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Pretty much sums up the LLM fanbase.

Fake it ‘till you make it. Seems like LLM’s have caught-on to that too.

You can curb an LLM into doing what you want. Unfortunately people don't have the patience or the skill.

Yes, that reply provides convincing arguments for not merging the Bun fork, as it interferes with Zig's own roadmap for achieving even better results, while continuing to improve the whole language.

A single PR for a 3000-line addition would, in all likelihood, be rejected anyway.

What’s the point in debating the PR quality? The policy explicitly forbids all LLM code, so that policy is of course the “real reason”.

Unfortunately, those are largely words of a foregone era. The zeromq "community" today is tenuous. It has some really good people in it, the few that remain active, but the human-level processes and communication channels are ill defined and not well "staffed". In some ways, this lack of human activity and interactivity is perhaps okay and even justified given how stable libzmq and most of its bindings are (and the sub-ecosystem around particular bindings are a bit more active). Perhaps Hintjens' grand (and excellent, imo) vision got zeromq to where it is but the project feels to have gone adrift since we lost him. Somewhat ironic to his community-centric vision statement (the guide) it seems a project needs a charismatic and active leader to gain and retain a community. I guess that says more about human nature than it does about software development.

I'm not sure how to tie this all back to the zig story other than to point out the stated premise that zig is not short of PRs and so they can pre-select for no-LLM contributions. I think that is a good move for them and I get the "contributor poker" idea. But, the game changes when the premise breaks and the flow of newbies reduces to a trickle. At that point, if there are still active zig people who still want newbies, they may need to broaden their net. But if/when that happens, it may be too late to recover by opening to LLM-assisted contributions.

Also my experience. Though my actual ability to remember the language nuances and stdlib is suffering from this :(

maybe you are not bottlnecked by coding. but there is high probability that you will be bottlenecked by verifying the correctness of LLM-generated code.

Rule should be whatever the people running the project think the rule should be. If you've got your own project, do implement the anti-fully-autonomous-PRs rule for your project. But the creators of Zig do not owe you or me the rule we like.

> Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own?

I've been thinking about this a bunch recently, and I've realized that the thing I value most in software now isn't robust tests or thorough documentation - an LLM can spit those out in a few minutes. It's usage. I want to use software which other people have used before me. I want them to have encountered the bugs and sharp edges and sanded them down.

I remember hearing the same arguments in the early 2010s, when the "3D printing revolution" was just around the corner. Why would anyone buy anything anymore if you can download a model and print it in the privacy of your home? And make it infinitely customizable?

The whole point of having a civilization is that most things in life can be made someone else's problem and you can focus on doing one thing well. If I'm a dentist or if I run a muffler shop, there are only so many hours in a day, so I'd probably rather pay a SaaS vendor than learn vibecoding and then be stuck supervising a weird, high-maintenance underling that may or may not build me the app with the features I need (and that I might not be able to articulate clearly). There are exceptions, but they're just that, exceptions. If a vendor is reasonable and makes a competent product, I'll gladly pay.

The same goes for open source... even if an LLM could reliably create a brand new operating system from scratch, would I really want it to? I don't want to maintain an OS. I don't want to be in charge of someone who maintains an OS. I don't necessarily trust myself to have a coherent vision for an OS in the first place!

That only holds true for the smallest tier of open source projects. Past a certain point of complexity, it's unlikely you can expect the robot to read your mind well enough to provide something of high quality and 'outstanding for just you'.

The Zig project is certainly far beyond such capability.

LLM access is not yet universally available. There are those who can't exactly afford it. And there are also those with access but there are occasional or perennial issues, like Claude outages and general degraded performance over time. For example couple of months ago when I just started using Claude, I was easily making good progress on multiple projects within a week. Nowadays I'm hardly getting through much of anything as most of the time Claude is just showing spinners, and it also feels like the code quality has taken a nosedive.

I've been seeing a drop in PRs against my repositories. I have a couple of repositories with around a hundred stars. Nothing spectacular but they were getting occasional PRs until last year. This year I've had almost none so far. My theory is that LLMs prefer sticking to mainstream projects. And since lots of developers are now leaning heavily on LLMs, they are biased to ignoring most of what I provide.

And you indeed get a lot of wheel reinvention by LLMs because that is now cheap to do. So rather than using some obscure thing on Github (like my stuff), it's easier to just generate what you need. I've noticed this with my own choices in dependencies as well. I tend to just go with what the LLM suggests unless I have a very good reason not to.

Most people don’t have the ability to read code well enough to determine if an LLM output is good or not. And most people don’t have subscriptions to models that can develop non-trivial programs…

Maybe this will be a real problem in a couple years though.

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.

