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Posted by lumpa 13 hours ago

The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy(simonwillison.net)
459 points | 243 commentspage 4
feverzsj 11 hours ago|
No human should trust any bullshit made by bullshit machine.
slopinthebag 9 hours ago||
Very convenient of Mr. Willison to omit the fact that Bun's upstream changes are total garbage and would not be upstreamed regardless of any policies, omitting LLM generated code or not, since they are, as a zig core team member articulated in a classier way, shite.
simonw 1 hour ago||
I hadn't see that post when I wrote this. I've updated it now to add a link.

What were you trying to imply by "very convenient"?

throwa356262 9 hours ago|||
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...

000ooo000 8 hours ago||
Notable quotes:

>There’s the 4x speedup claimed by the Bun team, already available on Zig 0.16.0!

>Each [incremental] update is taking less than 0.4s, compared to the 120+ seconds taken to rebuild with LLVM. In other words, incremental updates are over 300 times faster on this codebase than fresh LLVM builds are. In comparison, an enhancement capped at a 4x improvement is pretty abysmal. [..] Again, this feature is available in Zig 0.16.0—you can use it!

fg137 4 hours ago||
I have learned to take always Willison's words with a giant grain of salt, despite how popular those articles are here.
simonw 1 hour ago||
How can I do better?
slopinthebag 9 hours ago||
Go zig! I don't use the language but I totally respect where they're coming from and their mission and ethics.

For those who are pissed because a large OSS project isn't accepting LLM generated slop: Fuck off!

_stiletto_ 1 hour ago||
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jimmypk 3 hours ago||
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techpulselab 7 hours ago||
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njanne 7 hours ago||
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marlburrow 9 hours ago||
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qzgrid37 2 hours ago||
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jwzxgo 13 hours ago|
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mapontosevenths 11 hours ago|
> unless it's coming from a known and trusted developer.

That's exactly the sketchy part here. They turned down known, working and tested, code that came from a partner (bun) due to this policy. Code that 4x'd compile speed.

A general ban makes sense based on their rationalization ("contributor poker"[0]). A total and inflexible ban can lead to a worse outcome for everyone though.

If a senior, experienced, contributor vouches for the code it shouldn't matter if they hand crafted it on stone tablets, generated it with yarrow sticks, or used gpt-3.

[0] https://kristoff.it/blog/contributor-poker-and-ai/

lelanthran 9 hours ago|||
> That's exactly the sketchy part here. They turned down known, working and tested, code that came from a partner (bun) due to this policy. Code that 4x'd compile speed.

No; they turned it down because the vibe-coded PR was crap.

> The rewritten type resolution semantics were designed to avoid these issues, but Bun’s Zig fork does not incorporate the changes (and has not otherwise solved the design problems), which means their parallelized semantic analysis implementation will exhibit non-deterministic behavior. That’s pretty much a non-starter for most serious developers: you don’t want your compilation to randomly fail with a nonsense error 30% of the time.

lmm 10 hours ago||||
> If a senior, experienced, contributor vouches for the code it shouldn't matter if they hand crafted it on stone tablets, generated it with yarrow sticks, or used gpt-3.

The flip side of that is that if such a contributor vouches for code that turns out to be poor-quality, this should severely damage their reputation. I've found far too many "senior" developers will give AI a pass on poor coding practices.

JoshTriplett 11 hours ago||||
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958209
superb_dev 11 hours ago|||
A standout paragraph from that thread:

> Put more simply, we are going to make these enhancements, but hacking them in for a flashy headline isn’t a good outcome for our users. Instead we’re approaching the problem with the care it deserves, so that when we ultimately ship it, we don’t cause regressions.

These exact changes are already on the roadmap and Bun’s PR is rushing ahead.

mapontosevenths 11 hours ago|||
Thanks. That explains away most of my concern.
feverzsj 11 hours ago|||
Quite the contrary, Bun's developers don't even understand language spec. Their slop didn't use the same type resolution semantics as Zig, which makes their implementation exhibits non-deterministic behavior.
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