Comment by neomantra
11 days ago
One non-obvious reason is that an important aspect of their community is to shepherd new contributors [1]. LLMs crushing everything would reduce that. More obvious is all the toil for maintainers dealing with LLM PRs (broadly it’s an issue). The Zig maintainers prefer to put their energy into improving people and fostering those relationship.
It's important that developers have an accurate mental model of how things work, are structured and why.
LLMs promote a decoupling of mental models and the actual codebase.
As much as some may want to believe, just reviewing what the LLM outputs is not equivalent to thinking about implementation details, motivations, exactly how and why things are, and how and why they work the way they do, and then writing it yourself. The process itself is what instills that knowledge in you.
Exactly. This is what many ai-sloppers ignore. Mental models are crucial. Nothing substitutes for having the program itself in your brain and being able to "mentally debug" it when something breaks.
Well said! I don't think either party is really at fault here, but if Anthropic wanted to contribute non-negligible amounts of code over time then it's an absolute dealbreaker.
Sucks for people who were invested in contributing to Bun and don't like working with AI tools to be sure, but I think the writing was on the wall for them pretty much immediately post-acquisition. You must admit, it's hard to predict that 100% of source lines will be written by AI if you're not walking the walk!
That's a solid reason to keep LLMs away from the kind of tasks that help with onboarding. But a patch series from a competent team that changes 3000 lines should probably be evaluated on its own merits. Or at least, the collaboration-based reasons to reject AI don't apply and the real reason would be something else.
(Though I don't know if this particular patch series would get accepted on its own merits.)
The recent article explained the bun patch would have been refused on technical merits as it's intrinsically incorrect, to be able to work properly it required some language changes.
> patch series from a competent team that changes 3000 lines should probably be
split into a bunch of much smaller changes?
I don't understand your suggestion. If you take an ugly patch series that changes 3000 lines and organize it into small quality changes, it's still a patch series that changes 3000 lines.
There's no reason to assume my generic statement was talking about the ugly version rather than the nicely organized version.
1 reply →
I mean in an authoritarian system you wouldn’t make a one off exception like that.
Yeah, I remember when the lazy bastards started writing programs using compilers instead of learning assembly language. Now I don’t have a single colleague who can write assembly. There’s whole generations now who can’t code assembly. Most don’t even know what a register is. Hope Zig holds against this latest attempt to make everyone stupid.
To add to the other commenters, loads of people don’t know assembly, which speaks to the quality of the average developer. The ones that still understand assembly to this day tend to be better developers, writing faster and more efficient code.
I'd be very surprised if the "average" developer across the board was in fact not just a JavaScript / TypeScript only developer. I have no expectations or really even hope that the average developer I work with has ever written a line of assembly.
>The ones that still understand assembly to this day tend to be better developers, writing faster and more efficient code.
That is if you use something like C, C+=, Java, .NET, Go. With Javascript and Python I don't think knowing assembly would make any difference because it's hard to optimize the code in these languages for how the CPU and memory works.
4 replies →
Your analogy falls apart because the "lazy bastards" still knew how to program and understood the code they were working on.
Vide-coders often don't read, let alone understand, the code they send for PRs.
I don't think most JavaScript devs know how to read C code, let alone assembly, so I think the comparison is apt. Is it not?
3 replies →
Generating AI code/PR is not the same as using compilers because of at least two things:
- the scale of how much and how fast you can generate code with AI vs how fast can you write code for compiler
- the mental model of what is being generated and how much the contributor understands and owns the generated code
Using an LLM isn't analogous to using a higher level language.
That’s funny because it’s exactly, literally the same. The difference is it’s not deterministic. That may be a problem but it’s still a higher level language, just a much higher level language than anything before.
14 replies →
There’s a big difference between (mostly) deterministic compiler and non-deterministic LLMs.
[dead]