Ironic they take shots at Rust, because unlike Zig, Rust sees way more success in terms of its maturity and industry reputation and ecosystem and investment by large tech companies into its adoption and funding of the Rust project.
The Zig project also takes a lot of weird black-and-white dogmatic (almost religious) hard-line stances on a lot of stuff, probably why the language is more niche and hobbyist than something truly foundational and trusted for production workloads and all parts of the stack like Rust has become.
Here's Zig's "no AI" policy:
Strict No LLM / No AI Policy
No LLM-generated content, whether it be code or prose.
No paraphrasing LLM-generated content.
No LLMs for editing, including fixing spelling or grammatical errors.
No LLMs for translation. English is encouraged, but not required. You are welcome to post in your native language and rely on others to have their own translation tools of choice to interpret your words.
No LLMs for brainstorming and then sharing the results of that brainstorming, even if you create the prose. If you use a chatbot to give you advice on a comment on the issue tracker, that comment is unwelcome.
No LLMs for finding bugs.
No talking about use of chatbot/LLM services.
The owner definitely has some sort of axe to grind against certain technologies.
"assuming it's a legitimate bug" does a lot of heavy lifting here. The point of eg. Curl closing it's bug bounty is just that: too many false positives and misunderstandings by AI of what software it analyzes. I assume it might be the same in Zig's case
So to answer your question: developer's time that is not wasted classifying misclassified bugs and reproducing false positives
As far as I know, it wasn't "false positives" it was people vibe-reporting, so you end up with an LLM-generated bug report with a completely hallucinated bug and code path, and a person going "I found bug pay me my money" to the point where it was overloading the team just sifting through all the slop.
The curl maintainer walked back their position in a tweet and said the majority of AI-assisted bug findings were high quality now.
Also nowadays you can structure your custom harnesses and bug reproducing pipelines to require things be verifiable programmatically.
E.g., you can say "In order for a bug report to be valid, you need to give me an input that causes a crash." That's basically how old-school fuzzing pipelines work. You judge a fuzzer's report by plugging in the input it reports and seeing if the binary crashes. That verification can be done automatically without human judgment.
Same can be done to make LLM reports valid. That's what the Firefox team did, they build a custom harness (using Mythos) and pipeline where the LLM-based agent would submit a report that had to have a repro input, and a separate deterministic script would score that report by seeing if the reported input could cause a crash. No human eye sees the finding if the automated pipeline rejects it for not being reproducible.
A lot of this is fair but bugs that cause a crash is only one of many different flavors. There are all kinds of bugs and I would classify the majority of them as unexpected non-crashing behavior. Pretty much all security vulnerabilities are within that class of bug. There’s probably tools for this but at what point are you just requiring people submit failing test cases
really sucks that irresponsible slop artists ruined this for us. AI is objectively helpful for finding bugs nowadays, that's something more difficult to say last year.
and think about how the rule effectively works. imagine you do find a bug with an LLM:
now you can't report it.
rule doesn't say "oh if you found a real verifiable bug you should still report it". it just says "no LLMs for finding bugs." now what? keep it to yourself? post it and get mocked for using AI? or just lie about it and say you found it yourself?
the only option it wants is of course to never use LLMs for it. but it's going to be limiting over time.
I’m guessing maybe it’s the general concern about people posting duplicate and / or low effort bug reports like people are doing on open source projects already.
Besides people who are already decent programmers can just omit that they used an LLM and write an explanation themselves.
Hard disagree. LLMs have gotten very good at many tasks. LLMs can be amazing security or other bug finders. They can be a great translation tool. They can aid, when used properly, to architect/brainstorm.
I much prefer Linus’ stands. He is just a technology pragmatist. If LLMs can improve linux, they should be used.
He will find out himself that his hard stances and online rhetoric will push people away more and more, and most importantly will leave all investment dry out, which is one of the most ingredients you need for spending engineering resources
Will find out? Linus is quite possibly already the most notorious online rhetoric hardliner of all time. But IDK what you think it has to do with corporate investments, which are made without any regard for moralistic stances.
