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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

#291

Post by tombert »

frumiousirc wrote: post #168
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 s…

You know what; I use ZeroMQ all the time. Thanks for bringing to my attention that the community is waning, I will look into contributing to it tonight.

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

#292

Post by em-bee »

renticulous wrote: post #256
PunchyHamster wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to "for this next step I need a vpn multiplexer written in a language I don't use" but that acceleration is exactly because you're not good at that language

Can't we reach a compromise where proven track record of good use of LLM by a contributor or a company (eg. Bun) be pre-approved or entertained? Blanket ban on a new technology shouldn't be the default option.

if they had a good track record, the current submission that led to this article damaged it.

i am reminded of this quote: it takes more cleverness to debug code than it takes to write it. if you write code as clever as you can, by definition you are not clever enough to debug it. using LLM makes your code many times more clever than what you could write yourself. which means by the same definition the code is to clever for you to understand or debug it.

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

#293

Post by dspillett »

renticulous wrote: post #256
PunchyHamster wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to "for this next step I need a vpn multiplexer written in a language I don't use" but that acceleration is exactly because you're not good at that language

Can't we reach a compromise where proven track record of good use of LLM by a contributor or a company (eg. Bun) be pre-approved or entertained? Blanket ban on a new technology shouldn't be the default option.

Certainly not in the case of asking it to do something you'd be slow at because you are unfamiliar. If you are not familiar enough with the system, how are you confident that what the LLM has produced is valid and complete? IMO the people saying LLMs make then 10x faster were either very bad to start with (like me!) or are not properly looking at the results before throwing them over the wall.

And how do you know if that is the case or the person/team using the LLMs is one of the good ones?

So the safest answer is just "no".

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

#294

Post by esafak »

> 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?

You may as well say "if someone else can do it I'll just do it myself". It takes skill and taste to know what to ask, wisdom to recognize mistakes, and time and money to fix them.

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

#295

Post by WarmWash »

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…

Tangential side story, but an interesting one none the less.

I was a food delivery driver back in the mid 00's to the mid teens. Early on, GPS was rare and expensive, so to do deliveries and do them effectively, you had to be able to read a map and mentally plan out efficient routes from the stochastic flow of orders coming out.

This acted as a natural filter, and "delivery driver" tended to be an interesting class of people, landing somewhere in the neighborhood of "lazy genius". Higher than average intelligence, lower than average motivation.

Then when smartphones exploded in the early 10's, the bar for delivering fell through the floor, and the job became swamped with people who would be best identified as "lazy unintelligent". Anyone who had a smartphone and not much life motivation was now looking to drive around delivering food for easy money.

Not saying the job was ever particularly glamorous, but it did have a natural mental barrier that tech tore down, and the result was exactly as one would predict. That being said, I'm not sure end users noticed much difference.

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

#296

Post by dnautics »

dgellow wrote: post #177

> Zig values contributors over their contributions. Each contributor represents an investment by the Zig core team - the primary goal of reviewing and accepting PRs isn't to land new code, it's to help grow new contributors who can become trusted and prolific over time. > LLM assistance breaks that completely. It doesn't matter if the LLM helps you submit a perfect PR to Zig That’s the best rational I’ve seen so far,…

i do think llms are great, i vibe code a lot of zig (working in a locally deployed semi-embedded on-prem device), and i think the zig policy is a good idea at least for the next five years.

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

#297

Post by doug_durham »

The more I sit with this the more this seems like a rationalization. Being a good contributor is a human quality, not a quality of the tools that you use. Are you thoughtful? Do you place the needs of the project above your own? Are you easy to work with. None of these things have anything to do with the tools you use. Perhaps they have a bias where they think that LLM use indicates poor character? Good luck to the project. We will see where this lead them.

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

#298

Post by Quothling »

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?

> Any examples how you see some engineers being left behind?

I don't know where you live, but around where I live in Denmark you'd fail for not using AI at a senior interview in a lot of places. Even places which aren't exactly AI fans use AI to some extend.

The biggest challenge we face right now is figuring out how you create developers who have enough experience to know how to use the AI tools in a critical manner. Especially because you're typically given agents for various taks, which are already configured to know how we want things to be written.

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

#299

Post by krupan »

doug_durham wrote: post #297

The more I sit with this the more this seems like a rationalization. Being a good contributor is a human quality, not a quality of the tools that you use. Are you thoughtful? Do you place the needs of the project above your own? Are you easy to work with. None of these things have anything to do with the tools you use. Perhaps they have a bias where they think that LLM use indicates poor character? Good luck to the p…

If it's possible to be that good of a contributor while using LLM coding tools then people won't notice you are using an LLM

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

#300

Post by krupan »

nayroclade wrote: post #243

It seems like this policy will help them win at contributor poker in the short term, but lose in the end. The next generation of developers will, for better or worse, grow up using AI assistance to write their code, but none of them will ever become a Zig contributor.

I still can't understand why people believe that this is the future. Especially for green field work like new compilers. LLMs do not invent new things. They cannot produce anything smarter/better than what they have been trained on. The big advantage they provide is producing (regurgitating) code faster than humans and better than less experienced/knowledgeable humans.
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