QGIS bans AI assisted contributions
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Followup discussion at https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/2026-September/068576.html.
This formally changes the AI policy to a strict "NOT ALLOWED" policy.
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Hi, maybe this strong take deserves a bit of context of why we want to go further than the previous "Human in the loop" policy
So, for this reason, a huge +1 for me. I'd like to open another topic about the usage of LLM for review, auditing and security purposes, but I think this is a very separate thread, and we'll open discussions at the user conference before any formal discussions. Things are moving so fast, let's first tackle this QEP. |
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Thank you @nyalldawson - hopefully having a short paragraph like this rather than a long essay cut out any confusion! |
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Does that include any contribution to issue content, comments, PRs ? Also, we should also include the QEP repository at least. |
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Hi, When I created my 2 AI-assisted regressions-fix PRs to investigate the cause of the bugs, suggest fixes, and review the code, I didn’t realize the harm this could cause to QGIS’s already fragile reviewer community. I’m clearly not yet skilled enough to fix bugs in a project as complex as QGIS, but LLMs give you the illusion that it’s possible. A few tokens later, and the bug is fixed. By doing this, we’ve broken a trust contract between the reviewer and the contributor. The contract that, to contribute at such a big project, you know what you're doing. I guess there’s a second effect but I didn't read much online: by making this kind of ease available, contributors using AI learn very little/nothing and don’t build up their skills on the project. They can never really hope to become reviewers themselves, and the community stagnates. This is the point of view of a passionate open-source user but beginner developer, trying to find my place in today’s world, where AI doesn’t really make things easier. Let's learn to walk before running. |
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) |
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Please do not misunderstand my criticism below. I consider the current craziness around "AI" to be a huge problem in many ways, ethical, societal, economical etc. And I see the huge and unfair pressure that its abuse creates on maintainers and developers. I wish it all had never happened but here we are. I want to highlight some technical benefits though, which this policy would disallow, at least as I understand it. I am deliberately ignoring everything else here. I could also absolutely understand if it was more of a "political" move to ban something considered unethical. But is that the intention? Is it to reduce pressure on developers? Or to make a strong statement against "AI"? In any case, I think it could more clear and probably be stronger. As it is written now, I would understand the policy to not allow usage of LLM for review, auditing and security purposes either. The words assisted and used are very broad and I am afraid that they might throw out the baby with the bathwater (if the baby is AI usage that yields things that are functionally and logically fit for integration in QGIS, that are human-reviewed and that do not create more after-merge-maintenance-hassle than those 100% sourced from human brains). As someone who sometimes feels brave enough to make tiny steps into the C++ world of QGIS core, I have found LLMs to be useful for discovering additional, non-obvious context in the code. They are often wrong, but it is my strong belief that the results can be used by humans to gain further understanding of code and actually help creating better contributions. I also sometimes find LLMs useful to get a simulation of a reviewer. Throw your code at it for review, get some listicle back, discard some of it garbage or unrelated, look at the rest, maybe find an actual issue, fix it, then go to your co-workers with a slightly less bad PR. A "Clippy" in your IDE, that gives some - sometimes useful - feedback or criticism on your development, can also help reduce errors and improve robustness. Like a web search will yield false information alongside true information, a LLM will do the same. It is up to the human to critically verify whatever they output. Such uses would be disallowed by my understanding of this policy. |
yes, we are aware we might throw the baby with the bathwater, but the baby might be non-viable, so... |
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Can we please have some more context on this proposal?
The mailing list posts mention hurt in the community, and points being raised on different channels (eg mastodon), which is quite vague and I'm afraid interpreted differently by each one of us.
I'm mostly interested on what we're trying to protect against: is it bots? passer-bys? randoms becoming regular contributors? existing regular contributors? core developers?
I'm also interested on where the previous policy failed -- 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.
