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Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions

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Re: Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions

#42
post #40

The foundation points out something that has always been true, but AI has really brought to the forefront, that any contributor, including AI, could potentially not be relied on to maintain this patch in the future. This is the core of the issue, not that someone uses AI, but that it’s just one of many smells a patch can have that indicates someone doesn’t understand what they’re submitting. You could be breaking var…

AI is well-capable of fabricating text that looks like an opinion in 2026. This would not help differentiate AI from human authors.

Re: Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions

#44

While I agree with the general message, and wish it will eventually radiate to cooperations as well, it is obviously a decision driven by feelings, not logic. The idea that you can't trust code that was generated by heavy users of AI, because _they_ don't understand it enough to fix it, is false, because they can use AI to fix it. In general, I have hard time understanding how one might even block other contributors…

And it just keeps looping like that until the context window bursts. In practice the model is great at writing new code, but when you feed it its own six month old spaghetti code with a floating bug in the state machine it just starts hallucinating and silently breaking neighboring features

Re: Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions

#45
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If you understood the change, writing a short description of the problem and the fix yourself would be trivial.

Efficiency is the key. I haven’t written any issue before so LLM was much quicker than manual experiment. I have personally checked the result before submission.

So why the hate? :)

Re: Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions

#46
post #42
post #40

The foundation points out something that has always been true, but AI has really brought to the forefront, that any contributor, including AI, could potentially not be relied on to maintain this patch in the future. This is the core of the issue, not that someone uses AI, but that it’s just one of many smells a patch can have that indicates someone doesn’t understand what they’re submitting. You could be breaking var…

AI is well-capable of fabricating text that looks like an opinion in 2026. This would not help differentiate AI from human authors.

You’re absolutely right - AI is not just capable, it’s on the leading edge. It’s not about vibes, it’s about results.

(It’s famously not well capable of sounding human)

Re: Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions

#47
post #4

Why base the decision on what tools are used by the author and not on the quality of their past contributions?

If your contributions are genuinely indistinguishable from AI code, then this shouldn’t affect you. There would be no way to enforce it

I think they arent even trying to build an AI detector. This is more of a social signal like "dont send us an automatically generated flood of changes"

Re: Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main functional reason is that because a human hasn't written the code, its potentially more likely to have subtle hidden bugs that a human cant explain because they didn't write it, as well as large pull requests that have to be validated by a human when smaller human written ones would be better. But I think it's generally the non-functional reasons that projects are rejecting LLM-generated code. Some d…

And on top of that - no matter if you develop open-source or proprietary software, who is to guarantee the AI didn't get trained with GPL (or even worse, leaked proprietary) source code? Who is going to pay my lawyer when someone files a copyright lawsuit and all I have as an excuse is that I "AI-laundered" my code? And some projects like WINE or ReactOS probably have to worry about that even more given they need to…

Given the amount of web scraping LLM providers have been doing, I'd say it's likely that any code that is publicly accessible on the internet has been incorporated into it's training data, whatever its license

Re: Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions

#49
post #16
post #7

It's a fair policy. Getting those verbose, AI-authored walls of text is very annoying, especially when you're expected to thoroughly review it. It's like a denial-of-service attack on the human mind. I can only imagine how frustrating this can get in open projects that get a lot of contributions. However, I don't think this will discourage AI-based coding at all. In fact, I see two potential outcomes of these policie…

> - Negative: Submitters just add stylistic markers to make their accounts and output seem human-generated. This is like syntactic sugar: the core content and the size of contributions stay the same, but the style gets quirkier. From my experience reviewing, most contributors never read the policies, especially those making a "quick AI PR". I don't expect the new policy to change this much. > Positive: Submitters act…

> From my experience reviewing, most contributors never read the policies, especially those making a "quick AI PR". I don't expect the new policy to change this much.

The policy allows the reviewer to reject it on the "AI" grounds.

Re: Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions

#50

  ...the influx of contributions authored or submitted by AI is sapping the projects' maintainers of their willingness to confront the "already tedious" work of reviewing pull requests....
To me this seems a core issue: PR reviews for most people feel tedious and this has been the case way before AI already.

Don't get me wrong, slop is slop, no matter if AI or entirely human-fabricated. But just like AI-assisted coding can actually be helpful, why can't AI-assisted PR reviews make it less tedious?

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