> The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written, carefully curated, and continuously updated to reflect the latest language features and best practices.
I think it's time to have a badge for non LLM content, and avoid the rest.
The name seems odd to me, because I think it's fine to describe things as a digital brain, especially when the word brain doesn't only apply to humans but to organisms as simple as a 959 cell roundworm with 302 neurons.
Even for content that isn’t directly composed by llm, I bet there’d be value in an alerting system that could ingest your docs and code+commits and flag places where behaviour referenced by docs has changed and may need to be updated.
This kind of “workflow” llm use has the potential to deliver a lot of value even to a scenario where the final product is human-composed.
Meh. I mean, who's it for? People should be adopting the stance that everything is AI on the internet and make decisions from there. If you start trusting people telling you that they're not using AI, you're setting yourself up to be conned.
Edit: So I wrote this before I read the rest of the thread where everyone is pointing out this is indeed probably AI, so right of the bat the "AI-free" label is conning people.
> Most programming languages hide complexity from you—they abstract away memory management, mask control flow with implicit operations, and shield you from the machine beneath. This feels simple at first, but eventually you hit a wall. You need to understand why something is slow, where a crash happened, or how to squeeze every ounce of performance from your hardware. Suddenly, the abstractions that helped you get started are now in your way.
> Zig takes a different path. It reveals complexity—and then gives you the tools to master it.
> This book will take you from Hello, world! to building systems that cross-compile to any platform, manage memory with surgical precision, and generate code at compile time. You will learn not just how Zig works, but why it works the way it does. Every allocation will be explicit. Every control path will be visible. Every abstraction will be precise, not vague.
But sadly people like the prompter of this book will lie and pretend to have written things themselves that they did not. First three paragraphs by the way, and a bingo for every sign of AI.
I had a discussion on some other submission a couple of weeks back, where several people were arguing "it's obviously AI generated" (the style btw was completely different to this, quite a few explicitives...). When I put the the text in 5 random AI detectors the argument who except for one (which said mixed, 10% AI or so) all said 100% human I was being down voted and the argument became "AI detection tools can detect AI" but somehow the people claim there are 100% clear telltale signs which says it's AI (why those detection tools can detect them is baffling to me).
I have the feeling that the whole "it's AI" stick has become a synonym for I don't like this writing style.
It really does not add to the discussion. If people would post immediately "there's spelling mistakes this is rubbish", they would rightfully get down voted, but somehow saying "it's AI" is acceptable. Would the book be any more or less useful if somebody used AI for writing it? So what is your point?
A nitpick about website: the top progress bar is kind of distracting (high-constrast color with animation). It's also unnecessary because there is already scrollbar on the right side.
This looks fantastic. Pedagogically it makes sense to me, and I love this approach of not just teaching a language, but a paradigm (in this case, low-level systems programming), in a single text.
Zig got me excited when I stumbled into it about a year ago, but life got busy and then the io changes came along and I thought about holding off until things settled down - it's still a very young language.
But reading the first couple of chapters has piqued my interest in a language and the people who are working with it in a way I've not run into since I encountered Ruby in ~2006 (before Rails hit v1.0), I just hope the quality stays this high all the way through.
So many comments about the AI generation part. Why does it matter? If it’s good and accurate and helpful why do you care? That’s like saying you used a calculator to calculate your equations so I can’t trust you.
I am just impressed by the quality and details and approach of it all.
Nicely done (PS: I know nothing about systems programming and I have been writing code for 25 years)
Because AI gets things wrong, often, in ways that can be very difficult to catch. By their very nature LLMs write text that sounds plausible enough to bypass manual review (see https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s...), so some find it best to avoid using it at all when writing documentation.
But all those "it's AI posts" are about the prose and "style", not the actual content. So even if (and that is a big if) the text was written using the help of AI (and there are many valid reasons to use it, e.g. if you're not a native speaker) that does not mean the content was written from AI and thus contains AI mistakes.
If it was so obviously written by AI then finding those mistakes should be easy?
Because the first thing you see when you click the link is "Zero AI" pasted under the most obviously AI-generated copy I've ever seen. It's just an insult to our intelligence, obviously we're gonna call OP out on this. Why lie like that?
> That’s like saying you used a calculator to calculate your equations so I can’t trust you.
A calculator exists solely for the realm of mathematics, where you can afford to more or less throw away the value of human input and overall craftsmanship.
