QGIS bans AI assisted contributions

Code

Issues3 (3)

Pull requests12 (12)

Actions

Projects

Wiki

Security and quality

Insights

More items

Add QEP428: No ai contributions permitted - #387

#387

Merged

nyalldawson merged 2 commits intoqgis:masterqgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals:masterfrom nyalldawson:qep_428nyalldawson/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals:qep_428Copy head branch name to clipboard

Oct 7, 2026

ConversationCommits2 (2)ChecksFiles changed

Merged

Add QEP428: No ai contributions permitted#387

nyalldawson merged 2 commits intoqgis:masterqgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals:masterfrom nyalldawson:qep_428nyalldawson/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals:qep_428Copy head branch name to clipboard

Conversation

nyalldawson

commented

Sep 24, 2026

Copy link

Copy Markdown

Contributor

Followup discussion at https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/2026-September/068576.html.

This formally changes the AI policy to a strict "NOT ALLOWED" policy.

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

Add QEP428: No ai contributions permitted

d05dd95

nyalldawson

added

Policy

In Discussion

QEPs currently in discussion stage

labels

Sep 24, 2026

haubourg

commented

Sep 24, 2026

Copy link

Copy Markdown

Member

Hi, maybe this strong take deserves a bit of context of why we want to go further than the previous "Human in the loop" policy

So, for this reason, a huge +1 for me.

Thanks a lot for opening the QEP, given the pressure context you are in @nyalldawson , much appreciated.

I'd like to open another topic about the usage of LLM for review, auditing and security purposes, but I think this is a very separate thread, and we'll open discussions at the user conference before any formal discussions. Things are moving so fast, let's first tackle this QEP.

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

Copy link

Copy Markdown

Member

Thank you @nyalldawson - hopefully having a short paragraph like this rather than a long essay cut out any confusion!

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

Copy link

Copy Markdown

Member

Does that include any contribution to issue content, comments, PRs ?

Also, we should also include the QEP repository at least.

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

Copy link

Copy Markdown

Hi,

I am directly concerned by this new policy, and it’s also a +1 for me.

When I created my 2 AI-assisted regressions-fix PRs to investigate the cause of the bugs, suggest fixes, and review the code, I didn’t realize the harm this could cause to QGIS’s already fragile reviewer community.

I’m clearly not yet skilled enough to fix bugs in a project as complex as QGIS, but LLMs give you the illusion that it’s possible. A few tokens later, and the bug is fixed. By doing this, we’ve broken a trust contract between the reviewer and the contributor. The contract that, to contribute at such a big project, you know what you're doing.

I guess there’s a second effect but I didn't read much online: by making this kind of ease available, contributors using AI learn very little/nothing and don’t build up their skills on the project. They can never really hope to become reviewers themselves, and the community stagnates.

This is the point of view of a passionate open-source user but beginner developer, trying to find my place in today’s world, where AI doesn’t really make things easier. Let's learn to walk before running.

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

rouault-on-strike

reviewed

Sep 24, 2026

View reviewed changes

Comment thread

qep-408-ai-tool-policy.md

Show resolved

Hide resolved

Uh oh!

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

Copy link

Copy Markdown

Member

Does that include any contribution to issue content, comments, PRs ?

I would agree with this, though 100% of the submitted security advisories are written using AI since we started with this system. ( most concern our websites, not QGIS core though)

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

Copy link

Copy Markdown

Please do not misunderstand my criticism below. I consider the current craziness around "AI" to be a huge problem in many ways, ethical, societal, economical etc. And I see the huge and unfair pressure that its abuse creates on maintainers and developers. I wish it all had never happened but here we are.

I want to highlight some technical benefits though, which this policy would disallow, at least as I understand it. I am deliberately ignoring everything else here.

I could also absolutely understand if it was more of a "political" move to ban something considered unethical. But is that the intention? Is it to reduce pressure on developers? Or to make a strong statement against "AI"? In any case, I think it could more clear and probably be stronger.

As it is written now, I would understand the policy to not allow usage of LLM for review, auditing and security purposes either. The words assisted and used are very broad and I am afraid that they might throw out the baby with the bathwater (if the baby is AI usage that yields things that are functionally and logically fit for integration in QGIS, that are human-reviewed and that do not create more after-merge-maintenance-hassle than those 100% sourced from human brains).

