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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

#441

Post by em-bee »

SuperV1234 wrote: post #437
em-bee wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

anything unpredictable is inherently untrustworthy and requires extra effort to review. Lack of determinism is not a practical concern. it is to me. it's a knockout criteria. it is the only reason that keeps me from using LLMs for coding. nothing else is as serious an issue to me as this. here is why: i tell the LLM to build something with requirements A B C D and E. it builds, i review and i find A B and D are good,…

You'd have to review and verify even changes that you've written by hand. You might think that your hand-written code satisfies A+B+C+D+E, but until you've verified it, you cannot prove it. That's not any different from LLM-assisted writing -- humans are inherently non-deterministic as well :) The other fallacy is assuming that everyone else's experience with LLM-assisted writing is the same as yours. Personally, I'v…

The other fallacy is assuming that everyone else's experience with LLM-assisted writing is the same as yours.

that's irrelevant. my choice can only be based on my experience. i am unable to verify your experience, because i am not you. we have different tolerances, and if it works for your project, then fine.

you just cannot assume that because something doesn't work for you it doesn't work for anyone else.

we are talking about contributions to my project. if LLM coding doesn't work for me, then your LLM created contributions won't work for me either because i won't trust them. you can't legislate or enforce trust. trust can only be earned. lack of trust means i have to spend more effort to verify your code.

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

#442

Post by tovej »

matkoniecz wrote: post #389
tovej wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope not. How else are you learning to use the library? The only other option is to read the source, which is also a good idea eventually, if something is unclear, but why would you _start_ there?

Ask LLM.

Bad idea.

But even in that case, you're reading the documentation. Just through a nondeterministic, hallucinating search engine.

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

#443

Post by eddd-ddde »

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.

This reminds me of the critique of certain kinds of art.

"It's so easy, I could have done that myself"

Well yeah, but you didn't.

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

#444

Post by tovej »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #418
tovej wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about keyboards or screen readers or any sort of input testing, I'm talking about how the software is used in practice. If you disagree with that, I think the onus is on you to show me that an LLM could simulate the full context in which a user interfaces with software. That's a ridiculous claim. Feel free to show literally any evidence for this claim.

I'm disagreeing with the saying it's impossible across the board, I'm not saying it's universally possible. lol And you made the claim, not me. The proof is on YOU.

No, that's not how burden of proof works.

The status quo is that this capability does not exist. Whoever makes a claim contradicting the status quo has the burden of proof. I can't prove a negative.

And even with your logic, I did not make the original claim, it was made by simon.

Your statement now also makes little sense. For any nontrivial software project, the usage patterns and interactions with other systems are complex enough that the code itself does not contain enough context to understand how it is used, or what the invariants are.

There may be very simple codebases where an LLM can actually give you "thorough documentation" or "robust tests", but those are rare.

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

#445

Post by chickensong »

krupan wrote: post #300
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.

LLMs are the future because you have an amazing amount of information available with low friction, plus the ability to reason (sort of) about things. In some cases they might regurgitate, but they're also pretty good at synthesizing and comparing. None of this is perfect, but nothing else is either.

LLMs are a powerful tool like we've never had before. You don't expect a chainsaw to cut down a tree by itself and carve the wood into a statue or a new compiler. LLMs aren't mind-reading autonomous creators, they're more like a mech suit that can increase your capabilities. They have flaws, but until something better comes along, it sure seems like they're the future.

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

#446

Post by brokencode »

logicchains wrote: post #359
brokencode wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why review thousands of lines of LLM generated code from some random person you don’t know when you could use an LLM yourself to do the same thing, except with probably a better design and more thoughtful approach? Maintainers should get to spend their time developing stuff, not just reviewing low effort PRs. The flood of LLM code is changing the balance for the worse for maintainers, and I can totally see why they’d…

>Why review thousands of lines of LLM generated code from some random person you don’t know when you could use an LLM yourself to do the same thing Because getting an LLM to do it yourself still takes time and attention bandwidth and tokens.

But at least you know how the sausage was made by the end. You have no idea how high or low quality any PR from a random person online is, and taking any amount of time to review a PR could be a total waste.

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

#447

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

em-bee wrote: post #380
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found that for non-trivial features, I typically benefit from 3-4 rounds of: are you sure this isn't tech debt, are you sure this is thoroughly tested for (manually insert the applicable cases, because they aren't great at this, even if explicitly asked), are you sure this isn't re-inventing wheels, adding unnecessary complexity by not using existing infrastructure it should or that other existing code would not…

working this way would drive me nuts

Why? It's not that different from managing engineers.

You're just getting less work done on a slower cadence and asking the questions in design review and in code reviews...

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

#448

Post by mexicocitinluez »

tovej wrote: post #444
mexicocitinluez wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm disagreeing with the saying it's impossible across the board, I'm not saying it's universally possible. lol And you made the claim, not me. The proof is on YOU.

No, that's not how burden of proof works. The status quo is that this capability does not exist. Whoever makes a claim contradicting the status quo has the burden of proof. I can't prove a negative. And even with your logic, I did not make the original claim, it was made by simon. Your statement now also makes little sense. For any nontrivial software project, the usage patterns and interactions with other systems ar…

> There may be very simple codebases where an LLM can actually give you "thorough documentation" or "robust tests", but those are rare.

Its not rare. I've built 2 dozen line-of-business apps in it last handful of years that were glorified CRUD apps. Every environment I've been in has had a mix of the 2.

And even then, that's at odds with your absolute above. On top of being in a field that changes daily.

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

#449

Post by em-bee »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #447
em-bee wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

working this way would drive me nuts

Why? It's not that different from managing engineers. You're just getting less work done on a slower cadence and asking the questions in design review and in code reviews...

it's very different. LLMs don't behave like people. they don't learn.

i don't mind managing people, but i don't want to manage machines unless i can control them with the precise languages that the commandline and programming languages use. prompting a LLM is to vague an interface for me, the outcome is to unreliable, to unpredictable.

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

#450

Post by foltik »

tencentshill wrote: post #427
kay_o wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Holy... that was quite the read.
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