That is not the case with something like this, which - while it leans in to engineering - is in effect viewed as a work of art by people who give a shit about the actual craft of writing software.
This source is really hard to trust. AI or not, the author has done no work to really establish epistemological reliability and transparency. The entire book was published at once with no history, no evidence of the improvement and iteration it takes to create quality work, and no reference as to the creative process or collaborators or anything. And on top of that, the author does not seem to really have any other presence or history in the community. I love Zig, and have wanted more quality learning materials to exist. This, unfortunately, does not seem to be it.
It looks cool! No experience with Zig so can't comment on the accuracy, but I will take a look at it this week. Also a bit annoying that there is no PDF version that I could download as the website is pretty slow. After taking a look at the repository (https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/tree/main), each page seems to be written in AsciiDoc, so I'll take a look about compiling a PDF version later today.
It's pretty incredible how much ground this covers! However, the ordering feels a little confusing to me.
One example is in chapter 1. It talks about symbol exporting based on platform type, without explaining ELF. This is before talking about while loops.
It's had some interesting nuggets so far, and I've followed along since I'm familiar with some of the broad strokes, but I can see it being confusing to someone new to systems programming.
Hmm, the explanation of Allocators is much more detailed in the book, but I feel although more compact, it seems much more reasonable in the language reference. [0]
I'll keep exploring this book though, it does look very impressive.
It's really hard to believe this isn't AI generated, but today I was trying to use the HTTP server from std after the 0.15 changes, couldn't figure out how it's supposed to work until I've searched repos in Github. LLM's couldn't figure it out as well, they were stuck in a loop of changing/breaking things even further until they arrived at the solution of using the deprecated way. so I guess this is actually handwritten which is amazing because it looks like the best resource I've seen up until now for Zig
it's not only the size - it was pushed all at once, anonymously, using text that highly resembles that of an AI. I still think that some of the text is AI generated. perhaps not the code, but the wording of the text just reeks of AI
I've had the same experience as you with Zig. I quite love the idea of it Zig but the undocumented churn is a bit much. I wish they had auto generated docs that reflect the current state of the stdlib, at least. Even if it just listed the signatures with no commentary.
I was trying to solve a simple problem but Google, the official docs, and LLMs were all out of date. I eventually found what I needed in Zig's commit history, where they casually renamed something without updating the docs. It's been renamed once more apparently, still not reflected in the docs :shrugs:.
The book content itself is deliberately free of AI-generated prose. Drafts may start anywhere, but final text should be reviewed, edited, and owned by a human contributor.
There is more specificity around AI use in the project README. There may have been LLMs used during drafting, which has led to the "hallmarks" sticking around that some commenters are pointing out.
> The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written, carefully curated, and continuously updated to reflect the latest language features and best practices.
I just don't buy it. I'm 99% sure this is written by an LLM.
Can the author... Convince me otherwise?
> This journey begins with simplicity—the kind you encounter on the first day. By the end, you will discover a different kind of simplicity: the kind you earn by climbing through complexity and emerging with complete understanding on the other side.
> Welcome to the Zigbook. Your transformation starts now.
...
> You will know where every byte lives in memory, when the compiler executes your code, and what machine instructions your abstractions compile to. No hidden allocations. No mystery overhead. No surprises.
...
> This is not about memorizing syntax. This is about earning mastery.
Pretty clear it's all AI. The @zigbook account only has 1 activity prior to publishing this repo, and that's an issue where they mention "ai has made me too lazy": https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/272725
After reading the first five chapters, I'm leaning this way. Not because of a specific phrase, but because the pacing is way off. It's really strange to start with symbol exporting, then moving to while loops, then moving to slices. It just feels like a strange order. The "how it works" and "key insights" also feel like a GPT summarization. Maybe that's just a writing tic, but the combination of correct grammar with bad pacing isn't something I feel like a human writer has. Either you have neither (due to lack of practice), or both (because when you do a lot of writing you also pick up at least some ability to pace). Could be wrong though.
It's just an odd claim to make when it feels very much like AI generated content + publish the text anonymously. It's obviously possible to write like this without AI, but I can't remember reading something like this that wasn't written by AI.
It doesn't take away from the fact that someone used a bunch of time and effort on this project.
