The rationale behind the Zig project's anti-AI contribution policy

Zig operates a policy that strictly bans LLM use in issues, Pull Requests (PRs), the bug tracker, and translation processes.

The core of this policy is prioritizing Contributor Growth over the completeness of individual code. The Zig team uses review time not simply to check code, but as an 'investment' of time to help new contributors grow into trusted core members.

The negative impacts of LLM-based contributions on the project are as follows:

• Undermining the verification process: PRs written by LLMs skip the process of confirming a contributor's skill and building trust through review.
• Quality degradation and noise: 'Spam'-like contributions increase, including hallucinated code, compilation failures, CI failures, or PRs so massive in volume that they become impossible to review.

This policy has also caused actual technical conflicts. Bun developed a patch through its own Zig fork that improves compilation performance by 4x, but due to the LLM ban policy, it has been unable to get this merged into Zig upstream.