MicroZig to Adopt Strict No LLM / No AI Policy
github.com
github.com
> It is entirely valid for people to want to use LLMs for their projects and in their communities. It's also valid to want to keep them free of LLMs. Unfortunately those preferences are not compatible, one approach cannot coexist with the other. A choice needs to be made for MicroZig/ZEG projects. I've developed a preference for working without LLMs, and as I'm the most active maintainer of the project, shipping projects like the SYCL Badge, I'm imposing my preference.
> I have no hard feelings for anyone that decides to make an LLM fork of microzig.
I really wish a lot more of this debate could show that level of respect for the other side.
The author's tone here is very mature and measured. But the policy is not, and it doesn't seem particularly thoughtful, either. The Code of Conduct says that even using an LLM to explore a problem or idea, and then typing up a comment about your thoughts after doing so is "unwelcome". So it's not dictating where code comes from, or just code and prose, it's dictating how you process your own thoughts and ideas if you want to engage with the project.
LLMs puke these out.
It's extractive because a human has to triage them.
In an ideal world, LLM users would simply steer clear of trying to contribute instead of trying to hide it and direct their energy and tokens elsewhere
I genuinely do not understand why so many people that are pro-AI do not understand consent. There are people one comment downdown this tree talking about this being discrimination and harassment. It's not your project, you don't have a human right to contribute to it ... fork it ? direct your tokens elsewhere ? Wwhy the default with AI users seeming to try to nonconsensually force your way in while trying to hide it and consider it a one-up on the maintainer ?
> Yeah we know you're working with an LLM. That is fine (imo), as long as you're not doing drive-by slop PRs. These have been rather good quality, and you've been testing on hardware (which is important)
So it feels odd for them to suddenly change from this (clearly working) setup.
It's not hypothetical to say that an LLM can write widely adopted, battle-tested, production code.
Claude Code would be another example.
Linux is still mostly human, but even Linus Torvalds has warmed up to the idea that LLMs are tools a skilled user can use to contribute there.
There's a lot of quieter, private examples where some company rewrote their entire back-end or internal tooling with an LLM. You just tend not to hear about it because "we used AI" is currently negative marketing/PR, so why say it out loud?
https://x.com/trq212/status/2014051501786931427
Remember, game engines can render millions of triangles per frame, and Claude Code struggles to render a few hundred characters on a monospace grid. I wouldn't hold it up as a shining beacon of quality.
What a poor example. Epic Games’ launcher is popular despite its software, not because of it, and in large part because they give away free games every week.
> battle-tested
You’re just throwing words around. You can’t in good faith call something that is barely out “battle-tested”.
> Claude Code would be another example.
Claude Code is widely regarded as a mess and bad software, and for good reason (see sibling comment).
Zig has had a similar policy for a while. Where are these myriad forks which accelerate faster, and the communities behind them?
I've been very productive getting some Zig code to work with 0.17.0 and I really don't find a reason to contribute anything back given this policy.
But then use your own brain to understand the bug, its implications, maybe ways to fix it. Again, use whatever tools, as long as your mind forms a clear understanding, which you can operate on independent on any LLMs or whatever.
The problem with "LLM bug reports" is that the submitters run a machine tool to find something that looks like a bug, but have a poor / no idea themselves what the issue is, and whether it's really an issue. It's easy to flood maintainers with such reports. The "no AI" policy pushes the responsibility of doing proper assessment onto you, the submitter.
If you can use LLMs to produce a bug report with the quality of assessment equal or above that of a diligent qualified human bug reporter, godspeed.
that isn't what the policy says. It isn't just about writing the report.
> If you use a chatbot to give you advice on a comment on the issue tracker, that comment is unwelcome.
If a submission (PR, bug report) is high-quality, and the person behind it is responsive and clueful, so that the useful parts of the submission can be taken, and problematic parts, fixed, then it does not matter what process has produced the code. It could as well be a Boltzmann brain [1].