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The intention is not that this becomes the "written in stone, forever" policy. It's rather a "lets start with a closed door, which we can then selectively open a little if/when it's safe and proper discussion has been made on that". So we start by being ultra-restrictive, and then, later, someone (else) argues for cases like "ai can be used as a replacement for ide autocomplete" / "ai can be used for language translations" / etc , all to be considered on a singular case-by-case basis. |
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It's intended as a correction to the earlier QEP. 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). So as noted above, we correct by slamming the door shut, and then choosing later how far we want to inch it open. |
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This has now passed the discussion period and has moved to the voting stage |
nyalldawson
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Voting
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In Discussion
QEPs currently in discussion stage
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Oct 5, 2026
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would it be possible to keep it open by the end of the week. Reasons for this
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I'll let @timlinux make that call. |
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@nyalldawson I had a discussion with Tim this morning. I'm ok with moving forward to voting and will open another QEP to raise another discussion. Its +0 for me |
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Please keep in mind that this QEP is meant to establish an initial policy, it doesn't mean that AI contributions will be banned forever and in any form. +1 |
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Sorry for also being late... I have a big worry with this policy; it's not particulary clear what's actually prohibited. Using Claude Code/Github Copilot CLI/etc.? Sure, that's clear that it's not allowed. But what about LLM-backed autocomplete? What about non-LLM AI (for example, Jetbrains-based IDEs have long used ML models to rank auto-completion results)? Using ChatGPT to brainstorm a design? Searching for an error message and unintentionally seeing the answer in Googles AI answer? Asking Claude for a help with an issue in some PyQGIS, realizing it's actually a QGIS Core bug and going on to fix that manually? What if I can't think of the a term in English and use Google Translate to translate from my native language and subsequently use that in code? I realize that there's a fear that giving even a little bit of leway here will result in the problem persisting, but I think it's very important that the policy is very clear, especially considering the penality. To offer a suggestion:
(removes the very broad "AI" term which makes e.g. Jetbrains ranking model questionable, and explicitly spells out "written" so that e.g. searching/brainstorming/etc. is allowed) Preferably the policy would also contain informative examples of what is/isn't allowed. |
I think the measure of compliance is "did you in good conscience write the code yourself" - we are not set up to peer into your computer and look at what you did. You will know if your brain made the code you want to share or someone else's brain did. |
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@nyalldawson and others watching this QEP - as @3nids mentioned we had some discussions about this here at UC2026 - lets go ahead with the vote as scheduled. We will surely have some new QEP's looking to crack that door open once / if this goes through....but let's tackle one use case at a time so that we can all stay in the same boat and keep it rowing in the same direction. |
