LLM.

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

#184

Post by jcgrillo »

wallst07 wrote: post #153
feverzsj wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your employer allows/encourages this? Do you run that stuff in production? Would you mind telling us where you work so we can avoid using their products? It is just not possible to trust the software that emerges from the process you've described.

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

#185

Post by ToucanLoucan »

jcgrillo wrote: post #147
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…

LLMs are in this case enabling bad behavior, but open source software has always been vulnerable to this. Similarly, people who use LLMs to do this kind of thing are the kind of people who would have done it without LLMs but for the large effort it would have taken. We're just learning now how large that group is. This is a good thing, it's an opportunity to make open source development processes robust to this kind…

> LLMs are in this case enabling bad behavior

Yeah that seems to be their primary use case, if I'm honest. It's possible to use them ethically and responsibly, much in the same way it's possible to write one's own code, and more broadly, do one's own work. Most people however, especially in our current cultural moment and with the perverse incentives our systems have created, are not incentivized to be ethical or responsible: they are incentivized to produce the most code (or most writing, most emails, whatever), and get the widest exposure and attention, for the least effort.

Hence my position from the start: if you can't be bothered to create it, I'm not interested in consuming it.

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

#186

Post by amelius »

grokys wrote: post #157
chenzhekl wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where is the real bottleneck, if I may ask?

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

#187

Post by vehemenz »

hirako2000 wrote: post #175
discreteevent wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It says a lot that most readers can't distinguish good writing from something an LLM spat out. Ray Kroc's genius was to make people forget that you get what you pay for.

False equivalency. If you had the humility to run your own writing through an LLM first, it would have caught it. Just saying.

Not picking on you in particular, but most of the anti-AI crowd can’t present their case compellingly and have an utter lack of humility.

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

#188

Post by irishcoffee »

vga1 wrote: post #118
irishcoffee wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can AI possibly be better than “the best” when the corpus of training data now includes its own slop in addition to all the code by new devs/lazy devs/bad devs scattered all over the internet? Law of averages applies here.

Because LLM models are obviously much more than the sum of their parts.

Oh, which parts are those? Do tell!

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

#189

Post by 3form »

LaGrange wrote: post #169
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…

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.

I think worth noting that a more impactful and maybe even bigger proportion of those opportunists is in management.

Regarding quality overall, I agree, it's truly a cursed field. It was bad before; and with LLMs, going against that tide seems more difficult than ever.

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

#190

Post by fg137 »

slopinthebag wrote: post #36

Very convenient of Mr. Willison to omit the fact that Bun's upstream changes are total garbage and would not be upstreamed regardless of any policies, omitting LLM generated code or not, since they are, as a zig core team member articulated in a classier way, shite.

I have learned to take always Willison's words with a giant grain of salt, despite how popular those articles are here.
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