LLMs promote a decoupling of mental models and the actual codebase.
As much as some may want to believe, just reviewing what the LLM outputs is not equivalent to thinking about implementation details, motivations, exactly how and why things are, and how and why they work the way they do, and then writing it yourself. The process itself is what instills that knowledge in you.
Sucks for people who were invested in contributing to Bun and don't like working with AI tools to be sure, but I think the writing was on the wall for them pretty much immediately post-acquisition. You must admit, it's hard to predict that 100% of source lines will be written by AI if you're not walking the walk!
(Though I don't know if this particular patch series would get accepted on its own merits.)
split into a bunch of much smaller changes?
Vide-coders often don't read, let alone understand, the code they send for PRs.
- the scale of how much and how fast you can generate code with AI vs how fast can you write code for compiler
- the mental model of what is being generated and how much the contributor understands and owns the generated code
I guess there are 2 philosophies in software development: move fast and break things and move at a pace that guarantees everything is rock solid.
Most commercial software, Anthropic included is taking the former path, while most infrastructure teams are taking the later.
I guess Linux and FreeBSD kernels are also not accepting LLM based contributions yet.
Both appear to be[1][2]. FreeBSD doesn't have a formal policy yet, but they appear to be leaning towards admitting some degree of LLM contribution.
[1]: https://docs.kernel.org/process/coding-assistants.html
[2]: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/will-freebsd-adopt-a-no-a...
PostgreSQL, a famously slow and rock solid project, accepts LLM-based contributions. But they are held to the same high standard, if you cannot explain the patch you submitted it likely get rejected.
Zig is famous for taking the former path! Anyone using Zig for a few years knows every release breaks things, and they are still making huge changes which I would classify as “moving fast”, like the recent IO changes!
You can be against a particular technology without being "anti-technology".
See DRM/surveillance/bad self driving implementations.
Just because a thing exists doesn’t mean you have to use it for everything. You don’t use asbestos blanket? Why are you so against asbestos?
Zig, as programming language, has a multiplier codebase. A bug may affect a significant larger portion of users than most libraries or binaries will, as it's a fundamental building block of everything that uses Zig. Just that could be worth the extra scrutiny on every individual commit.
There's also the usual arguments: copyright ethics, environmental ethics and maintainer burden.
Couldn't you say exactly the same about bun?
