[OSGeo-Discuss] AI slope reaching our projects

[Even Rouault]

Hi,

So 2 months after having written be below message, and GDAL, PROJ, QGIS 
having adopted this human-in-the-loop policy, I personally consider it 
as mostly a failure (which was a very likely outcome). I've no idea 
about how much seriousness contributors using AI tools give in reviewing 
their output, but the reality is that even if they are well intended and 
super careful and read every line and (believe they) understand what it 
does, they just lack the experience to have a critical eye (which is the 
reason in the first place why they needed to use it). The asymmetry of 
effort between the ease for them to push the PR and the ones bearing on 
the reviewer's shoulder to debunk the flaws is unsustainable. Pretty 
similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law . With the 
difference that it is far from being obvious where the "lie" is (which 
is expected since those tools are designed at generating credible 
output). You've have to be super mindful of the tendency of LLMs to 
generate bloat. Unit tests are a striking examples. Before AI, we were 
begging our contributors with "please write a couple unit tests, 
please". No this is more "please please cut down the tests to the bare 
minimum, and remove all those comments that bring nothing but increasing 
cognitive burden". Crazy!

So my mindset would be now more on the side "no AI generated code 
allowed", but I don't know how we can realistically enforce that. I bet 
a significant proportion of people addicted to those tools will for sure 
lie (addiction is the appropriate word), which will make things even 
worse if you don't know when you have to turn your 
review-with-extreme-scepticism radar on.

Any feedback from other projects that the ones mentioned here?

Even


Le 05/02/2026 à 18:14, Even Rouault a écrit :
> Hi,
>
> At least GDAL, GRASS-GIS and QGIS have seen recently a raise in AI 
> driven "contributions". That's really a plague. GRASS-GIS has adopted 
> a policy regarding that in 
> https://github.com/OSGeo/grass/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#ai-use-policy 
> . QGIS is about to have one in 
> https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/pull/363. GDAL will 
> likely do something similar soon.
>
> Like there's a Code of conduct that projects can use, maybe OSGeo 
> could have a similar thing. Although I suspect people may have 
> different sensitivities to the subject.
>
> Even
>
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