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.
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.)
>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?
> [...] 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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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[ 456 ms ] story [ 379 ms ] thread* 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.
Edit: I noticed later it was in Milan, I guess it makes perfect sense.
(I’m not a member of the community, so not fully aware of the dynamics.)
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?
> [...] 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.
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)