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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

#471

Post by i_love_retros »

switchbak wrote: post #405
vatsachak wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lol why is it arrogant? My workplace is evidence that having a senior engineer title or even a computer science degree doesn't mean you are a good engineer. I honestly think some people have fake credentials and got their jobs via nepotism.

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

#472

Post by i_love_retros »

stirfish wrote: post #239
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…

It's great when I know how the code should look. Sometimes I just can't bring myself to write yet another http handler.

Already libraries for that which are battle tested, why vibe code a unique solution each time?

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

#474

Post by casey2 »

brokencode wrote: post #356
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…

Well previously lazy contributors simply would never have made a PR because it was too much work. Now they can have an LLM make a PR with virtually no effort at all. It’s obviously an imperfect rule, and maybe it’ll change over time. But I am just saying that I understand why open source maintainers are doing this. There is just no possibility for them to review all the low effort AI slop being thrown their way. Yes,…

Use AI to Fork it, add your own features, pull in upstream changes. What are the odds that the lazy contributor with AI is better in the long run?

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

#475

Post by acdha »

vehemenz wrote: post #229
richiebful1 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People forget that LLM code cannot be covered by copyright. So LLM code cannot be placed under an open source license

This is overstated. Not all LLM code is produced the same way. Code produced through substantial human creative input still falls under copyright, at least the way things are now. Besides, nothing legally prevents placing code under a license. Enforceability is the question, not permission. It's a bit like saying speed limits don't apply on private property, therefore you can't have any traffic rules on your private…

> Besides, nothing legally prevents placing code under a license. Enforceability is the question, not permission.

That’s not how copyright works. If you don’t own the code, you can’t release it under a license. The question of how much human editing is needed to establish copyright is a huge question right now.

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

#476

Post by tekknik »

vatsachak wrote: post #420
switchbak wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry. I forgot to add to add the respect form I really hope usted checked your code At this point I'm pretty sure I did the homework for people in college who are now senior engineers

I think your parent didn’t word this correctly.

This is commonplace. So commonplace that most have worked “checking the LLM” into their workflow so deeply that essentially all that’s done is prompt followed by a mini code review.

To suggest a senior engineer blindly accepts modifications without code review kinda hints at you not using LLMs to realize how quickly it will make a mess of things if you don’t hold it’s hand.

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

#477

Post by FeepingCreature »

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #74
FeepingCreature wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a good example of what I mean! fnCAD appears to be a significantly buggier and highly incomplete version of OpenSCAD, where AI essentially grabbed the low-hanging fruit - albeit an impressively large amount of fruit - and left you with the hard parts. I fail to see how this solved any problems. Maybe it was an experiment, which is fine. But it's not even close to a viable CAD product, even by OpenSCAD's scruf…

It solves all my problems! It's buggy and incomplete because it's "1.0 feature complete" for my own use. I've been doing lots of 3D printing with it, so it's definitely being dogfooded. File bug reports? I'm confident that features can be added as required, it's reasonably clean code.

I mean, to be fair, a one-user project is not ever going to be as bugfree as a tens-of-thousands-of-users project. That's just inherent and not an AI issue. If you judge AI projects by that standard, they'll always come up short. It's a sampling issue. An AI project that's gotten to a level where it competes with a traditional project will always be buggier and less feature complete and polished, because AIs speed up development. It will simply have seen far less, well, polish to get there.

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

#478

Post by mexicocitinluez »

tovej wrote: post #467
mexicocitinluez wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 assum…

> You are interpreting a general statement as a categorical one.

That is in fact what I did and if you meant otherwise, then yes I agree that currently there are plenty of cases in which those tools fall short and will never replace a human.

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

#479

Post by api »

colordrops wrote: post #461
api wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No that’s just reactionary.

The discourse around AI in the arts, and other creative and craft fields, is utterly identical to the discourse around photography when it came out to the point that you could search and replace terms and have the same dialogue.

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

#480

Post by dnautics »

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"

i am writing the sw stack for my own pharma startup.

we have 2 very high value DAU, one of whom is me, and probably will max out at 1000 in our wildest dreams.

long term, our biggest concern is a security regression that lets outsiders see our internal information

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