To be clear, I did not dismiss the project or question its value - simply questioned this claim as my experience tells me otherwise and they make a big deal out of it being human written and "No AI" in multiple places.
I was pretty skeptical too, but it looks legit to me. I've been doing Zig off and on for several years, and have read through the things I feel like I have a good understanding of (though I'm not working on the compiler, contributing to the language, etc.) and they are explained correctly in a logical/thoughtful way. I also work with LLMs a ton at work, and you'd have to spoon-feed the model to get outputs this cohesive.
Keep in mind that pangram flags many hand-written things as AI.
> I just ran excerpts from two unpublished science fiction / speculative fiction short stories through it. Both came back as ai with 99.9% confidence. Both stories were written in 2013.
> I've been doing some extensive testing in the last 24 hours and I can confidently say that I believe the 1 in 10,000 rate is bullshit. I've been an author for over a decade and have dozens of books at hand that I can throw at this from years prior to AI even existing in anywhere close to its current capacity. Most of the time, that content is detected as AI-created, even when it's not.
> Pangram is saying EVERYTHING I have hand written for school is AI. I've had to rewrite my paper four times already and it still says 99.9% AI even though I didn't even use AI for the research.
> I've written an overview of a project plan based on a brief and, after reading an article on AI detection, I thought it would be interesting to run it through AI detection sites to see where my writing winds up. All of them, with the exception of Pangram, flagged the writing as 100% written by a human. Pangram has "99% confidence" of it being written by AI.
I generally don't give startups my contact info, but if folks don't mind doing so, I recommend running pangram on some of their polished hand written stuff.
Doesn't mean that the author might not use AI to optimise legibility. You can write stuff yourself and use an LLM to enhance the reading flow. Especially for non-native speakers it is immensely helpful to do so. Doesn't mean that the content is "AI-generated". The essence is still written by a human.
I'm not sure, but I try my best to assume good faith / be optimistic.
This one hit a sore spot b/c many people are putting time and effort into writing things themselves and to claim "no ai use" if it is untrue is not fair.
If the author had a good explanation... Idk not a native English writer and used an LLM to translate and that included the "no LLMs used" call-out and that was translated improperly etc
You can't just say that a linguistic style "proves" or even "suggests" AI. Remember, AI is just spitting out things its seen before elsewhere. There's plenty of other texts I've seen with this sort of writing style, written long before AI was around.
Can I also ask: so what if it is or it isn't?
While AI slop is infuriating, and the bubble hype is maddening, I'm not sure every time somebody sees some content they don't like the style of we just call out it "must" be AI, and debate if it is or it isn't is not at least as maddening. It feels like all content published now gets debated like this, and I'm definitely not enjoying it.
You can be skeptical of anything but I think it's silly to say that these "Not just A, but B" constructions don't strongly suggest that it's generated text.
As to why it matters, doesn't it matter when people lie? Aren't you worried about the veracity of the text if it's not only generated but was presented otherwise? That wouldn't erode your trust that the author reviewed the text and corrected any hallucinations even by an iota?
IMO HN should add a guideline about not insinuating things were written by AI. It degrades the quality of the site similarly to many of the existing rules.
Arguably it would be covered by some of the existing rules, but it's become such a common occurrence that it may need singling out.
What degrades conversation is to lie about something being not AI when it actually is. People pointing out the fraud are right to do so.
One thing I've learned is that comment sections are a vital defense on AI content spreading, because while you might fool some people, it's hard to fool all the people. There have been times I've been fooled by AI only to see in the comments the consensus that it is AI. So now it's my standard practice to check comments to see what others are saying.
If mods put a rule into place that muzzles this community when it comes to alerting others a fraud is being affected, that just makes this place a target for AI scams.
My statement refers to this claim: "I'm 99% sure this is written by an LLM."
The hypocrisy and entitlement mentality that prevails in this discussion is disgusting. My recommendation to the fellow below that he should write a book himself (instead of complaining) was even flagged, demonstrating once again the abuse of this feature to suppress other, completely legitimate opinions.
The book claims it’s not written with the help of AI, but the content seems so blatantly AI-generated that I’m not sure what to conclude, unless the author is the guy OpenAI trained GPT-5 on:
> Learning Zig is not just about adding a language to your resume. It is about fundamentally changing how you think about software.
“Not just X - Y” constructions.
