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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

#421

Post by johanyc »

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…

So battle tested

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

#423

Post by ragall »

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've noticed that back in Europe everyone's in a panic mode, but that's because of the inferiority complex most people have vs both US and China. It's unwarranted.

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

#424

Post by esafak »

pelasaco wrote: post #416
esafak wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are we not paying it off? I sure am. I refactor code left and right. It is up to you.

> Why are we not paying it off? I sure am. I refactor code left and right. It is up to you. Do you work alone i presume? Everyone now is engineer. In my department, even managers are "writing code". Producing thousand of lines of ansible code, that nobody can review, with multiple lines of doc that nobody will read. It is just a mess.

That's a management problem. If you can't stop non-coders from coding perhaps you can introduce an AI reviewer to take a load off, demand that they be able to defend every line of code, and put them all on pager duty, since they're coders now ;)

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

#425

Post by hirako2000 »

aerhardt wrote: post #403
hirako2000 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I do believe in hardship. As sacrifice. It yields long term benefits for oneself, and for society.

But submissions into slavery for immediate gain accomplishes little, and costs society a lot more (physical and mental health issues are a huge burden).

Those parodies you saw, they were caricature of elite engineers, who sacrificed decades of his life to become so competent. Can work from home, eat pasta while glancing over a PR and just hit approve.

That you resent the luxury doesn't make it undeserved privilege.

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

#426

Post by thunderfork »

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…

In practice, I think these things correlate more than you think they correlate.

I don't think it's "poor character", though, so much as "willing to develop the deep mental model required for effective contribution".

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

#427

Post by tencentshill »

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…

Anything you say back to them calling out their nonsense, they'll feed back into their LLM and it will tell them why you're wrong and they're right.

https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/issues/45246

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

#428

Post by api »

colordrops wrote: post #395
api wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a spam problem more than anything else. It's not really an AI problem except that it's AI that is enabling this new type of spam. Imagine there's no AI, but for some reason you have people hiring armies of cheap overseas devs and using them to produce mediocre quality drive-by PRs. The effect would be the same. AI can be used to make quality code, but that requires careful use of the tool... like any other to…

Exactly, people could have "consulted Google" or "consulted stack overflow" and had the same issues. It's about the end result, not how the code got to that end result, and the submitter is responsible to make sure of the quality of the submission regardless of whether AI was used or not. To reject submissions where the dev "consulted ai" is like rejecting iron ore that was mined by a machine rather than a human. The…

I agree, but the problem comes back to how to evaluate quality at scale. That is very hard. It’s easier to just say no AI because that at least turns off the fire hose.

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

#429

Post by brokencode »

orochimaaru wrote: post #396
merlindru wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but that doesn't have anything to do with LLMs. if someone made the same gigantic mess of a PR without LLMs, it would still be rejected, because it is a gigantic mess of a PR. the low effort part is the problem. what if i made a great, focused, readable PR but had claude write it out? what if i carefully checked and deliberated each line, just as if i had written it myself? granted, in the real world, 99.9% of slop P…

It’s the lack of friction that LLMs bring. It’s easy to put in a couple of lines and generate 1000’s of lines of code. Whereas the person would never have done that without LLMs. I think LLM dev needs to take a better spec driven approach. The vibing is getting to be annoying.

I think the only thing that will save us is smarter models. Slop coders are not going to stop making slop.

They’ll still use even smarter LLMs badly no doubt, but I’m thinking that maintainers of open source projects will be able to more effectively use LLMs to review potential PRs to weed out the truly bad ones quickly.

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

#430

Post by lexh »

zeeveener wrote: post #313
branko_d wrote: post #91

From https://kristoff.it/blog/contributor-poker-and-ai/ : "Unfortunately the reality of LLM-based contributions has been mostly negative for us, from an increase in background noise due to worthless drive-by PRs full of hallucinations (that wouldn’t even compile, let alone pass CI), to insane 10 thousand line long first time PRs. In-between we also received plenty of PRs that looked fine on the surface, some of which…

I'm personally amazed that _Large_ OSS projects don't have the appropriate automation in place to prevent non-compiling or non-linter-passing submissions. - Hooks (although there's no clean way to enforce they be "installed" on a clone), GHA Workflows (or their equivalents on other forges). This might be my bias showing, but these are items I would consider table-stakes for a project of a certain size / level of popu…

But... this particular project does have such automation in place? It isn’t hard to find:

https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/src/branch/master/.forgejo/...

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