QGIS bans AI-assisted contributions under new QEP 428 policy
- The QGIS project formalized QEP 428 on Sep 24, 2026, changing its AI policy from 'human in the loop' to a strict ban on AI-assisted contributions.
- The stated reasons are maintainer load, since AI-generated PRs arrive faster than human review can handle, and the risk of unreviewed or low-quality code entering the project.
- The QEP PR drew 36 thumbs-up and 5 thumbs-down reactions, and maintainer haubourg backed it with a +1 and a detailed rationale.
- Using LLMs for code review, auditing, and security is split into a separate discussion, to be raised at the user conference before any formal proposal.
- According to a Hacker News commenter, a follow-up proposal in PR #388 (QEP 429) would add an exception for trusted contributors.
Hacker News opinions
The question I have is what counts as AI assisted. I prototype with AI all the time but write the final code by hand. Does that get caught by this?
You keep authorship no matter how the code got made. 'My code is AI assisted' isn't a real category, it's just your code.
Banning doesn't mean they verify every PR. It's a warning with a section to point at for quick rejection. Lazy AI PRs with huge diffs and weird phrasing are the obvious ones.
Before February the policy was human in the loop, so any tool was fine as long as you understood the code. Now it's a flat ban as of 09-24.
Calling this a threat response feels off to me. A couple prompts and a pile of agents can't replace what QGIS is for its users, and FreeCAD is the same story.
Forking and rewriting it with AI is the easy part. Supporting it for two decades is the hard part.
I think open contributions to this repo are basically done since the maintainers already have too much on their plate. Maybe charging a small review fee would deter the slop.
This only covers QGIS itself, not GDAL or GEOS. And open source projects that accept outside contributions are way more common now than a few years ago.
Writing detailed issues works better for me lately. The maintainer pastes them into an AI tool and iterates faster than waiting on my PR.
Why is HN so pro AI? This is a good change for code quality long term, IMO.
Pushback on that. Plenty of projects have bugs open for decades that an LLM could fix in five minutes, and good LLMs update comments and tests more diligently.
The real problem is the flood. If you allow AI contributions you get buried in low quality PRs, so a blanket ban is easier to enforce than filtering.