LLMs really can't do as much as you people think they can.

>> Whereas earlier you had to use something that was mass produced to be satisfactory for everyone

As someone who recently started using OpenSCAD for a project I find this attitude quite irritating. You certainly did not "have to" use popular tools.

The OpenSCAD example is particularly illuminating because it's fussy and frustrating and clearly tuned towards a few specific maintainers; there's a ton of things I'd like changed. But I would never trust an LLM to do it! "Oh the output looks fine, cool" is not enough for a CAD program. "Oh, there are a lot of tests, cool" great, I have no idea what a thorough CAD test suite looks like. I would be a reckless idiot if I asked Claude to make me a custom SCAD program... unless I put in a counterproductive amount of work. So I'm fine with OpenSCAD.

I am also sincerely baffled as to how this stimulates the "labor economy." The most obvious objection is that Anthropic seems to be the only party here getting any form of economic benefit: the open-source maintainers are just plain screwed unless they compromise quality for productivity, and the LLM users are trading high-quality tooling built by people who understand the problem for shitty tooling built by a robot, in exchange for uncompensated labor. It only stimulates the "labor economy" in a Bizarro Keynesian sense, digging up glass bottles that someone forgot to put the money in.

I have seen at least 4 completely busted vibe-coded Rust SQLite clones in the last three months, happily used by people who think they don't need to worry their pretty little heads with routine matters like database design. It's a solved problem and Claude is on the case! In fact unlike those stooopid human SQLIte developers, Claude made it multithreaded! So fucking depressing.

> Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own?

Because it is incredibly expensive to write a replacement for semi-complex software? Good luck asking frontier models to write a replacement for Zig, Docker, VSCode, etc.

> Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own?

Iff it is doable, then it would be worth considering it as alternative.

> It also stimulates the labor economy, because you have lots of people everywhere reinventing open source projects with their LLMs.

not sure what you mean by that

They're banning all AI though, so it looks pretty much anti-AI to me.

If it gets outdated they can review their policy. Right now it is sensible. We're at early ages of this type of AI and we don't know what the end game will be.

Someone forking it and makeing it better with AI is a possibility. If that happens will know it was better for the project for the maintainers to just review the code. If that happens, they can probably become maintainers in the fork. Or maybe they don't like that work and could just go do something else

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!

yeah giving a llm git blame and git grep has saved me a lot of time of doing boring basically re.

Ur/Web! That's something I haven't heard about in ages. Is it still in active development? In what circumstances are you using it? Fun, your own startup, is some secret big commercial user of it...?

Please elaborate?

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...

You need to look past this. Zig is an excellent low-level language. Thanks to the comptime features, you can have high-level looking APIs while staying down to the metal. It's not for everyone, obviously, but as a language, it is really good.

You have to be wilfully blind, then. It gets rather frequently praised on HN (as much as any niche language can be), and they certainly don't make black-and-white moral judgements often.

no cite?

If you see them, why don't you help squash them?

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).

You still have to review everything manually again anyway. It's a compiler for a language, bugs and bad architecture decisions cost a lot. They moved to codeberg, so there are less garbage PRs now. They try to grow a culture where you expected to deliver good code in the PRs so the review takes less time.

It takes like 5 minutes to spot garbage PRs manually. LLM can flood you with a wall of text where only half of the stuff make sense. Also, they can't really spot bad architecture. It's a compiler in an unpopular language, don't forget that.

> [you can] stop accepting imperfect PRs in order to maximize ROI from your work, but that’s not what we do in the Zig project

The real bottle neck when you want to grow is connecting with the right people. An LLM is not helping with that if you want to build a community. When you use LLM to skip the need to understand a problem how are you ever going to get a reputation that I can trust?

The post is not about reputation it about seeing how people respond and work with you in a community.

EDIT: I see that you frame it as a help and a tool and sure it might work, but I feel like it is just another obstacle.

> the burden of manually reviewing contributions... [a]nd the need to automate that with AI as well.

I suggest we also automate the distribution and the use of software with AI as well, and then just all go to the beach and sip on some cocktails or something.

Or in other words: Good luck with that.

>As always, the most ethical thing to do is to just ignore any anti-LLM policies and not disclose anything

How does this have anything to do with ethics? Its their project not yours, they can reject your PR for whatever reason, including you using LLMs for developing that PR. Also they're not assuming autonomous agents submitting PRs. They're saying that they do not accept PRs where any part of the thinking process was outsourced to a LLM.

Even if you disagree with their opinion, the ethical thing to do is to not interact and move on. Not to try to sneak in your LLM assisted PRs without the maintainers consent.

Can you elaborate on the ethics of expressly ignoring the wishes of the project ownership?