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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

#461

Post by colordrops »

api wrote: post #428
colordrops wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It sounds like they are even rejecting submissions where they even get a whiff of ai being "consulted" though. That's not quite the same as turning off the firehose.

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

#462

Post by PeterStuer »

I know my take on this is not popular. Don't blame the tool, judge the output.

Ofc, the scattershot 10k changes PR touching 30% of all your code files can be auto rejected without even looking at it. Who cares who or what wrote it.

And a small focusses PR from a new contributer that needs clarification which the author can not provide, shelve it.

But a blanket no-ai policy? I hear echos of business execs refusing email and demanding in person visits to remote offices for any interaction (not imagined. I knew an IT admin back in the late 80's who even refused to answer the phone and email as he felt that was 'too easy' and 'cutting in line', yes, the pysical hallway queue of people needing simple things like a login, quota adaptation or a password reset)

The tool is not your problem. Your selectivity process was never designed for low barrier access to participation. I have full sympathy for that. But focus on the real problem, the process, not some (rightly or wrongly) perceived feature filter to avoid changing how this works.

Now if you say "my project, my rules" 100%. And I sympatize very much with being overwhelmed by nuissance on a thing you love and care for.

Just don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

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

#463

Post by self_awareness »

jart wrote: post #72
LeCompteSftware wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

Anthropic will probably do what Google did in the 2000s, which is give jobs to all the open source developers whose work helped them get there. Civilization isn't monotonic. People keep solving the same problems over and over again, telling the same stories with a different twist. For example in 1964 having a GUI work environment with a light pen as your mouse was a solved problem on IBM System/360. They had tools si…

Well good luck compiling a CAD software from 1964 on 2026's aarch64 machine, and good luck in treating it as an applicable solution for today's problems.

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

#464

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

krupan wrote: post #306

This is the great disconnect in thinking around LLMs right now. You have people saying they are so amazing, why wouldn't you use them? But if they are so amazing, why are you mad when someone won't accept the code they produce? Just ask the LLM to duplicate that whole project! Oh, it's not actually that amazing of a tool? Hmmm The fact is, LLMs are incapable of invention and synthesizing new ideas. They can't contrib…

> But if they are so amazing, why are you mad when someone won't accept the code they produce? Just ask the LLM to duplicate that whole project! Oh, it's not actually that amazing of a tool? Hmmm

Is the barrier to entry really that you must be able to perfectly recreate the project from scratch before you can possibly have anything to contribute?

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

#465

Post by drekipus »

JackC wrote: post #204
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…

"They may speed up the good programmers a little, but those people were able to program anyway without LLMs." I don't think this is realistic. I'm a good programmer, and it speeds up my work a lot , from "make sense of this 10 repo project I haven't worked on recently" to "for this next step I need a vpn multiplexer written in a language I don't use" to, yeah, "this 10k line patch lets me see parts of design space we…

> I'm a good programmer, and it speeds up my work a lot,

Whenever I see this arguement, I'm reminded that most programmers don't know what they do for work

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

#466

Post by drekipus »

mattmanser wrote: post #339
JackC wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They may speed up the good programmers a little, but those people were able to program anyway without LLMs." I don't think this is realistic. I'm a good programmer, and it speeds up my work a lot , from "make sense of this 10 repo project I haven't worked on recently" to "for this next step I need a vpn multiplexer written in a language I don't use" to, yeah, "this 10k line patch lets me see parts of design space we…

Why are you writing a vpn multiplexer written in a language you don't use? You can't review it. Are you relying on your colleagues to do that, or is this riddled with bugs? Or is it code you're producing for personal use only so it's not worth mentioning as it's not sped your work up, it's just let you write a little play program.

No no no it's speed at all costs. Sure. I'm writing junk but the speed of what I'm doing is *impressive* You don't understand.

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

#467

Post by tovej »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #448
tovej wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are interpreting a general statement as a categorical one.

I wasn't really going for an exact, formal statement, but I can give you a formal interpretation of what I said above, if you want to be pedantic.

In general, you can't expect an LLM to produce thorough documentation or robust tests for nontrivial software, because the use of those software (i.e. how their interfaces are expected to behave) contains assumptions from the context in which they are used, and that information will not be encoded in the source.

If the above was somehow ambiguous, this should be clear and uncontroversial.

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

#468

Post by frumiousirc »

tombert wrote: post #291
frumiousirc wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Great! One thing I do is have an RSS feed from a reddit search query so I can lurk random discussions that mention "zeromq". I'll then see if there is something I can do to encourage or contribute to whatever is happening. There is also a mailing list and a VERY low traffic IRC channel on libera.chat.

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

#470

Post by aniou »

vehemenz wrote: post #206
aniou wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So - in that way - LLM will be Your mentor, it will shape Your way of thinking according to algorithms and datasets stuffed into by corporate creators. Do You really want it? There is also a second face of that: people are lazy. They wouldn't develop their own skills but rather they would off-load tasks to LLM-s, so their communicative abilities will be fade away. That's looks like a strong dystopia for me.

> LLM will be Your mentor, it will shape Your way of thinking according to algorithms and datasets stuffed into by corporate creators. How is this mutually exclusive with teaching better than most humans? Part of these "corporate" datasets include deep knowledge of the world's best literature and philosophy, for instance. Why can't it be both? > Do You really want it? If I'm in a hurry, don't know where to start, or…

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