2026-11-03 –, Bondi
Congratulations! LLM agents can now make you a GDAL developer, but the project closed the ticket your agent created. We will talk about LLM contributions to twenty year old software projects that might not want them.
GDAL recently implemented an LLM tool policy that attempts to temper free-range LLM development within the project. The reasons were many, but protecting the constrained resources of human-in-the-loop review, continuous integration capacity, and the project's reputation were at the top of the list. This talk is a conversation about how new modes of developing software are clashing with old modes of software distribution, how you can shepherd your LLM-generated content through a project like GDAL to work through issues, and what it means to be an open source software maintainer in the LLM development era.
Howard Butler is the president of Hobu, Inc., an open source software consultancy located in Iowa City, Iowa that focuses on point cloud data management solutions. He is an author of the Cloud Optimized Point Cloud specification, a Project Steering Committee member of the GDAL, PROJ, and GEOS projects, a contributing author to the GeoJSON specification, an active participant in the ASPRS LAS Committee, and a past member of the OSGeo Board of Directors. With his firm, Howard leads the development of the PDAL software library.