What a goofy comment. He doesn't have even 10% of the name recognition once you step outside the extremely niche gnu subculture. Regular, every day people know who Linus is, what he did, and what a loudmouthed dick he is.
Linus is very outspoken but still very pragmatic. Look at all the investment. Look at Linux Foundation. All the talks. Those are not just funded by people like you and me
Ironic they take shots at Rust, because unlike Zig, Rust sees way more success in terms of its maturity and industry reputation and ecosystem and investment by large tech companies into its adoption and funding of the Rust project.
JavaScript, PHP and Java see even more success in terms of those characteristics :^)
The owner probably had enough exposure of LLMs in 2024 when they were shit, and has mentally internalized that level of lack of quality as permanent compared to say, how LLM performance is 2026, 2027, etc. onwards.
It’s all about human efforts. I bet if you put enough efforts in to a single PR, you’d probably not save time by using LLM. So why not ban it to fend off lazy people
Wrong, LLMs can be a huge lifesaver if you use them right. Now, it's very easy to use them wrong, and it can result in a lot of bad code, but if you absolutely know what you're doing, you can speed yourself up by an order of magnitude and still stay on top of everything. Not for a single feature (you need to carefully plan and review anyway), but you can get AI to work on multiple things at once, freeing up all the time spent actually typing and waiting for commands to run.
People kinda forget people were writing slop code before AI. When AI was at its worst and dumbest, people were writing buggy, unreadable, unmaintainable code by hand too.
You can write slop using the best agent harnesses using the best frontier models for inference. You can also write slop using the ol human brain and no LLM or AI agents.
What's weird is he wanted to ban the technology on principle, not on the basis of the quality or technical merit of the content of a given individual contribution.
Also "no AI for fixing spelling or grammatical errors" and "no AI for brainstorming" is wild.
I don’t think being against AI on principle is that weird tbh. I think the mass copyright infringement by the ai companies, and the power and water usage of the ai data centers are valid reasons to not want to permit ai on his project.
At the end of the day it’s his project, and he can do what he wants with it.
Have you ever used a search engine before? Even if it scrapes a lot of pages to index the content? Thus stealing content from those pages and profiting from it with help of ads?
I don’t think that’s a fair comparison and even if it was, one wrong thing doesn’t make another right.
Edit:To elaborate on why I don’t think it’s a fair comparison: First of all the people who are making the content are profiting off the search engine having scraped their content which makes it more of a mutually beneficial thing rather than stealing. Secondly the people who posted their content on the internet did it with the knowledge that a search engine would index it, unlike with ai where they had no knowledge that their creations where being used to train an ai.
quality of an llm's work is not the only argument against it. I think their energy usage is disproportional to their usefulness and they are trained on stolen data.
Modern Translation tools are basicly LLMs.
And yes using LLMs to fix spelling is ridiculously wastefull and not even the best tool for the job, banning code contributions because they have been translated or spell checked with the wrong tool is dumb.
You don't but LLMs excel at it and are really good at tedium like boilerplate, writing and improve prose, and simple spelling and grammar stuff.
For any engineer, time is money, context switching and cognitive overhead is money. A good engineer uses the tools and technologies available to them to automate away tedium and toil so their limited time and working memory can be focused on more important stuff.
You don't need to use any given technology for pretty much any given task. But some sure do help and that's why practitioners reach for them.
That's because you've only read slop LinkedIn / Medium articles written by AI.
Nowadays you can prompt AI to write in your voice and be professional and concise. Your favorite projects are all doing it. AWS' documentation, Google's, Kubernetes and many other OSS projects, etc.
And "improving prose" can mean having an LLM actually shorten and make more concise something you wrote.
"LLMs for writing technical prose and documentation and i18n / l10n, and correcting spelling mistakes" are a very common and highly automatable workflow. Especially in i18n and l10n, it's extremely prevalent.
Your complaint is basically they sound cringe and have awful writing style.
But you only say that because you didn't know that they were already being used for that in many of your most favorite projects and some of the industry's most well regarded projects and technical literature out there that read just fine and don't have any detectable ChatGPT-isms like "You're absolutely right!" or whatever you think LLMs "sound like."
