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For those who aren’t aware, as I wasn’t, this is coming from the “VP of Community” at the Zig Foundation. So the proposal to soft ban LLMs at Zig Day meetups seems like it has a bit more weight than if it was some random community member.
(I’m not a member of the community, so not fully aware of the dynamics.)
LLMs are just pushed by everyone at us, people just can't stand hearing about it anymore even if they use it and find it helpful.
It's like at PyCon2026 the keynote was about LLM, and people were just leaving in the middle, including GvR.
This seems like a very positive move to me. It makes it clear what Zig days are about so people know what to expect. There are 1000s of other events for people who want to build with LLMs so it's nice to have some recourse for those who still want to code by hand
>My recommendation is also to not choose an extreme approach (e.g. by completely banning LLM-related discourse) unless you feel very strongly about it.
Organizers are allowed to ban the mention of certain programming topics? I could understand if it was a topic that was adjacent to violence/harassment/sensitive stuff, but come on... are anti-AI groups becoming a cult?
I would say that they're more becoming a vocal minority of intolerant people towards some ideas. Some have good reasons, others just love to be on the counter culture bandwagon.
I predict that we will soon have a group like PETA that is primarily anti ai. I also predict that we're going to have for some time a schism in the developer community, which we already see in hn today, but it will grow wider.
Calling them a cult is probably too strong -- cults have specific structural characteristics like isolated membership and leader veneration. "Tribal" or "in-group signaling" fits better. Though the underlying frustration tracks; the discourse does feel increasingly dogmatic in some corners.
That doesn't mean anything in the context of a Zig Day. People will come to the event full of new experiences to talk about that relate to LLMs and also with some worries about the future of their profession, wich also will relate to LLMs a lot.
Not only these are generally reasonable things for a human to want to talk about, but what is happening in the tech industry is definitely on topic for an event like Zig Days.
The problem is when this consumes nearly 100% of the communication bandwidth detracting from the main goals of the event (applying systems thinking & making software you can love).
I like the idea of "it's not about LLMs" better as a starting point. For example, someone could peel off from a shared coding session, ask an LLM to try a concept, then bring that LLM chat to the group to explore (and then yes close that window and go back to face-to-face). Make more efficient use of the face-to-face time.
You could be right but I can think of numerous frustrating code jams in my past when we burned a lot of precious face-to-face time on fussy setup or other fiddly stuff.
> You could be right but I can think of numerous frustrating code jams in my past when we burned a lot of precious face-to-face time on fussy setup or other fiddly stuff.
Agreed, LLMs are particularly good at this kind of task.
For example: my windowing system on Linux would intermittently freeze. Diagnosing it was a pain--so I bounced the logs off the LLM. It gave me a couple of hypotheses and the commands to enable the correct logs for when it happened again. After the third time it happened, it pinpointed that a particular USB hub was causing the issue. I removed the devices downstream from that hub and haven't had an issue since.
There's an irony in your comment. On one hand, it's clearly starkly anti-LLM, but on the other hand, you treat humans and LLMs as similar categories, accepting a strong pro-AI framing.
You would never say "events are for humans, not search engines" as if search engines were a similar category to humans.
The concern about LLMs at community events is reasonable, but the article actually addresses this -- Loris seems to be grappling with how to help learners without creating a dependency on generated code. That's a more interesting pedagogical question than just banning tools outright.
That’s correct! Since Zig is openly sponsoring these events, it is indeed by definition not astroturfing, which is only applicable with a hidden/lying sponsor.
(I know nothing about Zig, but I wanted to directly appreciate your accuracy of word usage regardless :)
> [...] the best career move is to become proficient at buying more tokens orchestrating agents, but I would still recommend not putting all your eggs in one basket just yet because maybe – just maybe – there will still be some value in knowing how systems work, both to differentiate yourself from other developers career-wise, and as part of effective LLM steering.
This should be read sarcastically. Its an idiom in the US. You state something you view as obviously true while qualifying it with "maybe - just maybe". Its commonly said in a comedic tone.
Approaching significant change with humanity asks us to have empathy for many emotions at once. With respect to LLMs & other generative models those include but aren't limited to:
* Excitement from people who are able to make things they could not,
* Fear from people who's livelihoods are threatened,
* Betrayal from artists whose work is being ripped off,
* Alarm from activists looking out for ecosystems & the climate.
To add to an already-difficult challenge: many people, corporations, & governments are pushing extreme greed, hubris, & dehumanization for various reasons.
