About LLMs at Zig Days

robbiewxyz

Approaching significant change with humanity asks us to have empathy for many emotions at once. With respect to LLMs & other generative models those include but aren't limited to: * Excitement from people who are able to make things they could not, * Fear from people who's livelihoods are threatened, * Betrayal from artists whose work is being ripped off, * Alarm from activists looking out for ecosystems & the climate. To add to an already-difficult challenge: many people, corporations, & governments are pushing extreme greed, hubris, & dehumanization for various reasons. This piece does an excellent job laying out its recommendations with sensitivity for people of different perspectives & positions. I very much appreciate that.

GaggiX

The giant Umarell in the background is a nice piece of furniture. Edit: I noticed later it was in Milan, I guess it makes perfect sense.

jdlshore

For those who aren’t aware, as I wasn’t, this is coming from the “VP of Community” at the Zig Foundation. So the proposal to soft ban LLMs at Zig Day meetups seems like it has a bit more weight than if it was some random community member. (I’m not a member of the community, so not fully aware of the dynamics.)

feverzsj

Just ban LLM. It's events for human beings, not LLMs.

sigmar

>My recommendation is also to not choose an extreme approach (e.g. by completely banning LLM-related discourse) unless you feel very strongly about it. Organizers are allowed to ban the mention of certain programming topics? I could understand if it was a topic that was adjacent to violence/harassment/sensitive stuff, but come on... are anti-AI groups becoming a cult?

sgt

This is so sad. "Maybe - just maybe" > [...] the best career move is to become proficient at buying more tokens orchestrating agents, but I would still recommend not putting all your eggs in one basket just yet because maybe – just maybe – there will still be some value in knowing how systems work, both to differentiate yourself from other developers career-wise, and as part of effective LLM steering.

myth_drannon

LLMs 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.

skeledrew

Be 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.