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- I think it's the least hostile thing they can say, and I respect their decision for their own project.
That said, it still feels like they are unnecessarily hobbling their project. LLMs are tools and they can help you think, research, and code. You can overuse them, yes, but you should embrace them where they help.
not accepting bun's PR for other reasons is totally fine (sounds like it's a core change where more thinking needs to be done), but simply banning all LLM authored PRs is unnecessarily restrictive. Just focus on the quality of the work.
by dack - I know my take on this is not popular. Don't blame the tool, judge the output.
Ofc, the scattershot 10k changes PR touching 30% of all your code files can be auto rejected without even looking at it. Who cares who or what wrote it.
And a small focusses PR from a new contributer that needs clarification which the author can not provide, shelve it.
But a blanket no-ai policy? I hear echos of business execs refusing email and demanding in person visits to remote offices for any interaction (not imagined. I knew an IT admin back in the late 80's who even refused to answer the phone and email as he felt that was 'too easy' and 'cutting in line', yes, the pysical hallway queue of people needing simple things like a login, quota adaptation or a password reset)
The tool is not your problem. Your selectivity process was never designed for low barrier access to participation. I have full sympathy for that. But focus on the real problem, the process, not some (rightly or wrongly) perceived feature filter to avoid changing how this works.
Now if you say "my project, my rules" 100%. And I sympatize very much with being overwhelmed by nuissance on a thing you love and care for.
Just don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
by PeterStuer - > This makes a lot of sense to me. It relates to an idea I've seen circulating elsewhere: if a PR was mostly written by an LLM, why should a project maintainer spend time reviewing and discussing that PR as opposed to firing up their own LLM to solve the same problem?
The same argument applies to open source itself. Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own? It's especially true if the open source project was vibe coded. AI and technology in general makes personalization cheap and affordable. Whereas earlier you had to use something that was mass produced to be satisfactory for everyone, now you have the hope of getting something that's outstanding for just you. It also stimulates the labor economy, because you have lots of people everywhere reinventing open source projects with their LLMs.
by jart - > 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
That’s the best rational I’ve seen so far, and fully support Zig decision here. I really appreciate their long term vision for both the community and actual project. I don’t think LLMs have such a great place in more collaborative efforts to be honest. Though we will see how things evolve, but I do see that when getting AI generated PRs I basically have to redo it myself (using LLMs, ironically… something I’m really starting to feel conflicted about)
by dgellow - My issue with AI-generated OSS contributions is:
If an AI improves developer productivity so much, why would maintainers of an OSS project want unknown contributors to sit in between the maintainer and the LLM? They'd be typing these queries into Claude Code themselves. To quote my colleague:
> We do not need a middleman to talk to AI models. We are not bottlenecked by coding.
by grokys - It seems that Zig people are following the path of ZeroMQ [1]: "To enforce collective ownership of the project, which increases economic incentive to Contributors and reduces the risk of hijack by hostile entities."
A healthy contributor community is more important than mere code performance, quantity of features or lines of code, etc..
by lccerina - Apparently, the noise around the AI policy came from Bun's developers saying that policy blocks upstreaming their performance PR. But the real reason seems to be that PR's code itself isn't in great shape, and introduces unhealthy complexity https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-s-zig-fork-got-4x-faster-compilatio...
> Parallel semantic analysis has been an explicitly planned feature of the Zig compiler for a long time, and it has heavily influenced the design of the self-hosted Zig compiler. However, implementing this feature correctly has implications not only for the compiler implementation, but for the Zig language itself! Therefore, to implement this feature without an avalanche of bugs and inconsistencies, we need to make language changes.
by hitekker - From https://kristoff.it/blog/contributor-poker-and-ai/:
"Unfortunately the reality of LLM-based contributions has been mostly negative for us, from an increase in background noise due to worthless drive-by PRs full of hallucinations (that wouldn’t even compile, let alone pass CI), to insane 10 thousand line long first time PRs. In-between we also received plenty of PRs that looked fine on the surface, some of which explicitly claimed to not have made use of LLMs, but where follow-up discussions immediately made it clear that the author was sneakily consulting an LLM and regurgitating its mistake-filled replies to us."
by branko_d