You know, this is a little bit different

of a video at this point.

I hope you're ready for a bit of a

yapstorm today because we got something

that originally I just wasn't going to

talk about. You know, I just didn't want

to talk about it. I didn't want to take

your time. I just I just couldn't do it.

But it just has been eating at me and

it's just been building in me like some

sort of just yap geton that's going to

come out and now it's going to come out.

So, our story starts right here. Bun,

the beloved JavaScript command line

utility that's written in Zigg, very

popular programming language, dropped

this little tweet that said, "Hey, in

Bun's Zigg fork," and you're like,

"Well, wait, wait a second. Bun has

forked Zigg. Wait, what?" They made a

small change that apparently makes debug

building up to 4x faster, improving

internal development velocity. And then

they give this a nice example right here

where you can see a bunch of what

appears to be parallel builds all going

at the exact same time. Now, you're

probably thinking, "What the hell? What

what's the controversy? Is it because

bun

for to zigg? Is that is that what we're

talking about?" No, that's that's not

it. That's not it at all. For those that

don't know, Zigg is actually quite the

popular programming language. As you can

see right here, Mitchell Hashimoto,

writer of Ghosty, yes, Ghosty is also

written in Zigg, has some high praises

for the language. And the language

itself was actually written in uh late

2015 early 2016 with the description of

it being my goal is to create a new

programming language that is more

pragmatic than C. This is like trying to

be more evil than the devil himself. Not

my words. Kind of funny. A good way to

describe your language. You just wanted

a more pragmatic C. Also, that's evil.

That's evil to do. All right. So, before

we get into the controversy and honestly

my five conclusions that I'm going to

draw from this, yes, like I said, this

is a lot of yapping that's going to

happen today. First, the bag. Kamish,

you got to listen to me.

>> Oh, no. Not one more comment from you.

I'm done rebasing your mistakes. You're

on junior CSS duty until further notice.

>> Commish, you can't do this to me.

>> Keep talking and you'll be doing store

procedures for a month now. Get out of

here. Take him with you.

Fun fact, CSS is actually touring

complete.

>> Larry, Gary, Tango, Mary, I'm just

pulling your request. It looks good to

me. You're clear to ship.

>> Thanks.

>> You're welcome. Next.

It's an awfully big PR

>> for an intern.

>> Well, I just bumped some dependencies.

It's nothing major.

>> Hey, can I get a quick stamp on this?

>> Yeah, don't worry about it.

>> Quick approval.

>> Oh, not on my watch. I'm on your disc

like a peas on slur. Not this again.

It's literally just a hex code change.

Just to prove it. Just to prove it.

Squish. Perf resisting review. Oh, I

know you're the dippler. I've seen vibe

coding, but that ain't it.

>> MERGE COP. NO,

>> MERGE COP.

>> I hate merge cop. He always makes

reviewing take forever. We have code

rabbit. Oh, come on. I wasn't even

merging the prod. It was a hex code

change. We have code rabbit. We don't

need real people reviewing such simple

changes. Code rabbit can do it for us.

Our engineers time is better spent

solving problems for customers. You can

try it too at code rabbit.ai. Next week

on Merge Cop.

>> Now my plan to merge a dip so big.

You're the dipler and I always knew it.

>> Okay, so what is the actual controversy

that's going on here? By the way, I love

saying controversy ever since I saw some

BR LITTLE SPOT BRUSH say their funny

words. They're funny English words and

one of them was controversy. Now I just

love saying it that way. Anyways, so if

you look at the tweet and you go all the

way down to the third one, it says this.

We do not currently plan to upstream

this as Zig has a strict ban on LL

authored contributions. And if you go

over and you do check out the code of

conduct and the first thing you'll

notice is that right away there's an IRC

channel. Okay, little strange that

there's an IRC channel, a language in

the year 2026 is still organizing and

strategizing on IRC. It's really a true

I mean they are truly trying to be a

more pragmatic se absolutely

Chad behavior. And if you scroll down,

just a hint, you'll see right away

strict no LLM and no AI policy, no LLM

for issues, no LLMs for poll requests.