> By Chapter 61, you will not just know Zig; you will understand it deeply enough to teach others, contribute to the ecosystem, and build systems that reflect your complete mastery.
More not just X - Y constructions with parallelism.
Even the “not made with AI” banner seems AI generated! Note the 3 item parallelism.
> The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written, carefully curated, and continuously updated to reflect the latest language features and best practices.
I don’t have anything against AI generated content. I’m just confused what’s going on here!
EDIT: after scanning the contents of the book itself I don’t believe it’s AI generated - perhaps it’s just the intro?
EDIT again: no, I’ve swung back to the camp of mostly AI generated. I would believe it if you told me the author wrote it by hand and then used AI to trim the style, but “no AI” seems hard to believe. The flow charts in particular stand out like a sore thumb - they just don’t have the kind of content a human would put in flow charts.
Every time I read things like this, it makes me think that AI was trained off of me. Using semicolons, utilizing classic writing patterns, and common use of compare and contrast are all examples of how they teach to write essays in high school and college. They're also all examples of how I think and have learned to communicate.
To be explicit, it’s not general hallmarks of good writing. It’s exactly two common constructions: not X but Y, and 3 items in parallel. These two pop up in extreme disproportion to normal “good writing”. Good writers know to save these tricks for when they really want to make a point.
Clearly your perception of what is AI generated is wrong. You can't tell something is AI generated only because it uses "not just X - Y" constructions. I mean, the reason AI text often uses it is because it's common in the training material. So of course you're going to see it everywhere.
Find me some text from pre-AI that uses so many of these constructions in such close proximity if it’s really so easy - I don’t think you’ll have much luck. Good authors have many tactics in their rhetorical bag of tricks. They don’t just keep using the same one over and over.
It was very hard to find a link to the table of contents… then I tried opening it and the link didn’t work. I’m on iOS. I’d have loved to take a look quickly what’s in the book…
Even if what you say is true, people make bets on new tech all the time. You show up early so you can capture mindshare. If Zig becomes mainstream then this could be the standard book that everyone recommends. Not just that, it’s more likely the language succeeds if it has good learning materials - that’s an outcome the author would love.
> people make bets on new tech all the time. You show up early so you can capture mindshare.
I got on the ground floor with elixir. got my startup built on it. now we have 3 fulltime engineers working on elixir fulltime. None of that would have happenned if I looked at a young language and said "its not used in the real world"
"nobody uses in the real world yet" is uncharitable, as Zig is used in many real-world projects (Bun and Tigerbeetle are written in Zig, for example). But there's value being at the forefront of technologies that you think are going to explode soon, so that's how people find time and energy, I guess.
SAME. I was looking for a donation button myself! I've paid for worse quality instructional material. this is just the sort of thing I'm happy to support
> The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written, carefully curated, and continuously updated to reflect the latest language features and best practices.
I think it's time to have a badge for non LLM content, and avoid the rest.
There is also Brainmade: https://brainmade.org/
The name seems odd to me, because I think it's fine to describe things as a digital brain, especially when the word brain doesn't only apply to humans but to organisms as simple as a 959 cell roundworm with 302 neurons.
There seems to be https://notbyai.fyi/ and https://no-ai-icon.com/ ..!
Even for content that isn’t directly composed by llm, I bet there’d be value in an alerting system that could ingest your docs and code+commits and flag places where behaviour referenced by docs has changed and may need to be updated.
This kind of “workflow” llm use has the potential to deliver a lot of value even to a scenario where the final product is human-composed.
I like these ones:
https://cadence.moe/blog/2024-10-05-created-by-a-human-badge...
Meh. I mean, who's it for? People should be adopting the stance that everything is AI on the internet and make decisions from there. If you start trusting people telling you that they're not using AI, you're setting yourself up to be conned.
Edit: So I wrote this before I read the rest of the thread where everyone is pointing out this is indeed probably AI, so right of the bat the "AI-free" label is conning people.
> Most programming languages hide complexity from you—they abstract away memory management, mask control flow with implicit operations, and shield you from the machine beneath. This feels simple at first, but eventually you hit a wall. You need to understand why something is slow, where a crash happened, or how to squeeze every ounce of performance from your hardware. Suddenly, the abstractions that helped you get started are now in your way.
> Zig takes a different path. It reveals complexity—and then gives you the tools to master it.
