Furthermore, how will they prove whether code is AI generated or not?
And... I was correct. See their other PR
> QEP 429: Add exception to the AI policy for trusted contributors - #388
Aka only the trusted maintainers can use LLMs for speedups, the rest can suck it? Very mature behavior from the maintainers.
you are the reason for this policy change
I'll fork it in about 30 seconds.
And neither of us will get any traction, because the QGIS team has a history and proven track record within the GIS community, and neither of us are attempting to solve a problem that community has.
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.
The fact of being open source means if your contributions are rejected, you simply need to fork. The open market competition will soon determine if your contributions were truly valuable and whether the original project's owner misjudged, or that contribution was essentially worthless.
Being able to market your work and build community are key skills for open source contribution. The history of forges is littered with interesting code that never got enough attention to go anywhere.
Second, while I sympathize with not wanting to be inundated with low effort PRs, putting a ban on AI assisted contributions in response is myopic virtue signalling.
Would you personally join in to evaluate and review the onslaught of AI generated PR to the project?
(The issue is, I think, if you allow AI, no matter how many paragraphs you write about taking responsibility and ensuring high quality contributions, you're gonna get a lot of bad ones just because by sheer volume there's enough people who aren't gonna read it, and that's gonna take a disproportionate amount of effort to filter out).
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.
Which chain? It’s not like there’s much productivity going on. There’s a lot of activity for very little impact.
This "human bottleneck" is why we have QGIS in the first place. I think they deserve a bit more respect than that.
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.
> If we subsequently discover that you have used an AI, LLM, or any agent-based workflow for your contribution, you will be subject to code reversion and contributor rights sanctioning.
Policies like this have an element of trust to them. That's not new: open source projects have needed to trust contributors not to paste in proprietary licensed code since open source began.
My 2 cents.
The question is whether or not you are willing to support your creation for the next two decades.
Second, majority of apps do not last 2 decades.. and that is okay... someone else can fork the repo and continue if needed.
Then marketing it to convince others to even try... If the idea is too niche it might never hit that threshold for uptake.
Another option would be to make a contributor pay for the review of its PR, even a small fee, to deter AI-slop, at least for new contributors. It could/would exclude students or people with the lowest wage though, but I'm optimistic even a 1$ bill or less would be enough.
The current contributors are already massively skewed towards people with more ressources and time and 75% of the world, so I do not expect a sharp decrease in contributions.
> 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.
It is useful?, it works most of the time?
> This is objectively a good change because it will improve the quality of the code in the long term.
It depends?, sure, banning hit-and-run massive AI generated PRs will help.
These were problems before AI too, people just want to get their name on things without putting in effort.
This also bans possibly high quality PRs that fix things or add something new.
Either way, we'll see, anyone can still fork and if it's a better project then that will win over
For me, it is the way AI has kept suggestions to either open issues with maintainers or make PRs to fix an "issue" it found. I know it hasn't researched the issue in depth enough to be talking with the confidence it has, and I know I am in no position to be bothering someone else unless I want to spend considerable time investing to make sure the issue is exactly what the AI is claiming, it isn't a known issue, and it is justified to bother the maintainer with it. But there are far too many who will see that option and just tell the AI to do it.
It isn't that I'm against AI. It is that opening a PR or filing an issue use to have significant enough gatekeeping that most low effort low quality work simply wouldn't pass it, but that has now changed. So a new gate is needed to ensure those who aren't willing to put their own time into the work before asking for the time of others, and banning AI is one of the better options I've seen.
This also doesn't even end AI interacting with the project, just changes it. If you have some unique use case that AI finds, you can download it locally, have the AI make the change just for you, and have AI keep updating when necessary. Each user gets the customization they want while maintainers are protected from low effort low quality spam.
Can you explain why you think that?
QGIS is written in C++. Does that affect t your answer to this question at all?
In this way it is very much a spiritual cousin of FreeCAD (also cross-platform Python/C++/Qt6), though that (at least currently) has a somewhat more liberal ("humans in the driver seat") policy.
That does not mean the product becomes more useful. I could rewrite Windows 1-to-1 with better code quality and no one would care because it still provides the exact same features. Unless "better code" means "better features", better code is useless.
coffeeaddict1•40m ago
rfgplk•38m ago
> My code is clearly AI "assisted"
No such thing, it's 100% your code, regardless of how it came to be.
smithofsmiths•21m ago
"Assisted" does not necessarily mean "authored", which is the point of the comment you're replying to; helping you review the code is "assistance", even if no code was written.
Curiously, https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/pull/387#... shows that at least some contributors realize the vagueness of the policy, but they don't seem to care, which is rather unfortunate.
skydhash•32m ago
The most egregious examples are always lazy (big diff, lengthy descriptions, weird phrasing,…). Now there’s a section in the policy to point to for the quick rejection.