Now, of course, what does this mean? I

think this is a big point of contention.

Does that mean you cannot generate any

code by it? Uh, but anyways, or no LLMs

for comments on the bug tracker,

including translations. English is

encouraged, but not required. You are

welcome to post your own native language

and rely on others to have their own

translation tools of choice to interpret

your words. By the way, I'm just

throwing this out there. That just

sounds like a giant pain in the ass. I

mean,

I mean, LLMs are just generally pretty

dang good at at translating. It's just

like, "No, you use an LLM, not not me."

And of course, this led to exactly what

you would expect it to lead to. Well,

screw Zig. They won't last long blocking

LLMs. Zig is going to get left behind.

Like, what what do we What What is Zig

getting left behind even mean? Like

where's it? Where's it going to go? It

can't get left by. It's a language,

people. And of course, some people are

actually happy about this, bro. They're

competing with C, not JavaScript for

sake. Makes me want to learn Zigg

more. Anyways, classic Twitter

arguments. They're all just so focused

on the exact thing that is the problem

instead of actually looking at what is

the implications of all this. What is

actually going to happen? Because

there's actually quite a bit to think

about if you have this kind of

divergence that's starting to happen

because you do have anthropic. They can

literally spend infinity tokens using

claude mythos, the most dangerous model

ever created. It's so dangerous that

Daario has decided that you could never

even look at it. Like even just looking

at it is like looking into the eyes of

Medusa. You're going to be turned to

stone and immediately start hacking the

NSA. Okay, so let me get to effectively

my the many points that I have about

kind of this weirdness that we're about

to see. The first thing obviously is

like I want features faster. Zigg has

been in development for 10 years. It's

still not at a major version. It's still

unstable release after release in the

minor versions. Still break a whole

bunch of stuff and things change. So

yeah, I can see why people would like a

little bit more velocity. And I think a

lot of people these days when they look

at velocity in its most kind of

rudimentary sense, they look at an LLM.

They're like, "Dude, why would you write

code when you could just say it in

English, the Lord's programming

language?" But I kind of want to push

back against that a little bit. Like

even though I think I'd personally

benefit seeing Zigg in a more kind of

concrete uh stable position, in fact, I

would start using Zig again in a more

realistic fashion if that was the case.

Uh but I I do want to push back a little

bit in kind of that line of thinking. If

you just even look at one of their

latest features, their new Async kind of

release of how they're handling async,

it's really really well done and it took

multiple years to actually get into that

position. Now, is it a good thing that

they took so much time to get async

await effectively in Zigg? Well, some

people could say, hey, they should have

been able to do it faster, but the way

they did it was done so well that I

think it's actually okay that they took

that time. There is a bit of beauty in

slowing down and not trying to be the

first person done, but actually being

the person that does it the correct way.

A second, I think the big controversy

here is that Bun forked a Zigg and did

not call it ZG. I I genuinely, if you're

going to fork Zigg and you're going to

diverge and you do not call it ZG, it is

truly a crime against humanity. We

better have Zigg and ZG. Just say I mean

that's a more iconic D duo than BBop and

Rock Steady. I would be genuinely upset

if this does not happen. It really just

goes to show that Daario doesn't like

humor also apparently. Okay, I expect

it. I expect it next time or I'm judging

I'm judging anthropic heavily here.

Okay, but a more important question is

how do you even how do you enforce this

in all reality? How do you enforce this?

What happen if I'm a contributor and I

just start using a little bit of tab

autocomplete? Well, that my friends is

an LLM. you know, that right there could

be an LLM. And even though I'm hand

coding effectively most of it, I could

be using an LLM. How do you know that

I'm not using an LLM? I mean, I get it

that some people out there, they have

very magical and mystical prompts that

they like to put out there. And it's

very obvious when the slop canineer

comes in with his slop trebuche just

unloading code and being like, "What?