I would highly recommend including documentation, bug reports, discussions, PR descriptions, comments, and basically all written interactions on GitHub. These are often even more verbose and extractive than the code itself. |
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As I wrote already in the mailing list. I believe a moratorium to get time until we have a good solution for every human being won't hurt. So +1 |
@timlinux Yes, but there you also included the verb "write" which is missing from the current proposal. It might certainly be implied, but explicit is better than implicit (to cite the Zen of Python). Edit to clarify: I don't mind the intention of the policy (especially when it's just about writing), it's just the wording I'm worried about. |
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+1 (Even Rouault) |
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For what it's worth, that's a +1 from me. |
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Declared as approved with votes from @rouault-on-strike @alexbruy @signedav @elpaso |
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For the record, +1 from me as well, thanks @nyalldawson |
…after ebdaf93's stated 11:10 coverage end; this session's feeds pulled 12:02-12:15 UTC across four passes - the parallel batch died at the 300s mark with 13/45 landed, an --http1.1 -4 browser-UA sequential pass recovered 11 more, a plain browser-UA pass recovered 15 more, and a googlebot-UA pass plus a final plain-UA retry recovered qbitai/solidot/swillison/webkit, 44/45 landed; missed on all attempts: rust - blog.rust-lang.org unreachable, newest stamp carried unchanged from the recordings (Oct 2 standing stale) so no in-window cost; shells this pass: mydrivers 404-1231B, oschina 404-1548B, register 404-204KB, svelte/tailwind/nextjs/vscode 404-pages, nodejs 404-98KB parse-0, anthropic 404-20KB; an unrelated untracked weibo-mss.json sat in the worktree from a concurrent session and is not part of this commit): three adds. (1) An "unprecedented" cyberattack has crippled supermarket refrigeration across Europe: hackers took control of Danfoss-made refrigeration control systems used by French supermarkets Intermarché, Leclerc and Coopérative U and set the automatic defrost function - normally two hours a day - into a continuous forced defrost cycle at 50 degrees C, disrupting deliveries and electronic-shelf-label in-store pricing; Coopérative U president Dominique Schelcher confirmed Monday morning that a cyberattack had been affecting the refrigeration production facilities of several stores in the network since the previous night, calling it extremely serious and unprecedented; separately NOS reports Albert Heijn, Etos and Gall & Gall in the Netherlands took websites down after a Sunday-afternoon cybersecurity incident with Belgium's Delhaize (also Ahold Delhaize) also disrupted; early losses approaching 300k euros, potentially several million nationwide (primary tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/unprecedented-cyberattack-cripples-supermarket-fridges-across-europe-as-hackers-activate-automatic-defrosting-delivery-and-store-prices-also-impacted-by-incident verified via direct curl --http1.1 -4 page fetch at ~12:25 UTC Oct 12, 2007199 bytes, datePublished 2026-10-12T11:32:54+00:00, byline Stephen Warwick, citing La Dépêche and the Coop U president's X confirmation; ladepêche.fr and nos.nl not probed this session, so the verified Tom's Hardware disclosure is cited per the relay precedents). New territory - grep shows zero prior supermarket/Danfoss/refrigeration entries (ebdaf93 recorded the related Ahold-Delhaize supermarket cybersecurity-incident newsroom statement 10:41:55Z as a corporate-PR skip - Ahold Delhaize is Albert Heijn's parent, the same arc's earlier Dutch signal). Categorized 后端 per the security-campaign precedents (CyberXero, Bricksforge, CISA KEV). (2) QGIS merged QEP428 "No AI contributions permitted" (PR #387 