[QGIS-Developer] R: Tightening AI submission policy?

Wed Jun 24 00:58:13 PDT 2026

Hi Ludovico

Yes thanks and noted - I just wanted to make sure we keep a nice tone -
many people are discovering new found abilities (imagined or real) with
LLMs and even if we don't want those kind of contributions, they should
walk away from the interaction learning why (perhaps we should link to a
LLM policy page on QGIS.org as part of the honey pot message) and not
feeling bullied. If we took @nyall.dawson <nyall.dawson at gmail.com> 's
original email transcript explaining why LLM contributions are not a net
benefit as relates to the QGIS application and publish it there, they would
at least come to an understanding of why their new favourite tool is not a
good fit for us.

Regards

Tim

On Tue, Jun 23, 2026 at 10:15 PM Ludovico Toscano <ludovico.toscano at tigis.ch>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I think you got the point, I wasn't pushing to poison the agent.md in
> order to push back people in a negative way. I was sharing it because the
> idea of this kind of honeypot at the moment is the most effective that I
> saw in other projects. Than it can be tweaked in different way. But the
> core idea is that bots or vibe coders don't read the policy, and this is a
> way to tell immediately the mantainers that the user hasn't readed the code.
>
> Regards, Ludovico
>
> ------------------------------
> *Da:* Tim Sutton <tim at kartoza.com>
> *Inviato:* martedì, giugno 23, 2026 10:54:25 PM
> *A:* Ludovico Toscano <ludovico.toscano at tigis.ch>
> *Cc:* Alessandro Pasotti <apasotti at gmail.com>; Nyall Dawson <
> nyall.dawson at gmail.com>; Vincent Picavet <vincent.ml at oslandia.com>;
> qgis-developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
> *Oggetto:* Re: [QGIS-Developer] R: Tightening AI submission policy?
>
> Hi
>
> On Tue, Jun 23, 2026 at 9:19 AM Ludovico Toscano via QGIS-Developer <
> qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm a small contribuitor of qgis, it's my first time posting here and I
> was interest by this discussion.
>
> I have an idea which is saw implemented in ghostty, to prevent
> contribution from bot or vibe coders. Basically the author of the repo has
> made a honeypot for these agents, he has made a AGENTS.md and a CLAUDE.md
> where in the last line of the document he tell the model to make a md file
> that saing "I am a sad, dumb little AI driver with no real skills." His
> idea is simple, if the author of the pr doesn't read the diff of the pr he
> will not notice that the LLM has added this file and this trigger a
> immediate ban.
>
> https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/blob/main/AGENTS.md
>
> I hope this can be usefull,  given that a bot or vibe coder will not read
> the policy like he's not reading the code this solution can be a first
> filter.
>
>
> I don't think degrading people is at all in line with our culture as a
> project. By all means put guidelines in place as to how AI can be used, but
> always deal with people in a positive way - for example the same mechanism
> could be used to add a line into the patch like "This line was
> automatically added by your LLM as a validation check. Please remove it
> before submitting your PR."
>
> Regards
>
> Tim
>
>
>
>
> Regards, Ludovico.
> ------------------------------
> *Da:* QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> per conto
> di Vincent Picavet via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
> *Inviato:* martedì, 23 giugno 2026 08:56
> *A:* Alessandro Pasotti <apasotti at gmail.com>; Nyall Dawson <
> nyall.dawson at gmail.com>
> *Cc:* qgis-developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
> *Oggetto:* Re: [QGIS-Developer] Tightening AI submission policy?
>
>
> Hello,
>
> Thanks for this proposal, I can only be in favor of a stricter policy.
>
> I would also add a specific item on IP, even if I do not like pushing the
> burden to contributors while have no way of ensuring IP compliance.
>
> In the line of :
>
> - "By contributing to this project, you are responsible to ensure that you
> have the corresponding and sufficient intellectual property rights on all
> contributed code without exception to comply to this project's opensource
> licences and IP policies. Note that code generated by LLM has a high
> probability of copyright infringement."
> Also a few resources for inspiration. I think if we can reuse other's
> positions word by word (if the idea is the same), it makes opensource
> project's position as a community stronger. Maybe we will end up converging
> towards a kind of standard opensource policy on AI, and that would be good
> for everyone ( and then one day the opensource world sues proprietary LLMs
> for copyright infringement, but that's another story).
>
> -  NLnet; Policy on the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence for
> NLnet-funded projects : https://nlnet.nl/foundation/policies/generativeAI/
> - Using LLMs Responsibly - Responsible AI Guide :
> https://responsibleai.guide/
> - LLM-gen-AI - Software Freedom Conservancy :
> https://sfconservancy.org/llm-gen-ai/llm-backed-generative-ai-recommendations.html
>
> Regards,
>
> Vincent
>
>
>
>
> On 23/06/2026 07:10, Alessandro Pasotti via QGIS-Developer wrote:
>
> Big +1
>
> It's probably hard to put in clear terms (and forgive my English), but
> I think that the criteria should be even stricter than "contribute
> only what you understand":
>
> "Do not contribute anything that you wouldn't have been fully capable
> of writing on your own without any AI assistance."
>
> or
>
> "Contribute only what you could have done by yourself without any AI
> assistance."
>
> Tthis makes it more likely that you will be able to fix or improve
> your work if needed.
>
> On Tue, Jun 23, 2026 at 1:47 AM Nyall Dawson via QGIS-Developer<qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org> <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org> wrote:
>
> 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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>
> --
>
> Tim Sutton
>
> *Kartoza Cofounder *Tim is a member of the QGIS Project Steering Committee
>
> *T * : +27(0) 87 809 2702          *E *: tim at kartoza.com          *W* :
> kartoza.com
>
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-- 

Tim Sutton

*Kartoza Cofounder*Tim is a member of the QGIS Project Steering Committee

*T *: +27(0) 87 809 2702          *E *: tim at kartoza.com          *W* :
kartoza.com

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