> This book will take you from Hello, world! to building systems that cross-compile to any platform, manage memory with surgical precision, and generate code at compile time. You will learn not just how Zig works, but why it works the way it does. Every allocation will be explicit. Every control path will be visible. Every abstraction will be precise, not vague.
But sadly people like the prompter of this book will lie and pretend to have written things themselves that they did not. First three paragraphs by the way, and a bingo for every sign of AI.
These posts are getting old.
I had a discussion on some other submission a couple of weeks back, where several people were arguing "it's obviously AI generated" (the style btw was completely different to this, quite a few explicitives...). When I put the the text in 5 random AI detectors the argument who except for one (which said mixed, 10% AI or so) all said 100% human I was being down voted and the argument became "AI detection tools can detect AI" but somehow the people claim there are 100% clear telltale signs which says it's AI (why those detection tools can detect them is baffling to me).
I have the feeling that the whole "it's AI" stick has become a synonym for I don't like this writing style.
It really does not add to the discussion. If people would post immediately "there's spelling mistakes this is rubbish", they would rightfully get down voted, but somehow saying "it's AI" is acceptable. Would the book be any more or less useful if somebody used AI for writing it? So what is your point?
The em dashes?
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A nitpick about website: the top progress bar is kind of distracting (high-constrast color with animation). It's also unnecessary because there is already scrollbar on the right side.
This looks fantastic. Pedagogically it makes sense to me, and I love this approach of not just teaching a language, but a paradigm (in this case, low-level systems programming), in a single text.
Zig got me excited when I stumbled into it about a year ago, but life got busy and then the io changes came along and I thought about holding off until things settled down - it's still a very young language.
But reading the first couple of chapters has piqued my interest in a language and the people who are working with it in a way I've not run into since I encountered Ruby in ~2006 (before Rails hit v1.0), I just hope the quality stays this high all the way through.
So many comments about the AI generation part. Why does it matter? If it’s good and accurate and helpful why do you care? That’s like saying you used a calculator to calculate your equations so I can’t trust you.
I am just impressed by the quality and details and approach of it all.
Nicely done (PS: I know nothing about systems programming and I have been writing code for 25 years)
> Why does it matter?
Because AI gets things wrong, often, in ways that can be very difficult to catch. By their very nature LLMs write text that sounds plausible enough to bypass manual review (see https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s...), so some find it best to avoid using it at all when writing documentation.
But all those "it's AI posts" are about the prose and "style", not the actual content. So even if (and that is a big if) the text was written using the help of AI (and there are many valid reasons to use it, e.g. if you're not a native speaker) that does not mean the content was written from AI and thus contains AI mistakes.
If it was so obviously written by AI then finding those mistakes should be easy?
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Humans get things wrong too.
Quality prose usually only becomes that after many reviews.
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Because the first thing you see when you click the link is "Zero AI" pasted under the most obviously AI-generated copy I've ever seen. It's just an insult to our intelligence, obviously we're gonna call OP out on this. Why lie like that?
> That’s like saying you used a calculator to calculate your equations so I can’t trust you.
A calculator exists solely for the realm of mathematics, where you can afford to more or less throw away the value of human input and overall craftsmanship.
That is not the case with something like this, which - while it leans in to engineering - is in effect viewed as a work of art by people who give a shit about the actual craft of writing software.
If you believed that you wouldn't explicitly say there was no AI generated content at all, you'd let it speak for itself.
Insecurity, that's why.
I too have this feeling sometimes. It's a coping mechanism. I don't know why we have this but I guess we have to see past it and adapt to reality.
This source is really hard to trust. AI or not, the author has done no work to really establish epistemological reliability and transparency. The entire book was published at once with no history, no evidence of the improvement and iteration it takes to create quality work, and no reference as to the creative process or collaborators or anything. And on top of that, the author does not seem to really have any other presence or history in the community. I love Zig, and have wanted more quality learning materials to exist. This, unfortunately, does not seem to be it.
How do you feel about regular books, whose iterations and edits you dont see?
Do you have any criticism of the content, or just "I don't know the author"?
>Learning Zig is not just about adding a language to your resume. It is about fundamentally changing how you think about software.
Zig is just C with a marketing push. Most developers already know C.
I suspect most developers do not know C.