This piece does an excellent job laying out its recommendations with sensitivity for people of different perspectives & positions. I very much appreciate that.
"
* Excitement from people who are able to [unaccountably plagerize] things they could not,
* Fear from people who's [business IP rights] are threatened,
* [overt copyright theft from] artists [and chat bot users] whose work is being ripped off,
* [well funded denigration of] activists looking out for ecosystems & the climate.
"
Thankfully LLM are not real "AI", and modern hapless 'slavery with extra steps' plans will eventually end badly. Popcorn and bubble infrastructure liquidation fund standing by... =3
Why do people insist on using extreme rhetoric like this? If you don't personally like using LLMs, that's fine. The only point this comment serves is to stir the pot.
Using your first example, if it was true and universally accepted that this was plaigerism--we wouldn't use it, now would we? But that's not the universal opinion so instead you're just twisting someone else's comment to stir the pot.
Again, if you don't personally like LLMs and you personally feel like it's plagiarism cool, don't use them. Or at least make an argument for it.
But as it stands, this comment is just low-effort trolling.
This rephrasing is directly unhelpful to the goal of empathy for the humans caught in the change. If we come off as insensitive we will have no hope of influencing people. Also if you see a specific fallacy, please do name which one so I can improve.
All that said, I personally unequivocally agree with each of your points. I hope you are channeling this rage not only into comments sections but also into the hard work of tearing down & replacing the many incumbent systems that plagerize, denigrate, steal, oppress, monopolize, waste, & enslave. I certainly am.
Be interesting to see where Zig and ecosystem is in a few years with this general anti-LLM stance from it's core people. My guess is it'll just make it's way as a hobby language, left behind in the dust. Which is of course a perfectly fine thing for some.
> I would still recommend not putting all your eggs in one basket just yet because [..] there will still be some value in knowing how systems work, both to differentiate yourself from other developers career-wise, and as part of effective LLM steering.
the thesis is that investing in your skills outside of LLMs pays dividends whether you decide to apply those skills to LLMs or not, plus spending time bonding with your fellow engineers is good for you too. so I'm sure Zig will be doing great in a few years
>> there will still be some value in knowing how systems work, both to differentiate yourself from other developers career-wise, and as part of effective LLM steering.
That seems like a strawman to as I can't think of anyone making a reasonable argument against. After all we still have C and even Assembly developers out there, despite the many languages-that're-more-convenient that've sprouted since.
Naw, limiting LLMs for an event that's specifically about learning, growing, and collaborating makes a lot of sense. If it ends up dying it won't be because of their stance on LLMs for a conference.
People from ZSF and other maintainers have had a pretty clear stance that, while they don't necessarily like LLMs conceptually, they don't really care about if you will use them for tooling or development of your own projects. The anti-LLM stance has been on things that directly affect development of Zig (communication around issues, feature/pull requests, etc) and now, an event which is meant to be a connection place for Zig developers around the world to show off their projects and talk about other projects, and I'm sure you understand why this is a nice place to have human on human communication be the primarily encouraged method.
None of these really affect the end user of the compiler of making functioning, good tools with the language, with a LLM, if they wish to. Ghostty uses LLMs extensively, Bun was essentially vibe coded even before the Rust port. You might not wish to, ideologically speaking, develop in a language built by people who don't like your method of building things, but it's not a blocker that will turn the language into a "hobby language" (if we are judging hobbyism by lack of AI usage)
No need to worry about manual coder hubris. This piece covers all clanker possibilties/bases.
> And even if you have full confidence that the future of commercial software is strictly hands-off agentic coding, Zig Days are still for people who enjoy the act of programming, even if that were to become just a hobby.
Maybe they’ll even get to enjoy their hobbies for a few days without worrying about getting left in the dust (perfectly fine).
My stance is that it already is like that, now TigerBeetle, Ghosty and Roc are the only major projects using it, and none of them are something that drives adoption of new programming languages.
Bun could have been that, if addons were to be written in Zig, that is now gone.
So unless something comes up where "you need to use Zig to play here" becomes a requirement, it will stay as a language where some folks have fun using it, and that's it.
Ruby meetups went through this with Rails around 2006. The "it's all Ruby" argument didn't hold — they became Rails meetups de facto. Zig is trying to avoid that same gravitational capture before it happens. Smart call.
(I’m not a member of the community, so not fully aware of the dynamics.)