If you mostly use chatbots and keep wondering whether you need to chase every new AI coding tool, this is the part that matters: AI code gets expensive when humans have to review it, not when models write it [C002].
That matters even if you never touch Zig. You see a hot demo, you worry about falling behind, and you assume more output means lower cost. But if you only follow the headline, you can waste time, budget, and attention in the wrong direction.
Zig had about 200 open code submissions sitting in the queue. That is the part the Claude myth skips. Writing got faster. Checking got slower. In public open source, outsiders can flood the line, but the maintainer still pays the review bill.
Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke [C001] is harsh, but the useful point is narrower than saying AI is bad. A private team reviewing its own AI-assisted code is not the same system as a public project screening outside submissions.
A 2026 paper looking at 294 open-source projects saw the same pattern: more code submissions, lower merge rates. More code is not automatically more value when the scarce thing is reviewer attention.
A tool update is worth watching only if it changes your next decision. If generation jumps but review time does not fall, cost went up. Share this with anyone still treating AI coding as a pure output story.