alt Hacker NewsA.) I understand this completely. I'm sure it's impossible for reviewers to keep up with the onslaught of AI-generated code.
B.) I worry what this entails for QGIS, and for the future of such community-built platforms as a whole.
Let's say I need some functionality which QGIS doesn't have. My options are to:
1. Learn to program QGIS, add the functionality, and commit it back to the community. From where I currently sit -- I've never developed for QGIS, I don't know its language -- that's an investment of several months, at a minimum.
2. Vibe-code the extension I need -- or just make a bespoke GIS application which has the small subset of GIS capabilities that I need, optimized for my particular use-case. Depending on the complexity, that's an investment of either days or hours.
By that math, (1) is never going to win, and now (2) is never going to be able to make a contribution back to QGIS. Moreover, the pool of people for whom (1) is a real option will be shrinking every day, particularly as those people have to compete economically with the people who embrace (2).
So it's hard for me to see how community projects survive in the face of these dynamics. And it would be a shame to lose them -- they create a lot of value that a bespoke vibecoded thingamajig never will. But for better or worse, I just don't see humans-only coding having much of a future.
Maybe your extension/app is compelling enough that the core team finds a way to recreate it, or make an exception?
Maybe it becomes normal to fork a project and vibe-code the extra thing you want and everybody does that and it's fine?
Doesn't seem like a loss for the project, just a win for you. If I understood the announcement correctly, they're doing this more for logistical reasons than to outright ban all AI-assisted code, so if something turns out to be super awesome then it's not like they have to do a clean-room reimplementation.
Meanwhile, let a thousand forks bloom, why not?