As someone who sometimes feels brave enough to make tiny steps into the C++ world of QGIS core, I have found LLMs to be useful for discovering additional, non-obvious context in the code. They are often wrong, but it is my strong belief that the results can be used by humans to gain further understanding of code and actually help creating better contributions.

I also sometimes find LLMs useful to get a simulation of a reviewer. Throw your code at it for review, get some listicle back, discard some of it garbage or unrelated, look at the rest, maybe find an actual issue, fix it, then go to your co-workers with a slightly less bad PR. A "Clippy" in your IDE, that gives some - sometimes useful - feedback or criticism on your development, can also help reduce errors and improve robustness. Like a web search will yield false information alongside true information, a LLM will do the same. It is up to the human to critically verify whatever they output.

Such uses would be disallowed by my understanding of this policy.

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

Loading

Uh oh!

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

Copy link

Copy Markdown

The words assisted and used are very broad and I am afraid that they might throw out the baby with the bathwater

yes, we are aware we might throw the baby with the bathwater, but the baby might be non-viable, so...

This QEP is a stop gap measure. Two years ago the world was just fine without AI sucked less than today, so there's no reason to allow it without fully understanding the consequences. We might have to wait for the burst of the AI bubble to fully understand what a fair AI use might be.

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

uclaros

reviewed

Sep 24, 2026

View reviewed changes

uclaros

left a comment

Copy link

Copy Markdown

Contributor

There was a problem hiding this comment.

Choose a reason for hiding this comment

The reason will be displayed to describe this comment to others. Learn more.

Can we please have some more context on this proposal?

The mailing list posts mention hurt in the community, and points being raised on different channels (eg mastodon), which is quite vague and I'm afraid interpreted differently by each one of us.

I'm mostly interested on what we're trying to protect against: is it bots? passer-bys? randoms becoming regular contributors? existing regular contributors? core developers?

I'm also interested on where the previous policy failed -- the extractive tag was never created, ~50 PRs were tagged AI Assisted, ~40 of them were closed without merging. There are several others that were simply closed but never tagged.

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

Comment thread

qep-408-ai-tool-policy.md

Show resolved

Hide resolved

Uh oh!

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

Update qep-408-ai-tool-policy.md

a7ad258

nyalldawson

commented

Sep 24, 2026

Copy link

Copy Markdown

Contributor

Author

@kannes

The intention is not that this becomes the "written in stone, forever" policy. It's rather a "lets start with a closed door, which we can then selectively open a little if/when it's safe and proper discussion has been made on that".

So we start by being ultra-restrictive, and then, later, someone (else) argues for cases like "ai can be used as a replacement for ide autocomplete" / "ai can be used for language translations" / etc , all to be considered on a singular case-by-case basis.

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

Copy link

Copy Markdown

Contributor

Author

@uclaros

It's intended as a correction to the earlier QEP. That clearly didn't work (as you've pointed out, the process didn't happen in reality, and we've already lost at least one extremely high value contributor as a result).

So as noted above, we correct by slamming the door shut, and then choosing later how far we want to inch it open.

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

This was referenced Oct 2, 2026

Fix wrong Natural Breaks (Jenks) classes qgis/QGIS#67612

Closed

[Postgres] Reconnect NOTIFY listener after connection loss qgis/QGIS#67630

Closed

Share OGR datasets among layers while reading a project qgis/QGIS#67629

Closed

Enable parallel provider creation for WFS provider qgis/QGIS#67631

Closed

nyalldawson

commented

Oct 5, 2026

Copy link

Copy Markdown

Contributor

Author

This has now passed the discussion period and has moved to the voting stage

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

nyalldawson

added

Voting

and removed

In Discussion

QEPs currently in discussion stage

labels

Oct 5, 2026

3nids

commented

Oct 5, 2026

Copy link

Copy Markdown

Member

would it be possible to keep it open by the end of the week. Reasons for this

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

Copy link

Copy Markdown

Contributor

Author

would it be possible to keep it open by the end of the week. Reas