authored by core contributor Nyall Dawson): the proposal replaces the project's earlier QEP-408 AI tool policy (Even Rouault's human-in-the-loop policy adapted from LLVM's AI Tool Use Policy, which required reviewing all LLM output, transparency via Assisted-by trailers, and banned unreviewed agent comments) with a total ban - "No LLM, AI or agent assisted code contributions are allowed in the 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"; in the PR discussion Dawson said the intent is to start with a closed door and selectively open it case-by-case later (e.g. AI as autocomplete replacement, translations), that the earlier policy's process clearly didn't happen in reality, and that the project had already lost at least one extremely high value contributor as a result; the QEP passed its discussion period Oct 5, moved to voting, and was merged into QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals master Oct 7 (primary github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/pull/387 verified via direct curl --http1.1 -4 page fetch at ~12:30 UTC Oct 12, 634350 bytes, page title "Add QEP428: No ai contributions permitted by nyalldawson · Pull Request #387", plus the PR .diff fetch (160 lines) carrying the full replacement policy text; api.github.com unreachable this session so the HTML page and .diff served as verification). Gap-fill disclosure: the merge sits Oct 7, inside the 14-day window, but no feed in the standing 45 set carries QGIS QEP activity and no commit message records it; the 79-point HN submission 2026-10-12T11:22:24Z is the first in-set visibility, per the HashiCorp-Boundary/DuckDB/Genkit/AISI/Mistral gap-fill precedents; entry dated by discovery time per the AISI precedent (2026-10-12 11:22). New territory - grep shows zero prior QGIS entries. Categorized AI per the AI-coding-governance substance. (3) Alibaba Qwen released QwenGyre, an online reinforcement learning framework for long-horizon agent tasks (relay ithome.com/1/012/066.htm verified via direct curl --http1.1 -4 page fetch at ~12:28 UTC Oct 12, 24251 bytes, page stamp 2026/10/12 19:20:43 Beijing = 11:20:43Z matching the ithome feed stamp exactly, byline 潞源): agent runs routinely stretch to hours with hundreds of interdependent model-environment interactions and millions of cumulative tokens; QwenGyre splits GPUs into compute units so units freed by finished batch tasks roll into training while running tasks keep their state and caches intact without restart; Token-in Token-out records the true context of every output segment, organizes trajectories into a tree by shared prefix and expands only the selected path into training samples; Partial Scoring yields usable feedback for timed-out but partially-complete tasks; official NL2RepoBench online RL experiments with ~700k-token rollouts lifted pass rate from 52.5% to 58.5% over 48 training steps with a 1.78x end-to-end speedup vs Async at equal GPU budget, and cross-task validation on Qwen3.6-122B covered NL2RepoBench/DeepSWE/TerminalBench; qwenlm.github.io blog and github.com both unreachable this session (curl exit 28 under the continuing flaky route) so no primary could be probed and the verified ithome relay is cited per the Reuters/Korea Herald relay precedents. New territory - grep shows zero prior QwenGyre entries. Categorized AI per the framework-release precedents. Evaluated and skipped: HN sweep (hn.algolia search_by_date with numericFilters created_at_i > 1791803100 - this cutoff is 11:05:00Z real UTC Oct 12, five minutes before ebdaf93's stated 11:10 coverage end per the standing sweep-cutoff convention): clean single-page pull, 61 hits spanning 11:08:10Z-12:19:04Z with 0 cutoff violations; the pre-11:10 overlap hits (Show-HN http-server-rs 11:08:10Z, NYT book-freezer 11:09:18Z) and all new hits evaluated - skipped: Ledger unauthorized-hardware-implant cointelegraph 12:16:36Z as a same-arc