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The Zig project's rationale for their blanket ban on AI-assisted contributions makes a lot of sense to me - for them, time spent reviewing PRs isn't about the code, it's about growing new contributors for the future of the project simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/30/...

I particularly appreciate how this rationale isn't based on the idea that LLM code is of poor quality compared to code written by hand - the quality of the code isn't the deciding factor at all here

This argument is going to age poorly IMO. Are maintainers pairing with newbies to answer questions and show how to be successful in the project? Are the docs beautifully written for beginners in multiple languages? Moreover, if its the person who matters, why are we judging the tools?

It’s expounded upon in one of the links, and IMO they’re quite rational in policing this way, at least for now. And I suppose it stands to reason that if s contributor successfully lies about significant LLM use but also is an excellent contributor who can be trusted, then the tech has made it!

But it’s definitely not true today and there’s many steps for AI yet to take before it could be used effectively like that. I would also posit that once (or if) we reach a state like that, software dev will be so different anyways that Zig itself may just go obsolete.