What?" Like, "What? Why? Why are you

upset? I just added 10,000 lines of

code. This is good. This is good for

you. You should love this, brother.

Nobody loves this. This This doesn't

even work. Okay, this whole thing,

virtually none of it actually works or

really changes anything. And so, this

does kind of lead to an interesting

point. If more people were to get in,

you know, kind of excited about Zigg. I

understand that they're building this

like mentality and this is totally okay,

right? You're totally okay saying, "Hey,

we want to create a culture where you

don't use LLMs." I think you should be

able to do that. I don't understand why

people get so angry at other people for

doing it and then they point to a

singular bug or a singular feature such

as this one right here. Uh this compile

at, you know, this super cool, hey, I'm

going to compile everything much much

faster. They look at this and they're

just like, oh yeah, screw this team. Oh,

they're going to die without just like,

well, first off, they got here by the

decisions they've made, so obviously

there must be some level of wisdom in

what they've done. Bun has enjoyed what

they've been building and doing and so

they're like, "Okay, actually no, no,

wait a second. This could be kind of

neat." And so it's kind of silly to that

these people just come out and just rag

so hard. Like you didn't build the

language. You don't know what it takes.

It took 10 years to get to where they

are today through very careful

decision-making. I don't know. But we're

entering into a weird world where things

like this, this little MIT license

that's currently on Zigg, maybe these

are some of the things that might change

at some point. Maybe this becomes less

and less of appealing kind of license to

have because this kind of behavior by

big companies with billions of dollars

and infinite tokens are going to try to

give you a run for whatever kind of

creative stuff that you've done. And it

also just feels really weird because

Andrew has spent the last 10 years

building this product on a pretty like

meager salary. If you look into some of

his blog posts over here, you can see

right here he says like, "Why am I

donating $150 a month or 10% of my

income to this library?" And it just

feels weird. Like there is just

something kind of weird about a big

corporation stepping in saying, "Hey, we

don't like how you guys do it, so we're

going to do it our way." But also,

that's MIT license. Like that's that's

why you don't use it if you don't want

that to happen because it's fully within

the big corporation's right to do that.

Like that's the whole point of this

license. There's also just something I

don't like about anthropic. Okay, I I

just haven't liked them. They just seem

so adversarial to engineers. They just

seem so adversarial to pretty much

everybody that's not anthropic. They

have their own little internal circle

jerk where they're just like, "The AI is

absolutely alive. We are absolutely

shephering into the future. This is the

most dangerous thing ever. It's probably

going to kill everybody. Also, we're

going to create and make trillions of

dollars because we're the only people

that are safe." They're just like the

weirdest group of people. And so for

some odd reason, when I see them make a

fork of an MIT project, it just somehow

feels greasier. And I don't really know

how to say it because it is MIT at the

end of the day, but but at the same

time, it just it somehow feels like

they're stealing. And I'm not really

sure how to express that other than I

just don't like it. It doesn't it

doesn't feel good. Something feels wrong

about it. And yes, currently it's just a

simple single feature kind of fork. So

maybe that's all it ever ends up being.

And then it's just like, okay, whatever.

It was just a simple single fork. Or

maybe they continue to keep on doing it

and then at some point it has to become

a hard fork once you add enough

features. I don't know. There's just

something that bothers me, but I don't

really know why. I can't really put my

finger on it. And that's part of the

reason why I wasn't going to make this

video because I don't really have like a

concrete takeaway other than yeah, I

don't like it. I don't really like how

Anthropic deals with the public and how

they think of software engineers and it

just bothers me more that they're

forking MIT Goodwill projects. It just

bothers me. A lot of questions. Hey, I'm

just saying lots of weird questions.

We've never really been in this kind of

area before and I don't really know what

to make of it. If you got an answer for

me, you got to let me know. Okay. Also,

I know that was just a lot of yapping.

