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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

#491

Post by fg137 »

simonw wrote: post #259
fg137 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have learned to take always Willison's words with a giant grain of salt, despite how popular those articles are here.

How can I do better?

More critical thinking.

Many of your articles just go along with whatever another company/person says without questioning it, to the point that I don't find those articles valuable at all.

I don't think I am alone, based on criticism in the HN discussions under those articles.

And I don't expect you or anyone to be an investigative journalist, but there is a difference between writing blog articles vs being a megaphone.

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

#492

Post by simonw »

fg137 wrote: post #491
simonw wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can I do better?

More critical thinking. Many of your articles just go along with whatever another company/person says without questioning it, to the point that I don't find those articles valuable at all. I don't think I am alone, based on criticism in the HN discussions under those articles. And I don't expect you or anyone to be an investigative journalist, but there is a difference between writing blog articles vs being a megapho…

That may be true for many of the short form pieces - there's only so much you can say in a couple of paragraphs - but I try to inject a whole lot of additional commentary, often critical, in my longer form work.

Recent examples from https://simonwillison.net/entries/

- https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/27/now-deceased-agi-claus... pulled apart the absurd deal between OpenAI and Microsoft where OpenAI could declare "AGI" and Microsoft would lose their rights to that IP

- https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/23/gpt-5-5/ pointed out that, while OpenAI had said that GPT-5.5 was not yet available via their API for safety reasons, they also recently blessed accessing their unofficial Codex-only API as part of their attempt to tempt OpenClaw customers away from Anthropic... which meant they DID offer and approve of an API for GPT-5.5 after all

- https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/22/claude-code-confusion/ was highly critical of Anthropic's decision to A/B test the pricing of Claude Code, not to mention the messy way they had done that.

- https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/21/gpt-image-2/ pointed out how much worse the previously celebrated Nano Banana is as at image generation compared to ChatGPT Images 2.0, while also showing ChatGPT Images 2.0 will cheat and add a raccoon if you ask it to solve its own puzzle.

- https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/18/opus-system-prompt/ was the first coverage I saw anywhere of the new eating disorder section of the Claude system prompt. I also repeated my criticism there of Anthropic's decision not to publish their tool descriptions even when they claim to have an openly documented system prompt.

- https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/16/qwen-beats-opus/ demonstrated the new Opus 4.7 drawing a worse pelican than an open weights model I can run on my laptop. (Though to be fair I manly concluded this as evidence that my own "benchmark" is of very limited value.)

All of those examples are from the past three weeks.

I don't think I'm an uncritical megaphone for the messages these companies want to convey.

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

#493

Post by merlindru »

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,…

Agree, but "no LLMs" locks out good PRs and contributors too.

I hypothesize it may have roughly the same effect as denying all contributions where the author used intellisense 10y ago.

A substantial portion of people who write good code will be using some sort of LLM assistance, even if it is just something like Cursor Tab (autocomplete).

Yes, you'll also hit all of the spammy PR "contributors", but you'd also do so by prohibiting all contributions by people who have a belly button

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

#494

Post by switchbak »

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 forgot to add to add the respect form" ... what does that even mean?

This whole comment is incoherent. And you're the one "hoping" people check things?

Normally I dislike AI slop in comments, but in this case I think it would be an improvement.

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

#495

Post by switchbak »

i_love_retros wrote: post #471
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.

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.

Jumping to an assumption like this - that they didn't review their work - that's somewhat of an insult to someone who has done this for a long time.

Now it's totally possible that they're an awful developer (who knows!), but it's arrogant to assume that with no evidence.

And I agree, some of the worst devs I've worked with have been PhD's or had otherwise impressive credentials (ostensibly). And I absolutely think at least 1 of them were just lying about their backgrounds.

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