On 7 October 2026 at 21:00:14 UTC, Nyall Dawson merged pull request 387 on the QGIS Enhancement Proposals repository. The request, titled “Add QEP428: No ai contributions permitted,” was opened by nyalldawson on 24 September 2026 at 07:51:43 UTC and merged by the same account. It is five days old. A Hacker News thread titled “QGIS bans AI assisted contributions” appeared on 12 October. That thread is context for the renewed attention. It is not the policy.
The change replaces the text of QEP 408, the project’s earlier AI tool policy. The diff edits qep-408-ai-tool-policy.md. The removed header names Even Rouault (@rouault) as author. The removed body says contributors may use tools they like “but there must be a human in the loop,” that they must review model-generated code or text before asking others to review it, and that substantial tool-generated content should be labelled, with an example trailer “Assisted-by.” The removed text says it is adapted from LLVM’s AI Tool Use Policy. The new file header still carries the QEP 408 filename, sets the date to 2026/09/24, names the author as “the QGIS project contributors,” and sets the version to 2.0.
The replacement policy, in the diff, is two sentences:
No LLM, AI or agent assisted code contributions are allowed in the https://github.com/qgis/qgis repository. If we subsequently discover that you have used an AI, LLM, or any agent-based workflow for your contribution, you will be subject to code reversion and contributor rights sanctioning.
What the thread says about the old process
Dawson described the change as a correction to the earlier QEP. On 24 September at 22:39 UTC, nyalldawson wrote to @uclaros: “That clearly didn’t work (as you’ve pointed out, the process didn’t happen in reality, and we’ve already lost at least one extremely high value contributor as a result).” The same comment says the correction is “slamming the door shut, and then choosing later how far we want to inch it open.”
About an hour earlier, uclaros asked where the previous policy had failed and wrote: “the extractive tag was never created, ~50 PRs were tagged AI Assisted, ~40 of them were closed without merging. There are several others that were simply closed but never tagged.” Those counts are that comment, timestamped 2026-09-24T21:55:18Z. They were not recounted for this story.
In a separate comment the same evening, nyalldawson wrote that the intention is “a closed door, which we can then selectively open a little if/when it’s safe and proper discussion has been made on that.” The examples named there are “ai can be used as a replacement for ide autocomplete” and “ai can be used for language translations,” each to be argued later, one case at a time.
How wide the wording is
kannes wrote on 24 September that “assisted” and “used” are broad enough to disallow LLM review, auditing and security uses, and that an LLM used as a private reviewer before a human submits a change would fall under that reading. haubourg, answering a question about issues, comments and pull requests, wrote: “I would agree with this, though 100% of the submitted security advisories are written using AI since we started with this system. ( most concern our websites, not QGIS core though).” That percentage is haubourg’s statement.
02JanDal, on 6 October, listed cases the wording might cover: an LLM-backed autocomplete, a non-LLM ranking model in a JetBrains IDE, a design brainstorm in ChatGPT, an error message that surfaces in a search engine’s AI answer, and Google Translate for a term used later in code. timlinux replied the same day that the measure of compliance is “did you in good conscience write the code yourself,” and that “You will know if your brain made the code you want to share or someone else’s brain did.” 02JanDal answered that this reply uses the verb “write,” which the proposal text does not.
The day before the pull request opened, Tim Sutton posted to the qgis-developer list (23 September 2026, 02:49:32 PDT) with a Project Steering Committee member’s view. The suggested sentence there is narrower than the merged text: “No LLM assisted code contributions are allowed in the https://github.com/qgis/qgis repository.” The merged policy adds “AI or agent” and “any agent-based workflow.”
On 7 October at 21:00:01 UTC, nyalldawson declared the QEP approved with votes from @rouault-on-strike, @alexbruy, @signedav and @elpaso. The merge followed about thirteen seconds later.
The Campfire
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Held for the desk. It appears after a look.