This seems like a very positive move to me. It makes it clear what Zig days are about so people know what to expect. There are 1000s of other events for people who want to build with LLMs so it's nice to have some recourse for those who still want to code by hand
About LLMs at Zig Days
81–90 of 90 posts
Re: About LLMs at Zig Days
#82LLMs are just pushed by everyone at us, people just can't stand hearing about it anymore even if they use it and find it helpful. It's like at PyCon2026 the keynote was about LLM, and people were just leaving in the middle, including GvR.
BUILD 2026 is happening next week and from the agenda I already seen it is worthless to spend any time looking at its sessions, other than probably what Mark Russinovich has to tell about Azure, almost everything else is AI.
Re: About LLMs at Zig Days
#83Be interesting to see where Zig and ecosystem is in a few years with this general anti-LLM stance from it's core people. My guess is it'll just make it's way as a hobby language, left behind in the dust. Which is of course a perfectly fine thing for some.
My stance is that it already is like that, now TigerBeetle, Ghosty and Roc are the only major projects using it, and none of them are something that drives adoption of new programming languages.
Bun could have been that, if addons were to be written in Zig, that is now gone.
So unless something comes up where "you need to use Zig to play here" becomes a requirement, it will stay as a language where some folks have fun using it, and that's it.
Re: About LLMs at Zig Days
#84Be interesting to see where Zig and ecosystem is in a few years with this general anti-LLM stance from it's core people. My guess is it'll just make it's way as a hobby language, left behind in the dust. Which is of course a perfectly fine thing for some.
People from ZSF and other maintainers have had a pretty clear stance that, while they don't necessarily like LLMs conceptually, they don't really care about if you will use them for tooling or development of your own projects. The anti-LLM stance has been on things that directly affect development of Zig (communication around issues, feature/pull requests, etc) and now, an event which is meant to be a connection place for Zig developers around the world to show off their projects and talk about other projects, and I'm sure you understand why this is a nice place to have human on human communication be the primarily encouraged method.
None of these really affect the end user of the compiler of making functioning, good tools with the language, with a LLM, if they wish to. Ghostty uses LLMs extensively, Bun was essentially vibe coded even before the Rust port. You might not wish to, ideologically speaking, develop in a language built by people who don't like your method of building things, but it's not a blocker that will turn the language into a "hobby language" (if we are judging hobbyism by lack of AI usage)
Re: About LLMs at Zig Days
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's going pretty far out on a limb (hah!) to create some artificial relevance given the context. Meanwhile LLMs are easily relevant in almost every way that matters to programming languages, more than even IDEs.
That doesn’t limit formation of a subcommittee to concentrate their discussion for the health of the group. Any topic is eligible based on group impact regardless of its perceived breadth by those avidly discussing it.
Subcommittees/subgroups are perfectly fine of course. But, again, given the context, this isn't that case. This is a core person in the ecosystem making a strong suggestion about how general groups should operate. Doesn't take much imagination to see things get to a point where only groups that seriously discourage or outright ban anything re LLMs are considered "legitimate". It's their prerogative of course but... lol.
Re: About LLMs at Zig Days
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Joel_Mckay is responding to a glib comment that sugarcoats and trivializes the theft. Just like you do. People need to be reminded of reality in their newspeak bubble.
Re-stating an opinion does not somehow establish it as a fact. I'd welcome an effort to support what you're saying instead of just hand-waving this as some sort of self-evident fact of the universe.
Most of OpenAI CEO rhetoric doesn't hold up to even cursory reason.
"People talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model - but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes about 20 years of life - and all the food you consume during that time - before you become smart." (Sam Altman)
Let us take a worst case upper favorable estimate of his flippant statement:
Adult Human peak power W: 600
Average U.S. home yearly kWh: 10500
20 Years = 7300 Days = 175200 Hours
Human_metabolic_kWh = 105120
Home_shelter_kWh = 210000
Total_20Y_Human_Life_kWh = 315120
US average electricity cost is @17.65¢/kWh, and according to sources the LLM models took “1.2 million kWh for older foundational models to upwards of 11 billion kWh for next-generation frontiers". So if true that means:
1200000 kWh = $211,800 USD
11000000000 kWh = $1,941,500,000 USD
In other metrics that means we know:
1200000 kWh trained LLM = 4 Human lives reallocated
11000000000 kWh trained LLM = 34907 Human lives reallocated
Sam claiming 34907 Human lives is a small price to pay for a 85% accurate nonsense machine is ridiculous hyperbolic nonsense, and or the data they are publishing is inaccurate.
People have a right to be displeased with the industry dismissing peoples concerns. =3
Re: About LLMs at Zig Days
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to avoid the topic when it literally redefines what it means to create software. If I'm using it to create some piece of software, then I turn around and say "I wrote this" am I even being truthful? But if I'm trying to avoid mentioning LLMs what other wording could I use?
> It's hard to avoid the topic when it literally redefines what it means to create software. Say that the IDE also "redefined what it meant to create software" when it entered the ecosystem as an idea and product, does that mean every conversation, community meetup and thinking needs to consider the IDEs now? Probably not, then there is no more room for the other topics anymore.
You could say it's more akin to if we have all been writing in a assembly and suddenly we got access to compilers and high level languages. Would we all be complaining that every conference is "about compilers"?
Re: About LLMs at Zig Days
#88Be interesting to see where Zig and ecosystem is in a few years with this general anti-LLM stance from it's core people. My guess is it'll just make it's way as a hobby language, left behind in the dust. Which is of course a perfectly fine thing for some.
My stance is that it already is like that, now TigerBeetle, Ghosty and Roc are the only major projects using it, and none of them are something that drives adoption of new programming languages. Bun could have been that, if addons were to be written in Zig, that is now gone. So unless something comes up where "you need to use Zig to play here" becomes a requirement, it will stay as a language where some folks have fu…
[deleted]
Re: About LLMs at Zig Days
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to avoid the topic when it literally redefines what it means to create software. If I'm using it to create some piece of software, then I turn around and say "I wrote this" am I even being truthful? But if I'm trying to avoid mentioning LLMs what other wording could I use?
This is a meetup for Zig the tool, so you would need to identify how you are interested in Zig to attend and not run into problems. “I want to [verb] with Zig someday and want to show up and listen and learn” “I [verb] with Zig and have formed opinions and want to swap them with others” “I [verb] with Zig and have not yet formed opinions” If you can’t identify a verb for such a sentence, then you probably need to gai…
You're assuming a file containing a statistical model that exists on your hard drive has agency. It doesn't. You as the user have sole agency and what you use the statistic file for.
Re: About LLMs at Zig Days
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a meetup for Zig the tool, so you would need to identify how you are interested in Zig to attend and not run into problems. “I want to [verb] with Zig someday and want to show up and listen and learn” “I [verb] with Zig and have formed opinions and want to swap them with others” “I [verb] with Zig and have not yet formed opinions” If you can’t identify a verb for such a sentence, then you probably need to gai…
You're assuming a file containing a statistical model that exists on your hard drive has agency. It doesn't. You as the user have sole agency and what you use the statistic file for.
> You as the user have sole agency and what you use the statistic file for.
Along with OS provider and any software developers that have included exfiltration and command vectors within any tools used on that drive.
Modern computers are sufficiently layered and complex that even cutting edge experts are surprised by what third parties have agency over local data.