Auguste Rame, Techatrix — 30 November 2025
Introduction
For those unfamiliar, Zigtools was founded to support the Zig community, especially newcomers, by creating editor tooling such as ZLS, providing building blocks for language servers written in Zig with lsp-kit, working on tools like the Zigtools Playground, and contributing to Zig editor extensions like vscode-zig.
The Plagiarism
A couple weeks ago, a Zig resource called Zigbook was released with a bold claim of “zero AI” and an original “project-based” structure.
Unfortunately, even a cursory look at the nonsense chapter structure, book content, examples, generic website, or post-backlash issue-disabled repo reveals that the book is wholly LLM slop and the project itself is structured like some sort of sycophantic psy-op, with botted accounts and fake reactions.
We’re leaving out all direct links to Zigbook to not give them any more SEO traction.
We thought that the broad community backlash would be the end of the project, but Zigbook persevered, releasing just last week a brand new feature, a “high-voltage beta” Zig playground.
As we at Zigtools have our own Zig playground (repo, website), our interest was immediately piqued. The form and functionality looked pretty similar and Zigbook even integrated (in a non-functional manner) ZLS into their playground to provide all the fancy editor bells-and-whistles, like code completions and goto definition.
Knowing Zigbook’s history of deception, we immediately investigated the WASM blobs. Unfortunately, the WASM blobs are byte-for-byte identical to ours. This cannot be a coincidence given the two blobs ( zig.wasm , a lightly modified version of the Zig compiler, and zls.wasm , ZLS with a modified entry point for WASI) are entirely custom-made for the Zigtools Playground.
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