Comment by alexrp
5 hours ago
We simply ask that Zig bug reports be written by humans, for humans. Whether you use LLMs on your project is immaterial to us.
Yes, I'm a core team member.
5 hours ago
We simply ask that Zig bug reports be written by humans, for humans. Whether you use LLMs on your project is immaterial to us.
Yes, I'm a core team member.
Thanks for the clarification here!
So for instance because of the size of our codebase our project has pushed Zig to some of the edges, specifically we end up hitting a bug when using llvm and zig on arm64 (Mac and Linux) where it seems to be caused by some configuration Zig passes through to LLVM. I’ve used codex and claude to help me diagnose and find the bug (we use nix’s glibc zig to circumvent the problem now). I now understand the root cause but am not sure what the proper fix would be. But I’ve not known whether or not even raising the issue would break the terms of contributing? Would raising the issue break the implicit agreement?
I would suggest just starting by filling out the bug report template, i.e. steps to reproduce, expected behavior, and observed behavior. If for some reason you can't provide a reasonable reproduction, the symptoms on their own can sometimes be enough for us to make an educated guess at what's going wrong.
Regarding whether you should post the root cause analysis: Per the current policy, the answer would have to be no.
I do personally have more nuanced thoughts on this, and I started typing them out... but then I realized that my reply was getting dangerously close to blog post length, so I decided to restrain myself and commit to turning it into an actual blog post later. In a nutshell, though, the problem is that even if there is such a thing as responsible use of LLMs for bug analysis, the only way we can currently be confident that someone possesses the required qualities for that is by working with them for a while.