Okay. This was a lot of yapping. I just

I just felt like I had a bunch of things

to say cuz this last year has just been

so weird in software development and

this kind of problem has started to kind

of poke up multiple times now. I don't

even know what to make of it. The name

is the sloppen. All right, so it turns

out that after I recorded this video

that Zigg did actually respond and gave

their thoughts which are super

compelling and I'm traveling so I'm

going to record the end of this video

from my hotel bed. Wow. All right, so

the response from Zigg is actually

really amazing. And so it starts off

with AI is entirely besides the point

here. The changes in this Zigg fork are

not desirable to upstream for several

reasons. So it turns out that parallel

semantic analysis has actually been uh

as an issue and they've been kind of

thinking about it for quite some time

now and they already have a mostly

working version of this exact same

thing. Now this is what they say about

it. The rewritten type resolution

semantics were designed to avoid these

issues. These issues being that if you

do parallel semantic analysis, sometimes

depending on the order of types, you can

actually get errors that should not

exist if everything was parsed

correctly. But Bun's Zigg fork does not

incorporate the changes and has not

otherwise solved the design problems,

which means their parallelized semantic

analysis implementation will exhibit

non-deterministic behavior. That's

pretty much a non-starter for most

serious developers. You don't want your

compilation to randomly fail with

nonsense error 30% of the time. And I

think we all pretty much agree to that.

That would be wild. I'm not even exactly

sure. There's no amount of compilation

speed up that I would take in which

exhibit some sort of nondeterminism. I

guess I mean to be fair if I could

compile it in a half of a second versus

1 hour, then yeah, obviously I'd rather

roll the dice three times to make sure

it actually compiles. But okay, besides

the point. To put it more simply, we are

going to make these change enhancements,

but hacking them in for a flashy

headline isn't a good outcome for our

users. Instead, we're approaching the

problem with the care it deserves, so

that when we ultimately ship it, we

don't cause regressions. Now, again,

this is what I've been talking about

with Zigg. This is why Zigg has remained

such a good language is that every

single time there's a problem, they

think about it and they approach it and

they take great care to do the right

thing every time. It's truly impressive

what they have built so far. So, I'm

completely not surprised that when you

just simply throw something through

Claudia and Claudia is just like, "Dude,

that's such a good question. You're so

insightful and these ideas you have are

brand new. My gosh, you should tweet

about it. You should fork Zigg that this

kind of stuff ends up happening. And

then guess what? It just turns out that

perhaps the implementation wasn't

correct, at least based on what I'm

reading from Zigg. But more importantly,

he actually goes in here and kind of

disproves the entire point of this,

which is I think even more impressive.

So instead of just having this

parallelized semantic analysis, he's

like, "Okay, no, no, no. You're focusing

on the wrong problem." Which is like a

huge classic. often when people try to

make something faster or better or more

well-ritten they think about it from

such a like myopic perspective and so in

this case it's just like oh well the

problem is is that we're just not

analyzing everything in parallel that's

really where the bottleneck is and then

comes in here and says no no no that's

not what I'm saying what I'm saying the

true bottleneck is is the LLVM now we

have an experimental our own kind of

custom backend that means we can produce

stuff at the same rate 4x faster And we

also have incremental builds as well,

which means that we can actually produce

it orders of magnitude faster. We can go

from 40 second build times down to a

half second. And that's completely

different than what's going on with just

the Zig fork. It is the wellthought

through and wellared for good

engineering that it takes to build a

good product. This is what good products

look like. And once again, I'm genuinely

impressed with Zik. And I think there's

a good takeaway here. I do think you can

move super duper ultra lickety split

with an LLM. And perhaps this was like a

good thing to go spike out and say,

"Hey, if we can accomplish incremental

or parallel semantic analysis, we should

be able to run about 4x faster." And

then instead of having this big flashy

headline like we can't even commit it

back because of LLM policies, instead

perhaps they could have worked with the

team. Perhaps they could have done a

little bit of digging cuz apparently

this is already available on Mac OS and

I think Linux. So maybe we could have

just looked at it a little bit more

instead of just making these gigantic

headlines.