It looks cool! No experience with Zig so can't comment on the accuracy, but I will take a look at it this week. Also a bit annoying that there is no PDF version that I could download as the website is pretty slow. After taking a look at the repository (https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/tree/main), each page seems to be written in AsciiDoc, so I'll take a look about compiling a PDF version later today.
If there is a PDF version, please remember to give me one. Thank you in advance.
It's pretty incredible how much ground this covers! However, the ordering feels a little confusing to me.
One example is in chapter 1. It talks about symbol exporting based on platform type, without explaining ELF. This is before talking about while loops.
It's had some interesting nuggets so far, and I've followed along since I'm familiar with some of the broad strokes, but I can see it being confusing to someone new to systems programming.
Hmm, the explanation of Allocators is much more detailed in the book, but I feel although more compact, it seems much more reasonable in the language reference. [0]
I'll keep exploring this book though, it does look very impressive.
0 - https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Memory
It's really hard to believe this isn't AI generated, but today I was trying to use the HTTP server from std after the 0.15 changes, couldn't figure out how it's supposed to work until I've searched repos in Github. LLM's couldn't figure it out as well, they were stuck in a loop of changing/breaking things even further until they arrived at the solution of using the deprecated way. so I guess this is actually handwritten which is amazing because it looks like the best resource I've seen up until now for Zig
> It's really hard to believe this isn't AI generated
Case of a person who is relying on LLMs so much he cannot imagine doing something big by themselves.
it's not only the size - it was pushed all at once, anonymously, using text that highly resembles that of an AI. I still think that some of the text is AI generated. perhaps not the code, but the wording of the text just reeks of AI
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I've had the same experience as you with Zig. I quite love the idea of it Zig but the undocumented churn is a bit much. I wish they had auto generated docs that reflect the current state of the stdlib, at least. Even if it just listed the signatures with no commentary.
I was trying to solve a simple problem but Google, the official docs, and LLMs were all out of date. I eventually found what I needed in Zig's commit history, where they casually renamed something without updating the docs. It's been renamed once more apparently, still not reflected in the docs :shrugs:.
Wait, doesn't `zig std` launch the autogenerated docs?
There is more specificity around AI use in the project README. There may have been LLMs used during drafting, which has led to the "hallmarks" sticking around that some commenters are pointing out.
A lot of love went into this. It's evident throughout. Great job!
Nah, just a lot of prompting.
So despite this...
> The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written, carefully curated, and continuously updated to reflect the latest language features and best practices.
I just don't buy it. I'm 99% sure this is written by an LLM.
Can the author... Convince me otherwise?
> This journey begins with simplicity—the kind you encounter on the first day. By the end, you will discover a different kind of simplicity: the kind you earn by climbing through complexity and emerging with complete understanding on the other side.
> Welcome to the Zigbook. Your transformation starts now.
...
> You will know where every byte lives in memory, when the compiler executes your code, and what machine instructions your abstractions compile to. No hidden allocations. No mystery overhead. No surprises.
...
> This is not about memorizing syntax. This is about earning mastery.
Pretty clear it's all AI. The @zigbook account only has 1 activity prior to publishing this repo, and that's an issue where they mention "ai has made me too lazy": https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/272725
After reading the first five chapters, I'm leaning this way. Not because of a specific phrase, but because the pacing is way off. It's really strange to start with symbol exporting, then moving to while loops, then moving to slices. It just feels like a strange order. The "how it works" and "key insights" also feel like a GPT summarization. Maybe that's just a writing tic, but the combination of correct grammar with bad pacing isn't something I feel like a human writer has. Either you have neither (due to lack of practice), or both (because when you do a lot of writing you also pick up at least some ability to pace). Could be wrong though.
It's just an odd claim to make when it feels very much like AI generated content + publish the text anonymously. It's obviously possible to write like this without AI, but I can't remember reading something like this that wasn't written by AI.
It doesn't take away from the fact that someone used a bunch of time and effort on this project.
To be clear, I did not dismiss the project or question its value - simply questioned this claim as my experience tells me otherwise and they make a big deal out of it being human written and "No AI" in multiple places.
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Did they actually spend a bunch of time and effort though? I think you could get an llm to generate the entire thing, website and all.
Check out the sleek looking terminal--there's no ls, cd, it's just an ai hallucination.
I was pretty skeptical too, but it looks legit to me. I've been doing Zig off and on for several years, and have read through the things I feel like I have a good understanding of (though I'm not working on the compiler, contributing to the language, etc.) and they are explained correctly in a logical/thoughtful way. I also work with LLMs a ton at work, and you'd have to spoon-feed the model to get outputs this cohesive.
