QGIS replaces its AI disclosure rule with a ban on AI-assisted contributions

The open-source mapping project QGIS has merged a proposal that, in the author's words, "formally changes the AI policy to a strict 'NOT ALLOWED' policy." It supersedes an earlier policy, QEP 408, under which AI-assisted work was allowed with a human in the loop. The approving votes were declared from rouault-on-strike (Even Rouault), alexbruy, signedav and elpaso; 3nids registered +0 and said he would open a separate proposal.

Commenter haubourg, who backed the ban, gave the main reason in the thread: AI use from external contributors puts "massive and unbearable pressure" on maintainers, and the volume is higher than human review can take seriously. Commenter uclaros reported that under the old policy about 50 pull requests were tagged AI Assisted and roughly 40 were closed without merging, and that the "extractive" tag the policy called for was never created. nyalldawson wrote that the earlier policy clearly did not work and had already cost the project at least one very valuable contributor. He framed the ban as temporary: "lets start with a closed door," to be opened case by case later.

The wording is contested. One commenter (02JanDal) asked whether LLM autocomplete, machine-learning completion ranking or brainstorming with a chatbot counts, and proposed limiting the rule to code "written" by an LLM or agent. Another asked for documentation, bug reports and comments to be covered too. timlinux's answer on enforcement was that the test is whether you wrote the code yourself in good conscience, since the project cannot inspect contributors' machines.

Why it matters: This is a maintainer group deciding that disclosure and tagging did not contain the review cost, and moving to a rule they can only enforce on trust. If you run agents that open pull requests against other people's repositories, this is a documented case where that stops being welcome, and the reason given is review capacity, not code quality. The quality claim is untested here; nobody in the thread measured it.