Zig bans AI code after president calls contributions 'invariably garbage'

The open-source language Zig has banned AI-assisted contributions. Its rule bars any LLM-generated content, paraphrases from an LLM, and anything edited, brainstormed, or debugged by an LLM. On the JetBrains podcast, Zig president Andrew Kelley said AI-assisted contributions are "invariably garbage." He warned that "People are sending us contributions that have no value whatsoever" and that they "have negative value, because they take review time away from the team." Reviewers form a "bottleneck" and Kelley said the project had 200 open pull requests at the time of the recording.

Kelley described AI-generated submissions as "slop contributions" that waste reviewers' time. Because mentorship is part of Zig's mission, he argued these drive-by contributions are counterproductive to helping programmers improve and typically come from people who will not join the core team.

AI-assisted coding tools such as Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex have spread through Silicon Valley, and big tech has set high targets for AI-written code.

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