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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

#41

Post by earleybird »

simonw wrote: post #11
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…

> 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…

Depth of use over the lifetime of an app is a quality all its own that often not appreciated. A recurring pattern at $dayjob is that a new manager or director will join a business unit and declare an existing app as the worst terrible, no good, horrible app they've seen and they're going to fix that. A year and a half later the new app is finally delivered with 80% of the original functionality and a fresh set of bugs. The new dev team sees the surface functionality but misses a lot of the hard earned nuance the old system accrued over time. This is a pattern that existed long before LLMs.

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

#42

Post by emj »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #32

It's a good rationale. But it points the finger at a real bottleneck in open source development: the burden of manually reviewing contributions. And the need to automate that with AI as well. Reviews were already becoming a problem before AI. Lots of projects have been dealing with a large influx of contributions from inexperienced developers from all over the world looking to boost their CVs by increasing their Gith…

> [you can] stop accepting imperfect PRs in order to maximize ROI from your work, but that’s not what we do in the Zig project

The real bottle neck when you want to grow is connecting with the right people. An LLM is not helping with that if you want to build a community. When you use LLM to skip the need to understand a problem how are you ever going to get a reputation that I can trust?

The post is not about reputation it about seeing how people respond and work with you in a community.

EDIT: I see that you frame it as a help and a tool and sure it might work, but I feel like it is just another obstacle.

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

#43

Post by Aeolun »

lelanthran wrote: post #39
daishi55 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the point in debating the PR quality? The policy explicitly forbids all LLM code, so that policy is of course the “real reason”.

> 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.

Of course the policy is preventing the merge. That’s literally the point of the policy…

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

#44

Post by applfanboysbgon »

Antibabelic wrote: post #24
jart wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I value software that reveals knowledge. The frontier LLMs were trained on all the code that institutions had been keeping to themselves. So they're revealing programing know-how on a scale that just wasn't possible with open source. LLMs are the ultimate Prometheus. Information is more accessible and useful now than it's ever been.

I promise you, "the code that institutions had been keeping to themselves" is not nearly as special or good as you are implying here.

The claim is also just categorically untrue. The largest source of training data by far is publicly available code on e.g. Github, so it mostly just gives you a way to recycle already-available code, without crediting the author, while allowing you to pretend you own it.

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

#45

Post by omnimus »

jeffmess wrote: post #28
bonzini wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single PR for a 3000-line addition would, in all likelihood, be rejected anyway.

Doubt it: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24536

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.

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

#46

Post by slekker »

jeffmess wrote: post #28
bonzini wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single PR for a 3000-line addition would, in all likelihood, be rejected anyway.

Doubt it: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24536

Very different context: that PR is from a maintainer, and trusted member of Zig, which surely discussed the implementation/design internally as well

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

#48

Post by FeepingCreature »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #25
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…

>> Whereas earlier you had to use something that was mass produced to be satisfactory for everyone As someone who recently started using OpenSCAD for a project I find this attitude quite irritating. You certainly did not "have to" use popular tools. The OpenSCAD example is particularly illuminating because it's fussy and frustrating and clearly tuned towards a few specific maintainers; there's a ton of things I'd lik…

This is funny because I was in the same situation, and actually used Claude to make a custom CAD program inspired by OpenSCAD :) https://fncad.github.io

You definitely need to have a strong sense of code design though. The AIs are not up to writing clean code at project scale on their own, yet.

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

#49

Post by vga1 »

omnimus wrote: post #45
jeffmess wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubt it: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24536

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.

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

#50

Post by saagarjha »

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.

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