[gdal-dev] [PROJ] LLMs are killing this community

[Laurențiu Nicola]

Javier,

I'm not going to disagree with you straight away, but a working full-text search archive also makes people post less on the mailing list. And searching before asking was considered good etiquette. I'll personally search and even ask an LLM [1] before wasting a maintainer's time.

And for anyone who's missing the human presence, I'd like to mention #gdal https://matrix.to/#/#gdal:osgeo.org (or #gdal on Libera.Chat), which has had approximately one and a half active users for the past couple of years.

Laurentiu

[1]: Everyone keeps saying that LLMs can't produce anything new, so if they can answer my question, it must have been answered before, right?

On Sat, Oct 31, 2026, at 11:50, Javier Jimenez Shaw via PROJ wrote:
> (email sent to GDAL and PROJ mailing lists. Yes, this is inconvenient, because each one will answer in their own one).
> 
> Yes, it is happening.
> 
> You probably noticed it. If not, just go to the archive https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/ and see how many messages were one year ago.
> 
> People is asking LLMs and not asking the community. We are sharing less. Each one (or at least a significant number) is being more in their silo... isolated. And that is not the way to make a community. To keep it alive.
> 
> It is a problem, because the community is what drives and maintain these products.
> 
> PROJ is more than 40 years old. GDAL more than 25. One key property of these products is its stability. We don't need quick development to compete in a capitalistic market. We don't play in that league. We don't need LLMs everywhere.
> 
> We are losing maintainers, and the remaining ones are not extremely motivated. That is like cancer for these projects.
> So next time, instead of going blindly to your preferred LLM to ask something, come here, ask real humans, and help to keep this alive. Other people (including me) will read the answers and learn new things. 
> 
> Also before doing a PR ask here (this is nothing new) to see if it makes sense, if there is somebody else with the same problem/idea, to see if there is a better option.
>  
> Enjoy talking with real humans. Even if you don't like to interact directly with people, you want them to be there. Contribute to keep this community alive.
> 
> People is complaining that young people and children is only using social media, and not interacting with real humans face to face. This is the same, or worse. LLMs are killing our communities, and we cannot wait.
> 
> Cheers
> Javier.
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> PROJ at lists.osgeo.org
> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/proj
> 
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