Posted by lumpa 16 hours ago
It's a critique of low effort PRs compared to the high effort review they require.
There are plenty of less stringent projects for people who to get better at open source to contribute to.
“Artisanal” and “Zig” are just about synonymous
Doing manual reviews of everything is very labor intensive and not scalable. However, AIs are pretty good at doing code reviews and verifying adherence to guard rails, contributor guidelines, and other rules. It's not perfect, but it's an underused tool. Both by reviewers and contributors. If your contribution obviously doesn't comply with the guidelines, it should be rejected automatically. The word "obviously" here translates into "easy to detect with some AI system".
Projects should be using a lot of scrutiny for contributions by new contributors. And most of that scrutiny should be automated. They should reserve their attention for things that make it past automated checks for contribution quality, contributor reputability, adherence to whatever rules are in place, etc. Reputability is a good way to ensure that contributions from reputable sources get priority. If your reputation is not great, you should expect more scrutiny and a lower priority.
Until the contributions are cheap and correct, you need valuable contributors more than you need the contributions.
You point would be valid when we get to a point of contributions all being both correct and cheap. Right now they are only cheap.
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.
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.
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.
Without AI, I’m a guy spending years learning C++ in spare time I don’t have to develop software concepts and solutions I want to work on TODAY.
The ZIG project, to me, has a place. Legacy coders right now do need protecting.
It’s not people like me that they need protection from.
It’s not even language models they need protection from.
What they need protection from are the corporate structures who falsely believe that this technology makes them obsolete.
The article talks about “playing the person, not the cards” and that thinking has one fatal flaw: the vibe coder is a person. The vibe coder may have creative agency that the legacy coder does not.
Look, I still cross up French and Spanish words because I took a year of each, C++ syntax, Python syntax, HTML, I understand their structures but I’m liable to start out writing a Python script and wind up with half a web page and a brutal error message in my IDE environment.
Zig’s motivation is correct in many ways I think. I am not really their target audience or their target coder. But I am also not their target enemy. Put the right group of legacy thinkers in my think tank, and the code would get even better.
-The Court Jester of Vibe Code