Interesting LLM policy for the Zig language

For those who don’t read Hacker News 10x a day, here’s a discussion of the Zig project’s view of LLM contributions:

Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Zig project's rationale for their firm anti-AI contribution policy

Zig has one of the most stringent anti-LLM policies of any major open source project: No LLMs for issues. No LLMs for pull requests. No LLMs for comments on the …

The key quote (emphasis mine):

Zig values contributors over their contributions. Each contributor represents an investment by the Zig core team - the primary goal of reviewing and accepting PRs isn’t to land new code, it’s to help grow new contributors who can become trusted and prolific over time.

LLM assistance breaks that completely. It doesn’t matter if the LLM helps you submit a perfect PR to Zig - the time the Zig team spends reviewing your work does nothing to help them add new, confident, trustworthy contributors to their overall project.

I like the idea of focusing on creating new contributors, but I’d like to offer another perspective.

In my experience maintaining beam, there’s been an influx of outside contributions. Some of these contributions have involved LLM assistance. beam is famously opaque to outside contributors (and even to me sometimes!), but I think that LLMs have given the confidence to potential contributors to take the step and help. Overall, the contributions I review are definitely high-quality from the start, so the social contract hasn’t been broken – no one has “shoveled” code into existence here.

All this to say: I like Zig’s notion of nurturing contributors, and I think some Haskell projects can still benefit from LLM usage in the community due to the intrinsic complexity of some of the codebases.