Given that the author of the contribution actually got a grip on the problem, and on the solution, the limitation of "no AI use" is no longer load-bearing. Not only might it have been counterproductive — it's also unverifiable in practice. It becomes absurd, akin to a demand that the text must have been edited by Vim and not VSCode. It must be noted that a misguided policy may indeed force the contributor to delve in the depths of the process of PR creation, and showcase every manually undertaken step in an attempt to prove that no AI was involved. Ironically, it is no secret that many less scrupulous participants might leverage AI to imitate just that. It must be noted though that the decision ultimately belongs to the project maintainers.
(The above paragraph was hand-crafted for your and my entertainment.)
In short: by default I respect the authors of the policy and hence assume that they enact the policy for reasons that are rational, not religious.
To me "no LLMs for finding bugs" means what it means, which implicitly means "we prefer to have bugs than for you to use a LLM". It is weird, may result in worse code, but it can be justified for ideological reasons, and I mean, why not, it is your project, your rules.
In the unlikely even I contribute one day, reading this rule, I will turn off my LLMs completely and my submissions will probably have bugs that could have been avoided using a LLM based debugging pass, but that's the rule, and I won't discuss it because it is also the rule.
If the intent is to avoid flooding maintainers with bug reports, say "no LLMs for bug reporting".
My read is any LLM use should be opaque to them. You should be able to explain your bug find in your own words, have formatted as the project expects, not have any LLM generated comments (which trend towards being useless anyways)
The wording of the post is very clever, if you're green you read it and you say "I'm banned because I use Claude". If you're experienced enough you can read the message between the lines: "if you use LLMs, it should still have gone through your brain before it reaches mine, so I'm not turned into a meat puppet by proxy"
Some people reject AI on a matter of principle. They may have a problem with the energy cost, the idea that AI companies are stealing the world knowledge for their own profit, that any use of LLMs will make you stupid, or that it does more harm than good overall. The code of conduct links to a short story by Isaac Asimov, you typically don't do that when your motives are purely technical.
If you say the quiet part out loud, the lemmings will take that as approval.
"Only thoughtful application of AI allowed" -> "Of course my usage of AI was thoughtful! My custom pi harness with 1M context project brain is very thoughtful!"
Not sure why you think this wouldn't be something they did on principle either though. Most open source projects are built on someone's personal principles: that's what motivates them to keep working.
(hence the recommendation someone's free to fork it and do the work themselves)
I care, because my personal policy is "Do whatever, but if you submit the code, you own it, and you better be able to act like you own it." And that's what you're saying their policy means. But that's not what it says, and I in fact strongly disagree with what it says. So the shear between what the words say and the "read between the lines" version is quite literally the difference between a policy I reject outright and a policy I strongly endorse.
> And of course you can't ask the submitter because they don't know either.
At that moment I abandon the ticket with a comment that they can reopen once they can explain what they found, why it is an issue and should be fixed, etc.
That's what it says, literally. I'm sorry but for a programming language project.. That's the most human slop of a policy I have seen in a long time.
Low effort, human slop.
> We know that if something gained somewhere, something lost somewhere.
I don't know that.
Yeah, but that doesn't imply equivalent exchange.
If you care about being the best sprinter in the world, yeah, put in the time and effort! But if you just want to get to work, there's no way you can beat the speed of a car.
If you're one of the better bug-hunters in the world, you probably lose something by using an LLM. For the rest of us, it's increasingly like trying to race a car.
We definitely need both types - it's important having the humans who do have that top 1% understanding. But increasingly, for everyone else, LLMs outperform doing it by hand.
While no one is reporting them to you, there will certainly people who will use those LLMS to find those bugs and exploit them.
And the LLMs have gotten pretty good at finding bugs.
To me, it’s akin to running a classic car club and not wanting drivers to turn up in their 2026 GT3 RS. They appreciate the building process and the thought and effort that went into it. At least, that’s my interpretation after attending some meetups/conferences.
