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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

#401

Post by archagon »

ZaoLahma wrote: post #145
feverzsj wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much sums up the LLM fanbase.

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…

Again, I have to point out that AI is not an abstraction layer. It blows my mind that engineers with years of experience somehow don’t understand this.

It would be an honor to be “left behind” by people who practice their craft with such carelessness.

(Frankly, I should probably stop replying to self-professed LLM boosters entirely since there’s a good chance I’m just chatting with an LLM.)

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

#402

Post by ofjcihen »

Quothling wrote: post #298
0xpgm wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I work for a fortune 50 that is heavily tech based.

If you can’t interview without immediately reaching for an LLM you are considered unfit to work here.

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

#403

Post by aerhardt »

hirako2000 wrote: post #207
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…

Before LLMs we could already see a growing abundance of half baked engineers only in for the good pay. Willing to work double time to pull things out. Management, unsurprisingly deemed those precious. They could email them out anytime, working weekend to fix problems their kind were the cause. Sure sir. They excel at communication. Perfecting the art. Now LLMs are there to accelerate the trend.

You're at least describing someone who sounds hard-working... what's the problem?

I'd be more concerned if I was someone who signed up to play ping pong two hours a day and do a bi-weekly commit.

There was a time not so long ago where I was watching "a day in the life of a software engineer" videos on Youtube and I was wondering if some of these were parodies. I still remember one in particular which I'm pretty sure was a parody, but it was only marginally distinguishable from the others.

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

#404

Post by cmrdporcupine »

wiseowise wrote: post #70
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.

> The frontier LLMs were trained on all the code that institutions had been keeping to themselves. Lolz! I haven’t encountered “code that institutions had been keeping to themselves” that got even remotely close to OSS in quality.

The quality of code inside Google's Google3 repository is more consistently high quality than most of what I see in the Exterior World.

But there's no way that Google is releasing a model trained on it. Way too high of a risk of IP leakage.

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

#405

Post by switchbak »

vatsachak wrote: post #370
dnautics wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep. as an expert programmer there are things i did not have access to. for example, i have an embedded-lite hardware project that required a one line patch to a linux kernel Module. i know what a kernel module is and im reasonably certain that the patch is safe, but there is no way in hell i would have found that solution (i would have given up). in a world without llms, the project would have died.

I really hope that you have gone over what the LLM decides to do. Time and time again I've had a project (such as a DSL to SQL compiler, automatic Rust codegen, CSS development) stall because the LLM took a short sighted decision. I later found better solutions by querying Reddit and upon consulting the LLM, it basically said "oh shit I'm sorry"

We have all had that experience, that's just the way this new world is.

It's honestly pretty arrogant to tell a senior engineer that you "really hope" they've gone over some code. AI generated or otherwise.

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

#407

Post by mikmoila »

spacechild1 wrote: post #365
simonw wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If LLM code really does have IP risk then most of the world's most valuable companies may have to throw away ~18 months of work at this point.

Even if training on copyrighted material is considered fair use, there is still the issue that LLMs may reproduce significant parts of the training set. In fact, there is an ongoing lawsuit in Germany (GEMA vs. OpenAI) because ChatGPT reproduced significant parts of existing song lyrics, which very likely violates German copyright law. The whole thing really is a legal minefield and some companies do indeed prohibit…

Yes, imagine a breakthrough moneymaker product containing generative AI parts; It'll be under legal attacks from day zero...

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

#408

Post by chickensong »

jbxntuehineoh wrote: post #341
bojo wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this anecdote. It highlights what our industry continues to forget: The end user doesn't care. Don't get me wrong, tech is why I am here. But if it works, Alice and Bob don't care one bit about how the product exists.

> The end user doesn't care. well, they think they don't. until their pii gets leaked all over the internet because whoops our s3 bucket was publicly accessible, or until the service goes down because whoops our llm deleted the prod db...

PII leaks are normalized now. Most people aren't even aware, or just shrug "oh well" and head to the app store to download the latest gacha game or whatever.

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

#409

Post by Quothling »

ofjcihen wrote: post #402
Quothling wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I work for a fortune 50 that is heavily tech based. If you can’t interview without immediately reaching for an LLM you are considered unfit to work here.

Around here C levels have AI adoption goals and are actively pushing it throughout organisations. Even when it doesn't exactly make sense.

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

#410

Post by Quothling »

vatsachak wrote: post #363
Quothling wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Everyone is jumping off the cliff > If you don't jump off the cliff you're falling behind

I was just giving them an anecdotal example of what they were asking for. I think the answer is somewhere in the middle, but I'm not in a position to push any form of change on the C levels.
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