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- Hacker News
- I'd love to know more about the process that the storytold team is using to build the Artcraft apps.
They're producing a fantastic quantity of software, and the quality seems higher than you'd expect for the velocity they're building at.
by stevex - > QGIS is trusted by organisations because they know they can contribute back, they can hire contributors for support, training and feature. As a community project, this is something we really want to protect
Ok, so there’s a financial motive here, where they’re worried that allowing more open contributions will diminish the value of their expertise and reduce their employability. To be fair to them, that’s probably true.
by alexwebb2 - I don't completely like or think this is a good ultimate decision, but looking over the thread on Github, it's being done for practical rather than ideological reasons after trying a more liberal policy first, and the discussion thread there indicates that they're already considering how to relax and refine it. A long-term and total ban on AI contributions would be a mistake as it all but guarantees a competitor or a fork, beside enforcability issues that create a "now you have two problems" situation. But as a temporary stop gap as specifically indicated by https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/pull/387#... this seems fine, and it's such important context that "QGIS bans AI assisted contributions" is true but misleading.
The linked discussion thread specifically calls this a "moratorium" and it's unfortunate that they decided not include that explanation in the policy document specifically to avoid controversy and flak, with the end result that there's now a 202-comment-plus HN thread: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/2026-Septem... -- the "proof of life" concept being tossed around in that thread, although rejected, is genuinely interesting and I hope they revisit it and allow a nominal financial contribution to the project to prove a human is behind a PR regardless of AI assistance (probably along with some other approach, as a total exclusion and the only way it would also be bad).
My own experience with QGIS is limited to the most basic navigation and queries of some local maps I've archived. Nonetheless it's an obvious gem and I hope they're able to arrive at a balanced and sustainable policy. Maybe they would get there faster and more reliably by tightening the previous LLVM-inspired policy rather than the slam-shut and then loosen approach they seem to be taking, but hardly anyone has experience with a situation exactly like this, so only time will really tell.
by Ariarule - More LLM allergies.
Look at this PR: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/67731/files
The code change is so simple that Claude today could easily write this code. How will they know if an LLM wrote the code? They won't. And this policy will age like milk: Each passing month, coding LLMs are improving. It will become more difficult to "detect" an LLM-authored submission.
The best LLM policy that I have seen for an open source project is Linux. Roughly: You can use LLMs, but you are fully responsible for the code it produces. Linus acknowledges both positives and negatives to LLMs.
- Part of this is an alignment problem, but on the human side: the bottleneck is no longer writing code but staying aligned with it, knowing what it does and whether it does what you meant. In my own work, that’s now most of the job, even for code I asked for. For maintainers reviewing large PRs from strangers, it's certainly much worse. A ban is bit harsh, but I understand why they’re rationing their attention.by jcolot
- At Plotly we are dealing with similar issues. We're doing our best to keep up, but it's genuinely hard not to just cut our losses on passer-by community contributions. 3 page issue writeups nobody has proofread, nobody but a bot to follow up with when we try, huge volume of plausible but weak PRs eating up reviewer time. All while we have core work we really want to be focused on rather than merging another bug fix we don't expect anyone but this bot has really run into.by robertclaus
- There’s something about geospatial work that seems to break LLMs. I’ve experienced it a lot with latest versions of both Fable and Opus, and it’s the classic nightmare of confidently-spoken-but-wrong.
Yesterday, I had a relatively trivial bit of work in play using distance-weighting to measure stuff, and Claude did really well / but right at the end, despite having a success metric and lots of great results matching it, Claude insisted my maths was wrong and needed changing.
When i asked why, and pointed out that the suggested replacement would cancel out the distance-weighting entirely, it immediately agreed with me and asked to write its fifth project memory about it.
The other big ones it tends to mess up on without strict guardrails are coordinate systems; and measurements, often converting back and forth between a given nation grid and wgs84 latitude/longitude in ways that lose good amounts of precision; and then custom-coding haversine-equivalents to measure a distance that’s otherwise be a simple subtraction via the national grid coordinates. It’s baffling.
by mootothemax - For those who, like me, had no idea what QGIS was: It is a free Geographic Information System (GIS), which means that it deals with creating, managing, analyzing, storing, and visualizing geospatial information. Think of (3D) maps and stuff like that.by Hendrikto