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Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

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/...

simonwillison.netThe Zig project's rationale for their firm anti-AI contribution policyZig 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 …
Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

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

Tom Yedwab
@tomyedwab.com

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?

Marc Slemko
@znep.com

It is a context sensitive position and context is rapidly changing, but everyone has their own context. It makes me more likely to invest serious time contributing, if I were interested in the project. I see it as more a social construct than a technical one.

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Marc Slemko
@znep.com

Death by fork is always a possibility in open source, and sometimes a necessity. The future is not preordained and will be different for different projects.

Marc Slemko
@znep.com

I'm thinking of this very broadly now, relating it to the social and technical and corporate interplays in the early days of @apache.org (apache, fork of NCSA) history and pre-history that I was involved with. Then a big split ended up being licensing. There are opportunities for new licenses here?