dedupe of the in-data 2026-10-10 Ledger 钱包供应链攻击 entry (2076a7c already skipped the hidden-chip confirmation the same way), BBC AI-less-regulated-than-milk 11:56:42Z as a same-arc dedupe (f3b1a25 skipped the BBC original, 11e84f8 the ithome Brad Smith relay), Linus assoc-array kernel-tag submission 11:42:02Z as an exact-arc dedupe of ebdaf93's in-data Phoronix entry (the submission links the git.kernel.org tag itself), science.org AI-found-solutions-in-22-fields 11:39:34Z as science research per the standing science arc, ServeTheHome AMD EPYC 8005 SKU analysis 11:42:47Z as vendor hardware SKU/value analysis without a disclosed launch event, Valve Steam Frame CAD reference gitlab 11:44:37Z as a bare repo link without an article per the EC2-R8g precedent, danielmangum access-port 11:11:24Z / HOCON conformance 12:03:16Z / RISC-V bulk normalization 11:38:09Z / phaselock optimistic-updates 12:07:33Z / copyconstruct debug essay 12:14:35Z / kinopio passwords 12:04:21Z / aresluna 12:00:06Z / aditya.rs sentience 11:12:37Z as single-person essays/tutorials per the deepwoodssec precedent, the france24 12:07:48Z / infosecurity 12:15:36Z relays of the ADDED supermarket story, hikerapi 12:13:42Z / db.zizka.ai 12:08:29Z / medium ZizkaDB EU-AI-Act 11:40:19Z / orisift 12:03:51Z as vendor marketing, techradar ChatGPT parking ticket 12:08:32Z as consumer anecdote, fastcompany procrastination 12:13:34Z / popularmechanics terminal lucidity 12:13:31Z / NYT ADHD 12:09:22Z / universetoday moon 11:43:00Z / bassfinity dichromat 12:01:59Z / bbc vikings 11:14:48Z / bbc citroen-2CV 12:09:09Z as non-tech/science/auto, kyivindependent Brexit 11:23:12Z / bl00d.money 12:06:11Z / politico 2014 11:17:38Z / ibtimes burnout 11:17:56Z as politics/society, twitter Jobs-Wozniak-Breakout 12:12:41Z as unverifiable without X login per the no-X-login rule, segor closing 11:25:17Z / wsj nobel 12:03:01Z / reddit all-souls 11:12:45Z / youtube china-energy 11:11:30Z as non-tech, plus the standing Show-HN/repo/small-tool tail (tokenleak, ctxvitals, yagi DSP, iconic.photos, same.energy, organ.app, nabusql, tsc-haxe port, gearslip, tote, airlock sandbox, earnmykeep, bu coding form, cosign discourse, ask-HN DNSSEC and departments threads) and the git-tips gist. Feed-side in-window items: bleeping Windows 11 23H2 end of support in 30 days 11:58:33Z as consumer-Windows lifecycle news per the standing consumer arcs; heise batch 11:12-12:07Z - iOS 27 upgrade push 11:12Z consumer-Apple, Citroën 2CV Concept 11:13Z auto, heise+ Speicherchip-Knappheit DDR5/NAND 11:30Z paywalled storage-market per the 三星存储 precedent, Pimax Crystal Pro VR 11:45Z consumer hardware, iX-Workshop Claude Code 12:00Z workshop marketing, Opel STX Concept 12:07Z auto, and the 11:08Z KI-Scam anti-scam-bots feature (two minutes inside ebdaf93's window whose 11:02-11:04 pulls predate it, late-serve evaluated) as a consumer security feature without a technical artifact; heise Python 3.15 erschienen 11:27Z as a same-arc dedupe of the in-data Python 3.15.0 正式发布 entry; phoronix Linux 7.4 Snapdragon X2 Elite laptop support 11:16:13Z skipped as device-enablement per the Intel HDMI FRL v2 precedent; ithome batch 11:10-12:05Z evaluated in full and skipped - 国家铁路局十五五规划 11:12Z as government policy, 英特尔博通 CEO 资金短缺预警 11:12:41Z as CNBC-relayed interview commentary without a disclosed event per the 安蒙/周受资 precedents, 小鹏 G9L 巴黎上市 11:23Z auto, Edge AI 故障排查功能 11:28Z consumer-browser feature per the consumer-Microsoft arc, 小米电视 11:29Z / 安克 AI 会议耳机 11:39Z consumer hardware, 理想超充报告 11:35Z auto, 一汽大众 teaser 11:44Z, TGA 12 月颁奖 11:46Z gaming, 诺贝尔经济学奖 12:00Z and Polestar 清库存 12:05Z non-tech/auto, with the 11:20:43Z QwenGyre piece ADDED above; leiphone late-serve vs ebdaf93's recorded 07:42Z newest evaluated per the late-serve precedent - 安踏×火山引擎 Agent 电商案例 09:48Z as vendor case-study marketing and 苹果折叠华为八年 09:58Z as consumer commentary, both skipped; thn