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Zig Programming Language Bans AI-Generated Code Contributions
Zig, an open-source programming language, prohibits contributors from using AI tools to write, edit, or debug code. President Andrew Kelley said AI-assisted submissions have no value and consume reviewer time.
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Zig, an open-source programming language maintained by a 501(c)(3) organization, bars contributors from submitting code generated, edited, brainstormed, or debugged by large language models. The policy applies to all pull requests. Reviewers will reject any content that appears to originate from an LLM or that paraphrases LLM output.
At the time of the recording, the project had roughly 200 open pull requests. Kelley said the core team already faces a bottleneck in reviewing contributions and that AI-assisted code increases that workload.
Kelley noted that mentorship is part of Zig's mission.
He said contributors who rely on AI are not advancing the goal of helping programmers improve their skills. He described such submitters as "drive-by contributors" unlikely to join the core team. A blanket prohibition, he said, is simpler to enforce than attempting to distinguish acceptable AI output from unacceptable output.
Zig has been used to build other projects, including the Bun JavaScript runtime later acquired by Anthropic. The language's AI policy later became a point of discussion between the Bun and Zig communities.
