GoKawiil
Tech News
The QGIS open-source geographic information system project has merged a policy change prohibiting contributions created with the assistance of AI tools. The decision was implemented through a pull request to the project's governance documentation on GitHub.
GitHub has added two new options for repository owners to control pull request access. Users can now disable pull requests entirely or restrict their creation to collaborators only, providing more flexibility for different project types. These features are available across all repositories and can be configured in the repository settings.
Linear's engineering team reworked its continuous integration system after the CTO flagged rising costs and slow test cycles, a problem intensified by developers using AI agents to write code far faster than CI could validate it. By switching to faster third-party runners and adopting the native TypeScript compiler tsgo, along with reducing redundant setup and optimizing gating jobs, Linear cut pull request wait times from over six minutes to just over five and roughly halved runner time per test, even as its test suite nearly quadrupled in size.
NASA has issued a Request for Information outlining plans for a United States Space Academy, aiming for a 2026 groundbreaking, a 2028 opening in temporary facilities, and a permanent campus by 2031. The agency wants a site of at least 300 acres, initially serving 1,200 undergraduates with room to grow to 4,000, and is inviting all 50 states to submit proposals detailing land, funding, and infrastructure support.
A workplace consultant describes coaching a client whose budget and headcount request got lost inside a dense slide deck full of revenue charts and staffing data. The consultant argues the core ask should come first, not buried behind supporting evidence, and offers a four-step framework for structuring presentations so leadership actually absorbs the request.
A software developer recounts that their business partner used an AI coding assistant to build an entire payments backend module in a single day, then submitted a 5,236-line pull request without testing it. The developer found the endpoints didn't actually work and that documentation was riddled with obvious AI-generated filler, while missing critical details like where to obtain API keys.
A blog operator built network and header-based rules on a Cloudflare Worker to sort incoming traffic without relying on JavaScript, and found that 277 of 372 requests bearing browser User-Agent strings were actually not genuine browsers—74.5% of the total. Comparing this edge-based counting with Cloudflare Web Analytics page loads over two days revealed persistent gaps between the two measurement methods, exposing bugs in the HTML-acceptance check and missing provenance markers, both since fixed.
A pull request submitted to the uv project introduces a mechanism to deduplicate files stored in its wheel cache, reducing redundant copies of package files. The change was merged into the open-source Python packaging tool's codebase after review.
A WIRED journalist filed data access requests with more than 100 companies under the California Consumer Privacy Act, seeking to see what personal information had been collected. Instead of providing the requested data, many firms sent deletion confirmations the reporter never asked for, or refused to honor the contact method listed in their own privacy policies. McDonald's, notably, returned a 515-page file detailing app usage and predictive behavioral profiling.
Opslane is a new open-source platform that records user sessions to catch bugs beyond crash reports, including silent UX failures like unresponsive buttons or abandoned forms. It ranks issues by how many users are affected, investigates the highest-impact ones, and automatically opens verified pull requests when it can confirm a fix works in a sandbox environment. The system integrates with coding agents via an MCP server and delivers a daily Slack digest summarizing what broke and what's ready to merge.
At Black Hat USA 2026, PortSwigger research director James Kettle unveiled an open source AI-driven tool called HTTP Terminator, designed to test whether AI could invent original hacking techniques rather than just find known bugs. The tool autonomously produced new HTTP desync, or request smuggling, attacks and used them to breach real enterprise sites, including several belonging to financial services firms.