[QGIS-Developer] Two proposals -- moratorium on LLM use, and requiring a "proof of life" for contributors

[Laurențiu Nicola]

I think contributors using AI are of two kinds:

  - well-intentioned users who run into a bug and use an LLM to fix it
  - people who instruct their agents "go look on GitHub for some easy bugs and fix them"

You want to get rid of both, but the former will manage to file a PR on Codeberg just as well — they've been bothered by that bug for a long time, their shiny tool managed to fix it, and it's only natural to share it upstream.

As for the second category, they're trawling through GitHub because GitHub is so massively popular. Imagine a world where gitlab.com would be a nice alternative to GitHub instead of a bloated mess with even more AI features. They could just say "go file some PRs on GitHub or GitLab" and all would be well. If Codeberg had a 25% market share, they would certainly include it. And if some project asked you to use git-send-email, the agent would be perfectly able to do so (it would probably keep me away, so not all is lost).

Of course, that would dilute their "profile page", but hey, I can vibe-code a cross-forge profile page in an afternoon, wouldn't that be pretty cool? :-)

Laurentiu

On Wed, Sep 16, 2026, at 14:58, Greg Troxel via QGIS-Developer wrote:
> Laurențiu Nicola via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
> writes:
>
>> On Wed, Sep 16, 2026, at 14:31, Greg Troxel via QGIS-Developer wrote:
>>
>>>   It's interesting that what I'm guessing is large numbers of
>>>   LLM-generated PRs and/or LLM text in issues is at least mostly in
>>>   github.  If so, that is a clue that perhaps github itself is a problem
>>
>> If I may: https://xkcd.com/1138/
>
> While that's funny (and everyone who confuses correlation and causation
> eventually dies), I think there's something to the "github problematic"
> theory.
>
> Tradtionally, projects were centered on mailinglists.  That built
> commmunity.  With github, people show up and file and issue or PR and
> don't really join.  github computes scores/profiles and pushes
> themselves as something that matters, and they push AI.  A project on
> github that doesn't want AI, and doesn't want to suffer from people
> collecting gamified points, is swimming upstream.
>
> I'm involved in another (very small) project that is list centered, and
> now has repos on codeberg.  But, propsoed changes are "git send-email"
> to the list, not PR/MR.   I have not noticed any LLM intrusions.
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