I'm positive on the latest revisions (non-voting opinion). The "Rationale"
text added by Howard addresses a lot of what's being discussed here.

Chris

On Wed, May 13, 2026, 9:47 AM Even Rouault via gdal-dev <
[email protected]> wrote:

> >
> > I would love gdal to be a projct where I can still use AI/LLM to fix
> > the issues that annoy me in the same way I do elsewhere. How about
> > reworking this policy change from "no AI" to "need to solve maintainer
> > capacity problem". I think the "Peer review first" policy from the
> > above may actually adjust it better. Just allow to put any PR into
> > this mode, maybe via a tag or comment, and don't look at it until
> > there are some reveiws and their results are fixed. People who have
> > coded something for the project are likely using it, can test, it
> > should not be annoying for them as it's not them doing the local build
> > nowadays, just their llm, and they also likely will be ok to spend
> > some tokens for the automated review in addition to testing. After
> > there are like five of them approving without complaints, maybe it's
> > time to merge.
> You over-estimate the size of the GDAL reviewing community. Unless I
> miss something, I'm aware of:
> -  3 main "vocal"  (in the sense they write comments, or explicitly
> approve a PR) reviewers in the developer category: myself, Dan and
> Alessandro
> - Jukka with his "power user" hat commenting on functionality,
> documentation, etc.
> - Paul Harwood on C# issues
> - and to a lesser extent a few other people (Michael Sumner, Chris
> Toney, ...) who might occasionally comment on particular topics of interest
> (sorry if I missed someone. definitely not intentional!)
>
> There has  *never* been >= 5 people approving a PR. When we get at least
> one explicit approval, that's already an achievement. I regularly have
> to self-approve my own most ancient PRs when the queue of
> pending ones grows too much.
>
> >
> > It may also be a good idea to issue something like call for maintainers.
>
> Can that actually work ? Anyone is certainly welcome to review in their
> own capacity, but maintainers don't grow spontaneously. On a software
> large like GDAL, it is a many years process (took me 5-7 years to feel
> comfortable claiming that role). And you only go into that position by
> also making changes (bug fixes, enhancements, refactoring), and doing it
> the hard way so that you actually *learn* something in the process about
> the code base, its written and unwritten oddities and habits. Learning
> requires effort. I don't buy a single second that anyone can become a
> (competent) maintainer by only contributing vibe coded pull requests.
> Unless you're OK with your code base becoming progressively a LLM-only
> territory.
>
> That LLM are super convenient for creating likely/plausible code is a
> fact. That this is a good thing for the long term viability of both the
> code base and the community is much more arguable.
>
> Even
>
>
> --
> http://www.spatialys.com
> My software is free, but my time generally not.
>
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