QGIS bans AI assisted contributions

GIS work has very complex inner mechanics that are hard to reason about at a high level without very explicit abstractions to ease the costs and cognitive burden of manual review. Sometimes earlier, longer-lived FOSS projects may have grown organically without the benefit of retrospective appreciation because that path has not been trodden (at least out in the open) at the time.

Part of this is an alignment problem, but on the human side: the bottleneck is no longer writing code but staying aligned with it, knowing what it does and whether it does what you meant. In my own work, that’s now most of the job, even for code I asked for. For maintainers reviewing large PRs from strangers, it's certainly much worse. A ban is bit harsh, but I understand why they’re rationing their attention.

I think this is the end of open-contributions, the maintainers already having too much on their plate.

Plus it is becoming exceedingly rare of finding a contributor that save time, as in can do better than the maintainer itself using LLM and reviewing it itself.

Why is everybody all the time in favour of AI on HN? This is objectively a good change because it will improve the quality of the code in the long term.

Ironically I lost my use case for QGIS since LLMs can readily write scripts for manipulating and converting point clouds (lidar data). I'm not a pro by any measure, mostly just making contour maps, but it massively streamlined things. To me it reveals the future of software

For those who, like me, had no idea what QGIS was: It is a free Geographic Information System (GIS), which means that it deals with creating, managing, analyzing, storing, and visualizing geospatial information. Think of (3D) maps and stuff like that.

I implemented css geometry properties for svg2 in resvg with claude. I know it works and I've read the relatively small diff. But I'm afraid to send a PR because it might offend a artisanal handcrafted free-range software enthusiast. I guess any other AI enjoyer who needs this feature, which is standard functionality in svg2, will just burn a few tokens and do it themselves to keep the luddites from smashing the factories.

In fact, this change seems quite logical. AI is certainly a useful tool, but that doesn't mean it must be uded always and everythere. Edpecially when doing so could compromise the final quality of projects. Let's see where all this leads

Contributions that are valuable, are valuable. These "No AI Contributions" nonsense is like saying AI art is not art. It's just not valuable for you, has nothing to do with AI. The QCIS project simply doesn't want to go over each PR and see its value? Because AI-generated things are not valuable for them, has nothing to do with AI, PRs, contributions, etc.

My 2 cents.

If you didn't mention it, how would they know if your contribution was written by AI or not? What happens to contributors who sneak in their AI-assisted commits where it's not obvious?

I recommend people actually read the updated commit for the full message.

Waiting for GisCraft repo to be started.

The question I have is what is an AI assisted contribution? For example, I still right code by hand, but I make many prototypes using AI before committing to a specific implementation. My code is clearly AI "assisted", but all of my final code is written by hand (no autocomplete either).

Good, QGIS is one of the projects that can be put closer to the bottom of the stack in that XKCD comic. I've seen QGIS being used just as a visualisation tool, and i mean it's good at it too, but even in a limited use case i am aware of it was used to do important infrastructure work like planning water pipelines and predicting failures for said pipelines.

Edit: https://xkcd.com/2347/

I’ve been able to contribute to projects recently using ai. And another project banned this so I didn’t bother. The second was a bug fix for an issue I was having. The first was a new feature.

Either way my bug got fixed but if a project maintainer doesn’t want it who am I to fight it.

You can always fork it. I suspect my contributions are higher quality because I use different model providers to review each other but whatever.

I'm a non-native english, so I change the code myself, but I tend to participate in communities while using a translator. If I use AI, I can fix bigger things, but most of what I contribute to open source is finding small bugs, so I don't use AI for open source contributions. (I mostly don't even have the ability to make big changes.) Looking around open source like that a few times, I can understand the hatred toward AI to some degree: too many requests pour onto a single individual. Of course, that doesn't mean AI isn't helpful. In my view, AI writes code blocks better than I do, and it might even be better to use AI for some of the open source I've contributed to... but overall, I feel that some kind of system for filtering AI-based PRs is needed.

Seems it's time to clone them from scratch using AI.

Lucky for AI companies that OSS projects are doing this, otherwise where will they get their carefully created training data from? They would be reduced to training off the slop their tools produce! /s

> QGIS is trusted by organisations because they know they can contribute back, they can hire contributors for support, training and feature. As a community project, this is something we really want to protect

We have gone from "LLM-slop is gonna ruin open source projects" to we wanna "protect" humans so they can make some dough on the side training and stuff. If human coders become the bottleneck in the chain, the solution is obvious and there's only so much protection anyone can do.

Looking at the scope of their code, the quality, the testing rigor etc. it's clear that they feel threatened by AI. Realistically a couple of prompts coupled with a factory of agents can replace this entire codebase in a matter of hours.

Furthermore, how will they prove whether code is AI generated or not?