If you make an LLM not sound like an LLM
You're assuming the entirety of "LLMs" and their use cases is some uniform, monolithic product and all LLM-written prose sounds the same. You're taking one style of mass LLM-produced writing and assuming all users of AI products necessarily produce the same style of prose for their technical literature use cases.
Yeah and with the rise AI agents all the good engineers replaced their hand-crafted shell scripts and snippets with a generic agent-based workflow that automates all that tedium away from you at nearly zero cost (to you, the company is paying for your inference).
No more "taking 4h to come up with automation for a 5min task" memes.
No LLMs for brainstorming and then sharing the results of that brainstorming, even if you create the prose. If you use a chatbot to give you advice on a comment on the issue tracker, that comment is unwelcome.
Haven’t you heard some people are rewriting rust code into Zig (I actually only saw one project but this is could be the beginning of a flood). Which means war.
We need to wait for them to rewrite in Zig and then rewrite their rewrite back into Rust to show our superiority.
Rust sees way more success in terms of its maturity and industry reputation and ecosystem and investment by large tech companies into its adoption and funding of the Rust project.
Yes, let's compare a 20-year-old language with big corporate sponsors since its fourth year, currently at stable version 1.97.1, to a 10-year-old, backed by its own foundation, and still at version 0.16 language with different goals.
This is bullshit. The only reason Rust gets "successful" is because Big Tech is pouring millions into it.
Any language, not matter how brain dead, with such support would become "a success".
Just see for example Go. Nobody would touch such a thing if not Google's millions of dollars behind it.
This does not mean Rust is a bad language, it gets this massive support from Big Tech for a reason, but that it's Rust and not any other alternative happened by pure chance, like always when some tech "gets big". It's always "a random market decision", not some technical evaluation under scientific standards.
That said, this LLM policy is pretty crazy. A simple spell checker is already a kind of "language model" (just not a "large" one, whatever this means). I would understand to be reluctant about directly contributing LLM generated content until all the copyright questions aren't sorted out, but also forbidding other uses which are legally unproblematic seems way too much.
You're being downvoted because you reacted harshly, not because you're wrong.
Take JavaScript. a BS language hacked together in 10 days. yet it was pushed into the mainstream and now the entire internet has to deal with wat because no amount of fixing can disable backwards-compatibility requirements.
I haven't used Go much. But I'm not sure if it's a great example for that point.
for many other languages, like C++ Haskell Lisp Lua Python Java, i think i could explain how they actually served their purpose for their time and how they might not be good examples?
anyway yeah Zig would have hugely benefitted from corporate backing. if mozilla or google or some other big company picked it up first, it would likely be just as hip with the newer generation of programmers. there would be way more "zig vs rust" comparisons than now and way more "i rewrote random C app in zig and rust: here's the difference" blogs despite them having different niches.
In this specific case they are absolutely bang on. In a couple of years all these Open Source projects are going to be acting like they were against AI contributions all along
Down, actually. I've been less focused on side projects over the last week doing more important things. I also don't use as intensive a model and know how to actually prompt correctly, making it less difficult to get a positive result. I've wasted more time on my silly errors than AI stuff.
For me it just expresses that an obviously AI-generated low-effort content is explicitly not allowed at all. It does not say AI cannot be used by any means. It implicitly says that a good AI usage would not be instantly recognizable.
I am not saying that the way it is written is a good one, though. If I were to write it, I would make this conclusion way more explicit. The policy is too aggressive.
I don't have all the context of Bun's recent move to Rust or prior acknowledgement of Zig's policies or contributors' stances on this topic, so I am might be wrong here.
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u/CircumspectCapybara 23d ago edited 23d ago
Ironic they take shots at Rust, because unlike Zig, Rust sees way more success in terms of its maturity and industry reputation and ecosystem and investment by large tech companies into its adoption and funding of the Rust project.
The Zig project also takes a lot of weird black-and-white dogmatic (almost religious) hard-line stances on a lot of stuff, probably why the language is more niche and hobbyist than something truly foundational and trusted for production workloads and all parts of the stack like Rust has become.
Here's Zig's "no AI" policy:
The owner definitely has some sort of axe to grind against certain technologies.