The Zig project's rationale for their firm anti-AI contribution policy
The Zig project enforces a strict ban on AI-generated contributions, prioritizing the growth of human contributors over the immediate value of code submissions. According to Loris Cro, VP of Community at the Zig Software Foundation, the goal of reviewing pull requests is to nurture trusted contributors, not just to merge code. LLM-assisted contributions undermine this process because they do not help build contributor expertise or long-term project investment.
- ▪Zig prohibits the use of LLMs for issues, pull requests, and comments, including translated content.
- ▪The Bun JavaScript runtime, written in Zig and acquired by Anthropic, uses its own fork of Zig and does not plan to upstream recent performance improvements due to Zig's AI contribution ban.
- ▪Loris Cro describes the project's approach as 'contributor poker,' where maintainers bet on contributors' potential rather than the quality of their initial pull requests.
- ▪The core team believes reviewing LLM-generated code provides no long-term benefit if it doesn't help grow skilled, confident contributors.
- ▪Zig encourages contributors to write in their native languages, relying on personal translation tools rather than AI-generated content.
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Zig has one of the most stringent anti-LLM policies of any major open source project: No LLMs for issues. No LLMs for pull requests. No LLMs for comments on the bug tracker, including translation. English is encouraged, but not required. You are welcome to post in your native language and rely on others to have their own translation tools of choice to interpret your words. The most prominent project written in Zig may be the Bun JavaScript runtime, which was acquired by Anthropic in December 2025 and, unsurprisingly, makes heavy use of AI assistance. Bun operates its own fork of Zig, and recently achieved a 4x performance improvement on Bun compile after adding "parallel semantic analysis and multiple codegen units to the llvm backend". Here's that code.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Simon Willison's Weblog.
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