As of late 2026, this is gross negligence and any project with such a policy should be assumed to have a variety of easily exploitable vulnerabilities.
A lot of the recent major exploits like php2shell require a fair amount of effort to use, so unless you're a major public figure or holding on to something very valuable, there's not a lot of reason to be concerned.
Obviously, if you're writing a password manager, it's a very different story and I'd be horrified by such a policy there. But you've got to make an argument that this specific app is actually a target
The point of pwning your lightbulb is not to decide whether it's bright or dark in your house. It's valuable as a residential proxy with a good IP reputation, to be sold to the highest bidder who wants to do something they don't want traced to their own IP.
If a contributor genuinely understands the problem, has tested the code themselves and writes the PR description themselves, it would be indistinguishable from human written code anyway.
Or if it does, it could be hundreds of years in the future.
But maybe it'll be next year? LOL.
As it is, we seem to be developing detection techniques at a good clip and the way current LLM tech works it doesn't seem like there is a path towards avoiding detection... Plus, humans are genuinely very good at self-tuning to detect LLM output.
Agents have us beat and we can’t win back the ground.
Sources:
I remember how someone used it to guess vibe-codeness of the infamous and long awaited bun2rust article by Jared Summer from Anthropic. It was completely off-base vs real numbers of em/en dashes and hyphens.
> No LLMs for brainstorming and then sharing the results of that brainstorming, even if you create the prose. If you use a chatbot to give you advice on a comment on the issue tracker, that comment is unwelcome.
> No LLMs for finding bugs.
Indeed no hard feelings.
I genuinely don't understand.
"I'd like to request a vegetarian meal."
"This is a clever request. It will not be an obstacle for a good chef who knows the best spices to use to disguise meat."
I can understand the no automated AI contribution point of view, but going overboard with the above that is also completely unenforceable makes the policy look dumb.
A project without everyone putting the same filter between them and the work they submit might help a project evolve in interesting and different ways.
the rule is ultimately "dont submit stuff where only your llm session knows whats going on"
if you brainstorm with an llm, then rewrite the llm prose but have no understanding, youve still broken the rule.
if you understand what it suggested, why, and so on, then you do know whats up, and thats unenforceable, but who cares
You said it yourself - the enforceable policy is a a different, and much more reasonable policy. If the rule is "ultimately" something else, you can in fact just make that the rule. Or include a parenthetical explanation.
Rules are the ideal place for being pedantic and detailed! That's the whole point of rules - ultimately, the rule is the rule that was actually written down. Not anything else.
It's exactly as enforceable as when projects require you to swear that you can legally assign copyright of your submissions to the entity that runs the project, and/or swear that your submissions don't infringe on anyone's patents, and/or -as the ReactOS project does- swear that you've never seen the code that the project is reimplementing.
If someone swears that they're conforming to the rules and you later find out that they lied, then you ban them forever, publicly announce why, and -if needed- purge their contributions and do your best to alert affected users about the tainted versions. These sorts of policies work for the same reason ordinary doors and door locks work: most folks aren't profoundly antisocial shitbags.
If an LLM finds a bug in some code, but you fail to report it because of a project's code of conduct regarding AI, does the bug even exist at all?
If you find a bug in some code, and use AI to help you find the fix, are you allowed to submit the fix? Or should you just let them "figure it out".
I'm sorry, but I can't take stances like this seriously. Policies like this are unhelpful. This reeks of the academic knee-jerk reaction of ban AI, without considering the reality that yes, students continue to use AI, even if you tell them not to. AI should be used responsibly. Ban the behaviour you don't want, don't ban the technology.
There was someone on a previous thread about zig who reported a bug and was ignored, ostensibly because he used LLMs to confirm the accuracy of his bug report before submission. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49938732
if you want to submit an LLM found bug, you could instead donate the tokens directly to the maintainers, rather than making them read your agent outputs
Basically, the person running the project has made their stance clear, they’re not interested in debating it, and if you don’t like it, take your patronage elsewhere. Clear and straightforward.