Andrew Kelley didn’t mince words. On a recent JetBrains podcast the president of the Zig programming language called AI-assisted contributions “invariably garbage.” The remark landed like a slap. It wasn’t hyperbole. It reflected years of frustration with pull requests that added nothing but extra work. Zig has long positioned itself as a better C. Simpler. Safer in key ways. Explicit about memory. The project runs under a nonprofit Zig Software Foundation with a serious budget and real users in production. Ghostty. TigerBeetle. Even parts of Bun before tensions arose. Yet success brought its own headaches. More interest meant more submissions. Many of them now come tainted by large language models. The policy stands crystal clear. No LLMs for issues. No LLMs for pull requests. No LLMs for comments on the bug tracker, including translation. The Zig code of conduct spells it out. English is encouraged but not required. Contributors can post in their native language.…