| ▲ | endospore 4 hours ago |
| Makes me wonder why zig announced the strict LLM rule recently. I'm afraid one reason could be that zig doesn't want to accept code from the bun fork in the first place (because of LLM usage, deviation and other reasons) |
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| ▲ | neomantra 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| One non-obvious reason is that an important aspect of their community is to shepherd new contributors [1]. LLMs crushing everything would reduce that. More obvious is all the toil for maintainers dealing with LLM PRs (broadly it’s an issue). The Zig maintainers prefer to put their energy into improving people and fostering those relationship. [1] https://kristoff.it/blog/contributor-poker-and-ai/ |
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| ▲ | Dylan16807 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That's a solid reason to keep LLMs away from the kind of tasks that help with onboarding. But a patch series from a competent team that changes 3000 lines should probably be evaluated on its own merits. Or at least, the collaboration-based reasons to reject AI don't apply and the real reason would be something else. (Though I don't know if this particular patch series would get accepted on its own merits.) | | |
| ▲ | riffraff 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The recent article explained the bun patch would have been refused on technical merits as it's intrinsically incorrect, to be able to work properly it required some language changes. | |
| ▲ | bboozzoo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > patch series from a competent team that changes 3000 lines should probably be split into a bunch of much smaller changes? | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 32 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I don't understand your suggestion. If you take an ugly patch series that changes 3000 lines and organize it into small quality changes, it's still a patch series that changes 3000 lines. There's no reason to assume my generic statement was talking about the ugly version rather than the nicely organized version. |
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| ▲ | moomoo11 19 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean in an authoritarian system you wouldn’t make a one off exception like that. |
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| ▲ | bbor 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Well said! I don't think either party is really at fault here, but if Anthropic wanted to contribute non-negligible amounts of code over time then it's an absolute dealbreaker. Sucks for people who were invested in contributing to Bun and don't like working with AI tools to be sure, but I think the writing was on the wall for them pretty much immediately post-acquisition. You must admit, it's hard to predict that 100% of source lines will be written by AI if you're not walking the walk! | |
| ▲ | lowbloodsugar 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah, I remember when the lazy bastards started writing programs using compilers instead of learning assembly language. Now I don’t have a single colleague who can write assembly. There’s whole generations now who can’t code assembly. Most don’t even know what a register is. Hope Zig holds against this latest attempt to make everyone stupid. | | |
| ▲ | uncircle an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | To add to the other commenters, loads of people don’t know assembly, which speaks to the quality of the average developer. The ones that still understand assembly to this day tend to be better developers, writing faster and more efficient code. | | |
| ▲ | DeathArrow 10 minutes ago | parent [-] | | >The ones that still understand assembly to this day tend to be better developers, writing faster and more efficient code. That is if you use something like C, C+=, Java, .NET, Go. With Javascript and Python I don't think knowing assembly would make any difference because it's hard to optimize the code in these languages for how the CPU and memory works. |
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| ▲ | gls2ro 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Generating AI code/PR is not the same as using compilers because of at least two things: - the scale of how much and how fast you can generate code with AI vs how fast can you write code for compiler - the mental model of what is being generated and how much the contributor understands and owns the generated code | |
| ▲ | wtetzner 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Using an LLM isn't analogous to using a higher level language. | | |
| ▲ | brabel 5 minutes ago | parent [-] | | That’s funny because it’s exactly, literally the same. The difference is it’s not deterministic. That may be a problem but it’s still a higher level language, just a much higher level language than anything before. |
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| ▲ | gertop 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Your analogy falls apart because the "lazy bastards" still knew how to program and understood the code they were working on. Vide-coders often don't read, let alone understand, the code they send for PRs. |
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| ▲ | foresterre 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There are other reasons why a project like Zig might not want to accept LLM generated contributions. Zig, as programming language, has a multiplier codebase. A bug may affect a significant larger portion of users than most libraries or binaries will, as it's a fundamental building block of everything that uses Zig. Just that could be worth the extra scrutiny on every individual commit. There's also the usual arguments: copyright ethics, environmental ethics and maintainer burden. |
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| ▲ | esperent an hour ago | parent [-] | | > has a multiplier codebase. A bug may affect a significant larger portion of users than most libraries or binaries will Couldn't you say exactly the same about bun? |
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| ▲ | DeathArrow an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >Makes me wonder why zig announced the strict LLM rule recently. I guess there are 2 philosophies in software development: move fast and break things and move at a pace that guarantees everything is rock solid. Most commercial software, Anthropic included is taking the former path, while most infrastructure teams are taking the later. I guess Linux and FreeBSD kernels are also not accepting LLM based contributions yet. |
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| ▲ | KingMob 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Possibly, but the Zig creator is active on Lobste.rs, where he's been vocally anti-LLM for a year now, so the timing could just be a coincidence. |
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| ▲ | ai_critic 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It's a combination of pragmatism (not wanting to wade through slop, not wanting to shove out newbie developers) and politics (usual contemporary techie progressive stuff that's now oddly anti-technology). |
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