The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by PunchyHamster » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:32 PM UTC

vga1 wrote: post #49

omnimus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When somebody comments PR with “Incredible work, Jacob. It is an honor to call you my colleague.” then it's safe to assume it's out of the ordinary contribution. Pretty much falling outside of the “in all likelyhood”. 3000 line LLM commit is not that.

How would you differentiate a 3000 line LLM commit made by the best models and good AI processes from a 3000 line commit made by the best human developer? edit Okay, I set the bar too high here with "best human developer" and vague "good AI processes". My bad. Yes, LLM is not quite there yet.

It seems to be trivially easy for everyone but people heavily invested into LLM to spot LLM slop

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

#232

Post by redsocksfan45 » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:33 PM UTC

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.

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

#233

Post by redsocksfan45 » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:35 PM UTC

jcgrillo wrote: post #184

wallst07 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#234

Post by eschaton » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

bfrog wrote: post #222

I'm not sure how you could really take a stance on this. If someone used the tool to expedite work its unlikely you'd ever know it. If you use the tool to yeah, go one shot a ton of garbage then it will in fact be garbage.

It requires the people contributing the work to have the integrity to actually follow the project’s rules. It’s not OK to violate the project’s rules just because you don’t think you’ll be found out as a filthy fucking liar.

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

#235

Post by zzzeek » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:38 PM UTC

the best PRs I get are from more senior level people who are at work, hit a specific problem they had, and wanted to help out the project with a good PR. Then you never hear from them again because, of course, they're busy!

When you have junior people come in with PRs and you do the whole hand-holding thing so they learn and grow and all that, they're there because my project is famous, they want to get credit (which I give them), then they're off to get jobs whereever and they are working with completely different technologies, and you never hear from them again either, because, of course, they're now busy!

Really, outside of my core group of hangers-on, Claude is the only contributor we have that doesn't leave us.

> 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?

well yeah. I almost use PRs now just as a lazy means of issue prioritization. I'd love if github had more fine-grained controls to disable PRs but allow occasional contributors in (they don't).

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

#236

Post by gus_massa » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:41 PM UTC

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.

I'm almost not using AI, but a possible scenario is that the contributor spend like 20 hours in total.

Something like using the AI to get an initial bad version, make some tweaks to the prompt, make some manual fixes, ask the AI to fox something else, noticing some new related feature and asking the AI to add it, making some benchmarks and deciding to remove a small feature, or perhaps deciding between two similar implementations, add a few more manual fixes here and there, run the extended version of the automatic test and find a weird bug in the unusual setup, make a few fixes with the AI and manually. So after 20 hours of work, the final version has only 50 lines that have been rewriten like 5 times each. Now the mantainer can review only the final version in 1 hour or so.

This is very different to spending 5 minutes asking the AI to write a patch, that has 1000 lines that does not even compile and sending it to the maintainer without looking at it.

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

#237

Post by toddmerrill » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:47 PM UTC

dgellow wrote: post #164

ap99 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Same experience. I've been writing code for many decades, but that experience doesn't mean I can remember what I read when reviewing generated code. I write small, focused commits, but I have to take a day off each week to make changes by hand just to mentally keep up with my own codeset knowledge, and I still find structures that surprise me. It's not necessarily that the code quality is poor, but it's not like I (thought) I had designed it. It's lead to a weakening of my confidence when adding to or changing existing architecture.

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

#238

Post by simonw » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #205

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…

> he thing I value most in software now isn't robust tests or thorough documentation - an LLM can spit those out in a few minutes. Can it if we stop defining "robust tests" as "a lot of test code lines" and "good documentation" as "lengthy documentation"?

I chose my words carefully. "Robust tests" are tests that provide high coverage and aren't flaky. "Thorough documentation" likewise is documentation that describes as much of the code as possible.

I didn't use the word good.

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

#239

Post by stirfish » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

JackC wrote: post #204

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…

"They may speed up the good programmers a little, but those people were able to program anyway without LLMs." I don't think this is realistic. I'm a good programmer, and it speeds up my work a lot , from "make sense of this 10 repo project I haven't worked on recently" to "for this next step I need a vpn multiplexer written in a language I don't use" to, yeah, "this 10k line patch lets me see parts of design space we…

It's great when I know how the code should look. Sometimes I just can't bring myself to write yet another http handler.

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

#240

Post by StevePerkins » Thu, Apr 30, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

kay_o wrote: post #115

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…

> 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"

It's not about helping. It's about the feeling of clout. There are still plenty of people who look at Github profile activity to judge job candiates, etc. What gets measured gets repeated.

I believe that most of the ills of social media would disappear, if we eliminated the "like" and "upvotes" buttons and the view counts. Most open source garbage pull requests may likewise go away if contributions were somehow anonymous.