Zig bans AI-assisted contributions to protect scarce reviewer mentor time

Zig is treating pull request review as a scarce training pipeline, not just code filtering, and that flips how AI contributions look: they consume reviewer time without producing future maintainers. The project moved to a blanket ban on AI-assisted contributions, with discussion indicating even disclosed LLM help can disqualify submissions, including some reports.

• Policy: no AI-assisted contributions, not a partial limit on codegen or tooling
• Rationale: reviewer time is “mentor time,” and AI PRs don’t grow contributors

The mechanism is simple: AI drives contribution cost toward zero while maintainer review cost stays fixed or rises, so bottlenecked projects have an incentive to block that input entirely.