late-serve vs ebdaf93's recorded 09:02:14Z newest evaluated per the late-serve precedent - SonicWall SMA 1000 135 exploitation attempts 10:36:56Z (full body extracted from the direct page fetch at ~12:22 UTC Oct 12, 166966 bytes: CVE-2026-102255 CVSS 10.0 pre-auth SSRF, patched Oct 6 in 12.4.3-03670/12.5.0-03082 hotfixes, first exploitation detected Oct 8 by Defused Cyber and Previdian, 135 attempts from two US IPs, SonicWall advisory not yet updated) skipped as a same-arc dedupe of the in-data 2026-10-09 BleepingComputer entry (SonicWall 满分漏洞已现攻击利用, same CVE-2026-102255 arc) plus the in-data 2026-10-08 heise disclosure entry; solidot newest 10:01:07Z unchanged from ebdaf93 (their skip stands); infoq-cn/-alt newest 17:19:27-label = 09:19:27Z real per the standing s22 8h offset, QCon marketing already skipped; qbitai feed recovered this session (6237 bytes, 10 blocks) with newest 05:48:36Z unchanged; hnrss newest 11:22:24Z = the QGIS submission ADDED above; per-feed newest-stamp scan confirms no other landed feed carried real items after 11:10Z Oct 12 beyond those evaluated (all newest stamps unchanged from ebdaf93's recordings where comparable: ars Oct 11 18:10:54Z, astro Sep 30, bun Oct 10 03:18:05Z, chrome Jun 22, cloudflare Oct 9 18:27:34Z, deno Oct 9 15:00Z, devblogs-dotnet Oct 6 17:05Z, devblogs-ms Oct 9 09:44:25Z, devclass Sep 26, github-blog Oct 9 16:00Z, github-changelog Oct 10 18:53:39Z, golang Oct 2, hf-blog Oct 9 15:20:29Z, infoq 09:19Z-real, jetbrains Oct 12 10:18:32Z, k8s Oct 6 18:00Z, openai Oct 9 07:00Z, react Sep 9, swillison Oct 11 00:52:37Z, techcrunch Oct 12 00:59:01Z, typescript Jul 8, vercel-blog Oct 9 20:24:00Z, verge Oct 11 20:06:43Z, vite Jun 23, webkit Oct 8 23:29:40Z; fresh in-window newest stamps all evaluated: bleeping 11:58:33Z, heise 12:07Z, ithome 12:05:23Z, phoronix 11:16:13Z). Source status: 45 feeds attempted fresh 12:02-12:15 UTC Oct 12 across four passes, 44 landed - usable full parses this pass: ithome/infoq-cn/infoq-cn-alt/solidot/leiphone/bleeping/heise/ars/astro/bun/cloudflare/deno/devblogs-dotnet/devblogs-ms/devclass/github-blog/github-changelog/golang/hf-blog/hnrss/jetbrains/k8s/openai/phoronix/qbitai/react/swillison/thn/techcrunch/typescript/vercel-blog/verge/vite/webkit; shells: mydrivers 404-1231B, oschina 404-1548B, register 404-204KB, svelte 404, tailwind 404, nextjs 404, vscode 404, nodejs 404-98KB parse-0, anthropic 404-20KB; missed: rust on all attempts (Oct 2 standing stale, no in-window cost). Window maintenance: today is 2026-10-12 UTC so the isFreshNews boundary stays today-14d = 2026-09-28 inclusive; the oldest entry (2026-09-28) sits at the inclusive boundary and is retained; prune already applied at 156e78f, nothing to prune; publishedNews 197 under the current cutoff. Validation: tsc -b passes (exit 0); npm run build fails only with the pre-existing lint:api-content failure set, digit-normalized diff against the baseline (ebdaf93's tmp/build-oct12-new2.log saved as tmp/build-oct12-h12-baseline.log before this session's build) shows BUILD LOGS IDENTICAL (606 log lines each, 0 diffs); node tmp/validate-oct12-h12.mjs reports 197 of 197 array entries parsed with 0 duplicate URLs, 0 bad category, 0 out-of-window, 0 order violations, 0 date-group violations, 0 over-length titles/summaries; in-file assertNewsCopy guard clean at module import via npx tsx (197 entries, publishedNews 197 spanning 2026-09-28..2026-10-12, new entries at the top of the 2026-10-12 group at 11:32/11:22/11:20); new entries within 19/28 + 19/28 + 23/28 title and 54/60 + 51/60 + 54/60 summary limits; dedupe re-checked against HEAD immediately before commit per the 5a3ba1a/156e78f collision convention (0 matches for the three new URLs; git fetch to origin failed with github.com unreachable, so the check is against local HEAD ebdaf93). Adds 3 items; dataset now 197 entries.
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