>No LLMs for finding bugs.
>No talking about use of chatbot/LLM services.
I've said it before and I'll say it again- it's a cult that bans dissent
Asking non-rhetorically. It seems like one position "ai in any circumstance = bad" is being enforced. The commenter above didn't even understand why he was ignored.
To clarify, do you mean someone who isn't part of the core team?
We’re quite knowledgeable and thoughtful folks fwiw
I think I’ve seen you are a core team member or contributor? I remember your tag?
Yes, I'm a core team member.
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?
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.
https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues/37060 I opened the issue and can give you the agent generated RCA on the matter if you all want it in issue 604 on antfly's github but I understand that's against policy and totally respect that.
Appreciate all the work you guys do and have been following the whole Zig project since inception fwiw!
Even in projects where I use LLM liberally, I would rather not read or have to engage with your LLM output.
I use LLMs already, I can make do without yours.
I don't want to read LLM output on a project either. But you may have misread the quoted section, it isn't saying "you can't post LLM output," it is saying you can't ask an LLM to advise/critique your own comment before posting it.
>>If you use a chatbot to give you advice on a comment on the issue tracker, that comment is unwelcome.
I've written code a long time and that's probably the dumbest rule I've seen.
Tbf I guess as a popular open source project not using AI to fix bugs, they probably already have more open bugs than they can ever fix so it doesn't really help them for people to find more.
I would imagine his bug was actually ignored just because Zig has 2700 open bugs, rather than some AI policy violation.
Show me a popular open source project that doesn't have a large number of open issues and I'll show you one that has a triage bot auto-close them.
https://youtu.be/zwi5b5xSsKA?is=PTjJJjSnVMdRuZag
They may just be taking the slow route of rejecting by default until they can be sure that the usage of LLMs provides long term value. I don’t see anything wrong with that. If you’re writing robust software, using LLMs at this stage is a bit of a gamble. We don’t fully know the long term effects on code quality yet.
It's clearly a hobby project (constant breakages, the maintainer getting into politics, rejecting some safety mechanisms, the anti-LLM crusade, a strange focus on esoteric targets with little to no commercial significance), but the maintainer does not admit that it is a hobby project.
It makes me respect the Rust community even more.
Typically, any time you think you've found a compiler error, you're using it wrong...
Okay: "I compile this input and the linker crashes."
Not okay: "I compile this input and the linker crashes. Also here's 10 paragraphs of slop about dwarf tables, which I can't even evaluate the accuracy of since I'm not an expert."
> Typically, any time you think you've found a compiler error, you're using it wrong...
Yes, if you can't figure out if it's a bug, the bug tracker is the wrong place to get help. Ask in a community forum instead.
It's a 20-line file with a few commands to run it to reproduce it. Not 10 paragraphs of slop.
Presumably that is much more helpful than - here's my gigantic repo, good luck running my tests, also good luck finding the bug.
What about my comment made you think I was suggesting not to give repro steps?
> also good luck finding the bug
But yes actually, this half is true. It's better to give them no extra information, than to give too much information that you have no idea if it's true or not.
> gets ignored
Who could have forseen this.
I'm thinking their lives must be absolutely dreadful for this constant fear of being left behind.