[QGIS-Developer] Tightening AI submission policy?

[Nyall Dawson]

Hi lists,

Following recent discussions and conflict within the PostGIS community, I
would like us to consider tightening our AI submission policy to hopefully
avoid similar conflict arising in our community.

I would propose that we move away from our current (quite permissive)
"human in the loop" policy (see
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/blob/master/qep-408-ai-tool-policy.md
) to something more restrictive, such as what the GDAL project has done.
See
https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/33399bf734f48a6727050ccd13a43575d43f6bf4/doc/source/community/ai_tool_policy.rst
).

In short, GDAL's policy is:










*Contributors can make limited use of LLMs for contributions in GDAL,
subject to details mentioned below:- Human contributors must be the primary
author(s) of GDAL contributions- All contributions including code, ticket
comments, and commit messages should be fully understood by the author(s)
submitting them to the project.- Submission of vibe-coded contributions is
banned.- LLMs may only be used as an improved auto-completion mechanism, or
for repeated tasks (mechanical refactoring) that could potentially be
completed with a deterministic algorithm.- Human-coordinated or
uncoordinated (OpenClaw, etc) use of agents for submission of contributions
to the GDAL repository is banned.- Any LLM usage must be indicated by
ticket label, comment, or commit message indication and account for what
was written by whom/what.- The contributing human author is ultimately
responsible for every line of code, comment, or mailing list interaction
they initiate, and all of it is subject to the project's
:ref:`code_of_conduct`.- The typical high verbosity of LLM code and text is
actively discouraged. More code is more code to maintain. High verbosity
contribution (tickets, code, messages, etc) will be seen as indication of
LLM-generated content when not labeled otherwise and may be ignored,
closed, left unmerged, or removed at maintainers' discretion.*


I personally think a combination of GDAL policy + borrowing the "contribute
only what you understand" term from Godot's current policy (see
https://contributing.godotengine.org/en/latest/pull_requests/pull_request_guidelines.html#ai-assisted-contributions
could be a good step forward. Specifically this clause:

*Contribute only what you understand*
*Only submit code that you fully understand and are prepared to explain to
a maintainer. This especially applies if you implement the idea of another
person, copy code from elsewhere, or if you use AI to assist you with your
contribution. In all of these cases, you must disclose which part of your
submission wasn't fully authored by you.*

Thoughts?

Nyall
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