Pangram[1] flags the introduction as totally AI-written, which I also suspected for the same reasons you did
[1] one of the only AI detectors that actually works, 99.9% accuracy, 0.1% false positive
Keep in mind that pangram flags many hand-written things as AI.
> I just ran excerpts from two unpublished science fiction / speculative fiction short stories through it. Both came back as ai with 99.9% confidence. Both stories were written in 2013.
> I've been doing some extensive testing in the last 24 hours and I can confidently say that I believe the 1 in 10,000 rate is bullshit. I've been an author for over a decade and have dozens of books at hand that I can throw at this from years prior to AI even existing in anywhere close to its current capacity. Most of the time, that content is detected as AI-created, even when it's not.
> Pangram is saying EVERYTHING I have hand written for school is AI. I've had to rewrite my paper four times already and it still says 99.9% AI even though I didn't even use AI for the research.
> I've written an overview of a project plan based on a brief and, after reading an article on AI detection, I thought it would be interesting to run it through AI detection sites to see where my writing winds up. All of them, with the exception of Pangram, flagged the writing as 100% written by a human. Pangram has "99% confidence" of it being written by AI.
I generally don't give startups my contact info, but if folks don't mind doing so, I recommend running pangram on some of their polished hand written stuff.
https://www.reddit.com/r/teachingresources/comments/1icnren/...
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Doesn't mean that the author might not use AI to optimise legibility. You can write stuff yourself and use an LLM to enhance the reading flow. Especially for non-native speakers it is immensely helpful to do so. Doesn't mean that the content is "AI-generated". The essence is still written by a human.
> Doesn't mean that the author might not use AI to optimise legibility.
I agree that there is a difference between entirely LLM-generated, and LLM-reworded. But the statement is unequivocal to me:
> The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written
If an LLM was used in any fashion, then this statement is simply a lie.
But then you cannot write that
"The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written"
> Can the author... Convince me otherwise?
Not disagreeing with you, but out of interest, how could you be convinced otherwise?
I'm not sure, but I try my best to assume good faith / be optimistic.
This one hit a sore spot b/c many people are putting time and effort into writing things themselves and to claim "no ai use" if it is untrue is not fair.
If the author had a good explanation... Idk not a native English writer and used an LLM to translate and that included the "no LLMs used" call-out and that was translated improperly etc
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You can't just say that a linguistic style "proves" or even "suggests" AI. Remember, AI is just spitting out things its seen before elsewhere. There's plenty of other texts I've seen with this sort of writing style, written long before AI was around.
Can I also ask: so what if it is or it isn't?
While AI slop is infuriating, and the bubble hype is maddening, I'm not sure every time somebody sees some content they don't like the style of we just call out it "must" be AI, and debate if it is or it isn't is not at least as maddening. It feels like all content published now gets debated like this, and I'm definitely not enjoying it.
You can be skeptical of anything but I think it's silly to say that these "Not just A, but B" constructions don't strongly suggest that it's generated text.
As to why it matters, doesn't it matter when people lie? Aren't you worried about the veracity of the text if it's not only generated but was presented otherwise? That wouldn't erode your trust that the author reviewed the text and corrected any hallucinations even by an iota?
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IMO HN should add a guideline about not insinuating things were written by AI. It degrades the quality of the site similarly to many of the existing rules.
Arguably it would be covered by some of the existing rules, but it's become such a common occurrence that it may need singling out.
What degrades conversation is to lie about something being not AI when it actually is. People pointing out the fraud are right to do so.
One thing I've learned is that comment sections are a vital defense on AI content spreading, because while you might fool some people, it's hard to fool all the people. There have been times I've been fooled by AI only to see in the comments the consensus that it is AI. So now it's my standard practice to check comments to see what others are saying.
If mods put a rule into place that muzzles this community when it comes to alerting others a fraud is being affected, that just makes this place a target for AI scams.
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I don't think so, I think it's just a pompous style of writing.
Who cares?
Still better than just nagging.
Using AI to write is one thing, claiming you didn't when you did should be objectionable to everyone.
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My statement refers to this claim: "I'm 99% sure this is written by an LLM."
