Zig is really moving on this one.
If the Zig community carves out a territory of principled engineering like this, I may adopt it as my primary language and make a career out of it. Finally an island of sanity in a sea of slop.
Honestly, same. I initially dismissed Zig due to their insistence on making unused variables an error even in debug builds but if they keep this up I may have to just Get Over It.
You can easily get rid of an unused variable error with a
_ = var;statement (just make sure to remove them when you’re done)
Love that, what a cool dude
It’s beautiful
Can’t wait for the punchline.
No punchline, just found such hardline requirements potentially entertaining.
Yeah how do they want to enforce this if people use it for brainstorming?
It might not be enforceable, but why would they want to contribute to something that’s very against what they use? Out of spite?
Same reason as before this policy: they care about the project itself.
If you don’t view these tools as the devil, of course you might roll your eyes and say, that’s nice, anyway, here’s an improvement.
Like all of this ranges from unenforceable to spuriously enforceable (eg for rule 1, you can guess whether something has AI vibes—with vibe code it might be easier if the AI has just hallucinated a function or something). Seems more for the purpose of making a point than anything, or perhaps relying on others respecting your policy, but other projects with much more lenient no-AI policies still have people flagrantly breaking them.
iirc their goal is not to have a perfectly enforceable policy, it’s to cultivate a culture around the language that is fully in favor of human contributors instead of ai. to let people learn and improve as they contribute, instead of simply merging code that looks good enough; they call it contributor poker
What’s wrong with it? Honestly it’s kinda refreshing.
What’s wrong with it?
That’s a complete disregard of a useful tool that brings measurable benefits.
Shhh, you’re not supposed to notice that on Lemmy.
Nah, be it AI psychosis or anti-AI psychosis - neither should dictate us what to say.
Clearly they don’t find it useful.
Up to them. I only answered the question.
where are these measurable benefits? so far they haven’t really realized anywhere
Authors and maintainers of many open source tools that you use every day - whether that’s curl or linux with its army of developers - openly discuss the value LLMs bring. You either don’t care to listen or you choose to ignore their words because they contradict your beliefs.
Funnily enough, many people in the industry with years of experience and a strong reputation have a fairly balanced view of AI, recognizing both its advantages and disadvantages. Only on social media do you find people who blatantly deny any positive contributions (or folks who believe that AI is irreproachable, but you won’t find them on fedi).
Curl broke tho
There’s also huge downsides that everyone always seems to forget (enormous power/clean water usage, noise pollution, etc.)
To be fair, this is what bothers me more than the supposedly non-existent benefits, because I’ve seen LLMs being useful as tools, but the impact on environment is not clearly communicated (I’d wager it’s because no one wants to admit that it’s enormous). For that reason I’m trying to use local LLM instead, and it is more limited in usefulness but that’s fine by me as it’s not the only tool I have
It’s a resolution they’ve arrived after considering the benefits and downsides of that tool. Nukes can be used for efficient large-scale excavation, but people were sane enough to realize why nuking themselves was a horrible idea.
Considering only the benefits and not the risks and drawbacks of anything is not just reckless. It’s zealotry.
Nobody proposed to ignore risks, but okay, you wanted to win this argument - so you had to invent it.
Why are you on fedi if you love the corpo slop machine so much? This platform was specifically made to get away from people like you. Go back to linkedin.
Don’t you think too much of yourself and your role here? Lmao. What a buffoon 😂
Name 1 great struggle that humanity suffers from that “Ai” has resolved.
A nice low bar, set fairly and in good faith.
You’re missing the whole point of these requirements.
Zig is, first and foremost, an educational platform. If you’re contributing AI generated content you’re taking an educational opportunity form someone and not really gaining any meaningful experience yourself either.
At least what the creator said in an interview.It’s a good reason to ban AI contributions. I think there was a similar case with some math lib that made some noise a few months ago. Still, this policy is much broader: you cannot even use AI to fix grammar mistakes.
I’ve seen other takes of this in the comments and I’m inclined to agree with them.
I don’t believe the rules are as much about enforcement as they are about setting the tone. Yes, it seems very broad, but it’s much easier to point to a rule than to waste time arguing what is and is not a valid contribution.
The educational aspect isn’t the only thing no AI rules try to achieve. Denial of attention has become a real thing since LLMs were introduced, so having a strict no AI policy helps to save maintainer time.
Again this can be brought back to the educational argument: if a maintainer is spending time arguing about validity of AI contributions, they’re not sharing knowledge, but I’m not sure if that’s really the case in this particular instance.I don’t believe the rules are as much about enforcement as they are about setting the tone.
so having a strict no AI policy helps to save maintainer time
I agree. I do think that AI can be useful, but if maintainers are overwhelmed by low-quality and mass-produced contributions, then it isn’t useful - it’s harmful.
It should be noted that e.g. DeepL which is a very good AI translation service isn’t an LLM but rather falls into the category of “Neural machine translation”. So this would still be fine
LLM stands for “large language model” in other words, it is a big neural machine. Saying they don’t use LLMs is like saying the ocean isn’t blue, it’s azure.
LLMs work by increasing scale, number of separate neural networks, to increase accuracy when improvement from training hits a wall. Which is very problematic because it means power consumption becomes exponential. I think most people won’t have a problem with neural networks, but certainly do have a problem with LLMs.
