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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

#191

Post by 3form »

vehemenz wrote: post #161
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.

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.

All of which are parts of the writing and thinking skillset, no?

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

#192

Post by darkstarsys »

As a heavy AI-assisted open source code creator (and someone with 40+ years of dev experience), this seems wrong-headed to me. I think it is an excellent policy, as they say, to "value contributors over their contributions," but this policy excludes all potential contributors who use the latest tools. It will eventually doom zig to a smaller "artisanal" pool of contributors, rather than welcoming newbies and helping them become better open-source developers.

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

#193

Post by vehemenz »

3form wrote: post #191
vehemenz wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All of which are parts of the writing and thinking skillset, no?

Right. It can enhance that skillset. Are you suggesting it can’t?

This wouldn’t be a plausible position.

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

#194

Post by greggyb »

daishi55 wrote: post #155
lelanthran wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

That may be the case, but the bun project only needs zig to correctly compile bun. The zig project needs to be able to correctly compile all existing and possible zig programs.

I haven't reviewed things, but it's possible and even likely (at least based on my own experience with LLMs) that the validation is mostly focused on bun compilation.

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

#196

Post by mexicocitinluez »

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.

> If an AI improves developer productivity so much,

You're not suggesting the only metric of productivity is lines of code are you? And that the only benefit of using LLMs is for generating code you're too lazy to type yourself?

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

#198

Post by cindyllm »

shevy-java wrote: post #195

AI must die - don't let Skynet 7.0 win!!! (Ok ok I think we lost the fight already. I see soooooo many people using AI tools on github in the last ~2 weeks alone, claude in particular literally infiltrated everything there.)

[dead]

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

#199

Post by aniou »

vehemenz wrote: post #161
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.

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.

So - in that way - LLM will be Your mentor, it will shape Your way of thinking according to algorithms and datasets stuffed into by corporate creators.

Do You really want it?

There is also a second face of that: people are lazy. They wouldn't develop their own skills but rather they would off-load tasks to LLM-s, so their communicative abilities will be fade away.

That's looks like a strong dystopia for me.

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

#200

Post by mexicocitinluez »

tovej wrote: post #40
simonw wrote: 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…

An LLM most definitely cannot spit out robust tests or thorough documentation. It can spit out some tests or some documentation, but they will not cover the user perspective or edge cases unless those are already documented somewhere. That's verified by both experience and just thinking about it for two seconds. The sanding down you refer to is what generates those tests and documentation.

> but they will not cover the user perspective or edge cases unless those are already documented somewhere

Are you suggesting that LLM's can't test for people who use screen readers? Keyboard only users? Slow network requests?

You're acting like the issues an app faces are so bespoke to the actual app itself (and have absolutely no relation to existing problems in this space) that an LLM couldn't possibly cover it. And it's just patently wrong.

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