Zig’s Andrew Kelley explains AI ban and shift from GitHub to Codeberg

Kelley defends prioritizing human mentorship over AI code and says moving to Codeberg restored reliable CI for Zig.

Zig creator Andrew Kelley reiterated that the project has a blanket ban on AI-generated code contributions, arguing they waste scarce maintainer review time and do not produce contributors who grow into long-term maintainers. He frames code review as a mentorship resource to be spent on humans actually learning the language and ecosystem, not on “drive‑by” submissions produced via chat tools. Kelley contrasted this stance with Bun’s recent Rust rewrite assisted by AI agents, saying the real divergence is in project values rather than language features. Separately, he explained that Zig moved its repository from GitHub to the nonprofit Codeberg after persistent GitHub Actions failures and because he prefers nonprofits’ stability over corporations’ growth and monetization pressure. Kelley also recapped Zig’s origins in his search for a systems language suitable for real-time audio, and noted that Zig now powers projects such as Ghostty, TigerBeetle, and Uber’s cross-compilation infrastructure.