Machine learning, neutral networks, AI, in general it’s very useful when trained at a specific task. LLMs are most certainly where things went wrong.
An LLM is a type of artificial neural network, but not every ANN is an LLM. So its a lot more like saying that not every red thing is a firetruck.
That is an extremely simple concept that even toddlers can understand.
DeepL uses plenty of LLMs internally and recently laid of around 1000 employees to “shift to AI”.
To be fair, LLMs do really good translations, but as with everything you use them for, you need to be familiar with the subject so you catch their mistakes.
I’m thinking beginner level so the LLM can support instead of replacing you while you get better.
LLMs do not do translations, they approximate something similar to the original statement in another language. They are very accurate when given a common piece to translate, but wildly accurate when given a sentence which is highly improbable.
they approximate something similar to the original statement in another language.
The funny thing is, for translating sentences or longer text, that’s what translation is. You can’t translate things 1:1, because different languages have different words, different phrases, different structures. You have to make some sacrifices somewhere, and the more you try to stick to a literal translation, the more stilted the result gets.
This isn’t to say LLMs are a good choice, but translation is an art more than it is a science, so to speak.
If it makes more mistakes than humans and therefor requires humans to check all of their work, and it’s been shown to not be very cost-effective, then what’s the point? Better to just not use the AI at all.
Human revision of a text is way faster than human writing of the same. A human can review way more translations than he can translate in the same time.
If that is your job, as long as the LLM can generate a decent translation, that is a good trade. This is not to say that there may not be better tools than LLMs, I’m not much into the business of translations.
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I kinda don’t agree, for me personally it’s faster to write than it would be to read and comprehend.
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Companies buy employees time the same way they buy tokens, the humans cost about the same for better results, so quickness isn’t really a factor here unless you’re willing to lower quality for speed and generally that isn’t the case with translation work.
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To be fair, LLMs do really good translations
Speaking as a multi-lingual person, they really don’t.
but as with everything you use them for, you need to be familiar with the subject so you catch their mistakes.
Yeah, which is precisely why they’re rubbish at translating things. In order to effectively use it to translate things, you need a good grasp on the source and target language, effectively making the tool useless.
That’s a fantastic way to make people hide their use of LLMs.
I use LLM for pretty much everything code-related these days. I would never make contributions to a project like Zig that specifically deny my contributions. I mean why would I specifically try to help them by directly breaking the rules they have set?
There’s an infinite amount of work to be done, no reason to harass opinionated people like that.
I’m considering banning non-LLM contributions to my projects, but I think it might be a bit too early for that.
They hiring?
I find the “no use of AI for finding bugs” weird, so long as you’re also confirming it yourself.
so long as you’re also confirming it yourself.
The issue is that 90% of them don’t.
They throw your code at an LLM, the LLM finds ‘bugs’ that may or may not actually exist (and may or may not be duplicates of other reports), the LLM writes up bug reports for them (always marked as urgent, top priority, security flaw), and those bug reports are posted without the user reading or understanding them or even being capable of understanding them.
For every bug reporter who’s using an LLM responsibly, there are 10 more blindly throwing bullshit like this at you.
I mean yes, that’s my point, ban that.
Well it’s hard to ban that without the other without making a fuzzy line anyone can argue they haven’t crossed.
The book by Asimov mentioned there is really good
What did you like about it? I haven’t read it and I’d like hear your take.
No people who have ever used, or heard of LLMs.
or heard of LLMs
This instantly disqualifies anyone who has ever read these rules.
Good luck enforcing no LLM spell check
Reading between the lines they wrote this because of seeing “I hear you, and you are right to be suspicious — but I only use AI for spell checking, nothing more” one time too many.
Just skimming this thread (I don’t even know what Zig is) and this automatically flagged something in my mind. Ugh. Make it fucking end already
This is not a list of all the things they are banning AI from.
This is a list of every reasonable use of LLMs they can think of in their environment.
So if anyone thinks “hmm, I know they don’t like LLM contributions but I’m just going to use it once for X”. The immediate next thought should be “They don’t even allow LLMs to spell check, therefore my single use of LLM for X will not be welcome, I will not do it”.
Basically none of this is enforceable. The rules are there so if someone is caught doing something, it can be pointed out that that something is written in the rules. And also to give a general sense of what is tolerated or not in a community.
This reminds me of a traffic law in my country:
It is illegal to go all the way around a roundabout 3 times in a row. There is not a police officer ok every roundabout, or a camera counting how many times you go around it. But if a kid goes off and do stupid shit at 2AM with a loud AF car, one of the things one might do is do many loops on a roundabout. Therefore they can’t just say “I’m not doing anything illegal, I’m just using the public roads with my car and a valid driver’s license”. Since one of the things they did was doing more than 3 rounds in a roundabout.
Wow! Such stupidity. “Don’t use tool B cuz tool is evil!!1!1!1” is bad. You shouldn’t misuse tools, but using LLMs for fixing grammar is a perfectly fine usage. This is dumb virtue signalling.
Thinkin’ about LLMs? That’s a paddlin’.
Then there is bun where the rules are probably written by an LLM and say “all non LLM uses are forbidden”.
Context: The did a complete rust rewrite with LLMs that was “just an experiment” and is now probably being merged.
In case you didn’t hear, Bun was acquired by Anthropic.
I know. No surprise there.
Anthropic sees multiple languages/platforms existing as a problem.