The hypocrisy and entitlement mentality that prevails in this discussion is disgusting. My recommendation to the fellow below that he should write a book himself (instead of complaining) was even flagged, demonstrating once again the abuse of this feature to suppress other, completely legitimate opinions.
But can we train AI on this beautifully hand-crafted material, and ask it later to rewrite Rust with Zig? :]
The book claims it’s not written with the help of AI, but the content seems so blatantly AI-generated that I’m not sure what to conclude, unless the author is the guy OpenAI trained GPT-5 on:
> Learning Zig is not just about adding a language to your resume. It is about fundamentally changing how you think about software.
“Not just X - Y” constructions.
> By Chapter 61, you will not just know Zig; you will understand it deeply enough to teach others, contribute to the ecosystem, and build systems that reflect your complete mastery.
More not just X - Y constructions with parallelism.
Even the “not made with AI” banner seems AI generated! Note the 3 item parallelism.
> The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written, carefully curated, and continuously updated to reflect the latest language features and best practices.
I don’t have anything against AI generated content. I’m just confused what’s going on here!
EDIT: after scanning the contents of the book itself I don’t believe it’s AI generated - perhaps it’s just the intro?
EDIT again: no, I’ve swung back to the camp of mostly AI generated. I would believe it if you told me the author wrote it by hand and then used AI to trim the style, but “no AI” seems hard to believe. The flow charts in particular stand out like a sore thumb - they just don’t have the kind of content a human would put in flow charts.
Every time I read things like this, it makes me think that AI was trained off of me. Using semicolons, utilizing classic writing patterns, and common use of compare and contrast are all examples of how they teach to write essays in high school and college. They're also all examples of how I think and have learned to communicate.
I'm not sure what to make of that either.
To be explicit, it’s not general hallmarks of good writing. It’s exactly two common constructions: not X but Y, and 3 items in parallel. These two pop up in extreme disproportion to normal “good writing”. Good writers know to save these tricks for when they really want to make a point.
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Clearly your perception of what is AI generated is wrong. You can't tell something is AI generated only because it uses "not just X - Y" constructions. I mean, the reason AI text often uses it is because it's common in the training material. So of course you're going to see it everywhere.
I sent the text through an AI detector with 0.1% false positive rate and it was highly confident the Zig book introduction was fully AI-written
Find me some text from pre-AI that uses so many of these constructions in such close proximity if it’s really so easy - I don’t think you’ll have much luck. Good authors have many tactics in their rhetorical bag of tricks. They don’t just keep using the same one over and over.
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It was very hard to find a link to the table of contents… then I tried opening it and the link didn’t work. I’m on iOS. I’d have loved to take a look quickly what’s in the book…
https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/tree/main/pages
inb4 people start putting a standardized “not AI generated” symbol in website headers
Some text is unreadable because it is so small.
Why do we need another language?
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There's an actual production grade database written in zig: https://tigerbeetle.com/
ghostty and bun aren't real world enough for you?
They're not. It's real world when there's a market for paying Zig jobs, not when you can list a few github repos that use it.
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Simple: your priors are wrong. People use Zig.
Even if what you say is true, people make bets on new tech all the time. You show up early so you can capture mindshare. If Zig becomes mainstream then this could be the standard book that everyone recommends. Not just that, it’s more likely the language succeeds if it has good learning materials - that’s an outcome the author would love.
> people make bets on new tech all the time. You show up early so you can capture mindshare.
I got on the ground floor with elixir. got my startup built on it. now we have 3 fulltime engineers working on elixir fulltime. None of that would have happenned if I looked at a young language and said "its not used in the real world"
"nobody uses in the real world yet" is uncharitable, as Zig is used in many real-world projects (Bun and Tigerbeetle are written in Zig, for example). But there's value being at the forefront of technologies that you think are going to explode soon, so that's how people find time and energy, I guess.
there's no way someone made this for free, where do I donate? im gonna get so much value from this this feels like stealing
It's AI-written FWIW
though maybe AI is getting to the point it can do stuff like this somewhat decently
The first page says none of the book was written by AI
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SAME. I was looking for a donation button myself! I've paid for worse quality instructional material. this is just the sort of thing I'm happy to support
Need this but to learn AI
They named a programming language after a wireless protocol?
What is it with HN and the "oh, I thought {NAME} is the totally different tool {NAME}" comments? Is it some inside joke?