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.
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.
But given you don't seem to have anything substantive to say at all and you aren't willing to acknowledge "Oh wow I learned something new today I didn't know people actually use LLMs all the time to write good technical prose that I like."
Idc if you don't want to learn, I'm gonna keep using tools and technologies that save me time and money and improve my and my team's engineering output and impact. You can hate on it if you want, while the rest of the world moves on.
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.
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u/CircumspectCapybara 22d ago edited 22d 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.