Zig President Says AI Coding Contributions Are ‘Invariably Garbage,’ So He Banned Them The open-source programming language Zig has implemented a strict ban on AI-assisted code contributions, including anything paraphrased, edited, brainstormed, or debugged by AI. Zig’s president, Andrew Kelley, stated that such contributions are “invariably garbage” and have negative value because they consume valuable review time. This policy aims to maintain the language’s core mission of mentorship and avoid the time-consuming task of evaluating the quality of AI-generated code.

• Zig, an open-source programming language, has banned the submission of AI-assisted code.
• Zig’s president, Andrew Kelley, described AI contributions as “invariably garbage” and a drain on reviewer resources.
• The ban includes LLM-generated content, paraphrased content, and code edited or debugged by AI.
• The core team reviews code submissions, and AI contributions slow down this process, which already faces a bottleneck of pull requests.
• Zig prioritizes mentorship as part of its core mission, making AI contributions counterproductive to that goal.
• The all-or-nothing AI ban is easier to enforce than attempting to judge the quality of individual AI-generated submissions. Continue reading https://www.businessinsider.com/zig-programming-language-ai-rules-2026-5