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

jwzxgo

I talked to developers of https://deerflow.tech/ and they pretty much had the same plan, unless it's coming from a known and trusted developer.

jart

> 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 open source project was vibe coded. AI and technology in general makes personalization cheap and affordable. Whereas earlier you had to use something that was mass produced to be satisfactory for everyone, now you have the hope of getting something that's outstanding for just you. It also stimulates the labor economy, because you have lots of people everywhere reinventing open source projects with their LLMs.

feverzsj

No human should trust any bullshit made by bullshit machine.

hitekker

Apparently, the noise around the AI policy came from Bun's developers saying that policy blocks upstreaming their performance PR. But the real reason seems to be that PR's code itself isn't in great shape, and introduces unhealthy complexity https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-s-zig-fork-got-4x-faster-compilatio... > Parallel semantic analysis has been an explicitly planned feature of the Zig compiler for a long time, and it has heavily influenced the design of the self-hosted Zig compiler. However, implementing this feature correctly has implications not only for the compiler implementation, but for the Zig language itself! Therefore, to implement this feature without an avalanche of bugs and inconsistencies, we need to make language changes.

buggymcbugfix

One reason I love writing production code in Ur/Web is that LLMs are incapable of synthesising something even remotely resembling it. Keeps me on my toes. I think this is a great policy by the Zig team.

felipeerias

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 ultimately they seem to be optimising for different goals.