Andrew Kelley

Andrew Kelley is the American systems programmer who created Zig in 2016 — a fast, explicit successor-to-C language that has become one of the most admired projects in systems programming, powering high-profile software like the Bun JavaScript runtime and the TigerBeetle database. He left industry jobs to work on it full time and serves as president of the Zig Software Foundation, the donation-funded nonprofit that develops the language.

The hard ban

Zig’s code of conduct bans LLM-generated contributions across every repository — not just code, but AI-written comments, translations, and issue reports. It made Zig one of only a handful of major open-source projects (a March 2026 survey found four of 112, alongside NetBSD, GIMP, and QEMU) to prohibit AI contributions outright, and the policy reportedly contributed to Bun maintaining its own fork.

Kelley defended the ban at length in a May 2026 JetBrains podcast conversation, in remarks widely covered by Business Insider and others. AI-assisted pull requests, he said, are “invariably garbage” — with a review bottleneck of hundreds of open pull requests, contributions that need line-by-line distrust are worse than nothing. His deeper argument is about people: Zig’s model invests reviewer time in contributors who learn the codebase and grow into core-team members, and “people who are sending AI pull requests, those people are not helping this goal.”

The absolutism is deliberate policy design — a bright line that costs nothing to adjudicate. It places Kelley at the strict end of an open-source spectrum that runs through Daniel Stenberg’s slop bans to Linus Torvalds’s declaration that Linux is “not one of those anti-AI projects,” and in direct contrast to fellow toolmaker Mitchell Hashimoto, who ships features with agents daily.