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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

#51

Post by vga1 »

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…

I think this ignores the amount of work needed to make LLM contributions be of high quality. It's much less work than making pure human contribution, but it's definitely not zero.

So centralizing that common work is a benefit of open-source just as much with LLMs as it was before.

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

#52

Post by jart »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #44
Antibabelic wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I promise you, "the code that institutions had been keeping to themselves" is not nearly as special or good as you are implying here.

The claim is also just categorically untrue. The largest source of training data by far is publicly available code on e.g. Github, so it mostly just gives you a way to recycle already-available code, without crediting the author, while allowing you to pretend you own it.

So you're both saying all the alpha in Claude comes from open source devs like me? Even when I'm wrong I'm right.

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

#53

Post by [deleted] »

saagarjha wrote: post #50
vga1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you differentiate a 3000 line LLM commit made by the best models and good AI processes from a 3000 line commit made by the best human developer? edit Okay, I set the bar too high here with "best human developer" and vague "good AI processes". My bad. Yes, LLM is not quite there yet.

Read it?

[deleted]

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

#54

Post by throwa356262 »

slopinthebag wrote: post #36

Very convenient of Mr. Willison to omit the fact that Bun's upstream changes are total garbage and would not be upstreamed regardless of any policies, omitting LLM generated code or not, since they are, as a zig core team member articulated in a classier way, shite.

Also, that zig team is already working on other approaches that are better and more stable than what Bun team did:

https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-s-zig-fork-got-4x-faster-compilatio...

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

#55

Post by lugu »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #32

It's a good rationale. But it points the finger at a real bottleneck in open source development: the burden of manually reviewing contributions. And the need to automate that with AI as well. Reviews were already becoming a problem before AI. Lots of projects have been dealing with a large influx of contributions from inexperienced developers from all over the world looking to boost their CVs by increasing their Gith…

I don't know Zig, but I think that is not the problem here. Not exactly. The real question is: why spending all those efforts to grow and align a pool of contributors if contributions are cheap and correct? Code review is not just about checking if what it says it does, and if it does it according to the guidelines. The review is a touch point to discuss where the project is heading and how to get there. That is the most important part in the long run. As a collective human effort, it needs coordination. Some of it is via the review process (especially for those not part if the core team that draft the roadmap). One could document all those micro decisions with the rational, but it might end up be a wakamole game. IMO, projects which allow AI usage need to spend way more effort in coordination (and quality insurance).

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

#56

Post by vurudlxtyt »

vga1 wrote: post #49
omnimus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When somebody comments PR with “Incredible work, Jacob. It is an honor to call you my colleague.” then it's safe to assume it's out of the ordinary contribution. Pretty much falling outside of the “in all likelyhood”. 3000 line LLM commit is not that.

How would you differentiate a 3000 line LLM commit made by the best models and good AI processes from a 3000 line commit made by the best human developer? edit Okay, I set the bar too high here with "best human developer" and vague "good AI processes". My bad. Yes, LLM is not quite there yet.

A personal relationship and trust, as seems to be the case here?

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

#57

Post by throwjd848rjr »

felipeerias wrote: post #19

The other side of this is that open source projects that allow AI tools will be more restrictive towards new contributors. This already happens to some degree on large software projects with corporate backing (Web engines, compilers, etc.), where it is often not trivial to start contributing as an independent individual. Reasonable people can disagree on whether one approach is inherently better than the other, as ul…

Imagine getting contributions from someone, who has no access to build system and tests.

If I have a test harness, and LLM workflow setup, it is easier to just write new code myself. I am not giving away my "secret sauce". And I will not have a debate "why this simple feature needs 1000 new tests...", and two days just to make a full release build.

For merge I have to do 99% of work anyway (analyze, autotest, build, smoke, regression test). I usually merge smaller commits just to be polite (and not to look like one man show), but there is no way to accept large refactoring!

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

#59

Post by IshKebab »

vga1 wrote: post #49
omnimus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When somebody comments PR with “Incredible work, Jacob. It is an honor to call you my colleague.” then it's safe to assume it's out of the ordinary contribution. Pretty much falling outside of the “in all likelyhood”. 3000 line LLM commit is not that.

How would you differentiate a 3000 line LLM commit made by the best models and good AI processes from a 3000 line commit made by the best human developer? edit Okay, I set the bar too high here with "best human developer" and vague "good AI processes". My bad. Yes, LLM is not quite there yet.

It's still fairly obvious just by skimming the code. The best AI models are still quite far from the best human developers in ability and especially in code quality.

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

#60

Post by thomascountz »

omnimus wrote: post #45
jeffmess wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubt it: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/24536

When somebody comments PR with “Incredible work, Jacob. It is an honor to call you my colleague.” then it's safe to assume it's out of the ordinary contribution. Pretty much falling outside of the “in all likelyhood”. 3000 line LLM commit is not that.

No description provided. I love this PR. But yeah, try being anyone besides Jacob and submitting that!
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