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Zig President Says AI Coding Contributions Are 'Invariably Garbage,' So He Banned Them
Zig, an open-source programming language bans contributors from using AI. Its president said that the these submissions have "no value whatsoever."
TL;DR
- Zig, an open-source programming language, has banned the submission of AI-assisted code.
- Zig's president, Andrew Kelley, described AI contributions as "invariably garbage" and a drain on reviewer resources.
- The ban includes LLM-generated content, paraphrased content, and code edited or debugged by AI.
- The core team reviews code submissions, and AI contributions slow down this process, which already faces a bottleneck of pull requests.
- Zig prioritizes mentorship as part of its core mission, making AI contributions counterproductive to that goal.
- The all-or-nothing AI ban is easier to enforce than attempting to judge the quality of individual AI-generated submissions.