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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

#191

Post by dirkc »

JodieBenitez wrote: post #119
eschaton wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do they enforce that contributions aren’t copied and pasted from AGPLv3 or proprietary codebases? The honor system and intuition and occasionally flat out asking people. Do you think sociopaths willing to lie about how they came up with a contribution are really that common?

Let me tell you a story: I use agents at work. Not to add more useless features, not in a let-loose way, not so that I can slack all day but to produce better output. Think performance optimizations, security fixes, better use of underlying frameworks, produce better documentation, get useful hints from the code base, that kind of thing. In a word, to produce objectively better software. that is my honor: giving the…

Don't compromise your professional integrity by lying about how you work. Rather find a job where you don't need to lie about your use of AI if you can.

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

#192

Post by maiybe »

A point of wild speculation. This is likely to be the slow decline of Godot.

As someone with 2 years of Godot experience (which seems like a lot given their lifespan), the underlying infra isn't strong enough to ward off the many competitors that will embrace AI at the heart of the engine. Ironically, the best engine right now for AI-assisted coding is Godot! It has plain text scene files, and Opus does a half decent design - screenshot - iterative flow to get things off the ground before artists clean it up.

Being an open source maintainer is HARD work I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. However, the Godot team has very strong opinions that don't really drive especially better software. There is a small history of being confrontational in their github PRs, and a strong opinionated approach. They mostly inherited their current spot in the market from mistakes and commercial pressures of the top two engines (cough Unity per-install fees).

The removal of AI-generated contributions is pitched as helping them maintain a better core product, but in reality, (my prediction) it will end up massively hampering velocity over the next 3-5 year horizon.

At the same time, it used to be impractical to make your own game engine to make a game. Now, with AI-assisted coding, strong game devs have a viable option, despite the added complexity. Rust libraries like bevy provide the training wheels to a half decent dev + AI assistant that can build more bespoke smaller engines for indies. To gain Godot's level of indie marketshare, a single breakout engine project that embraces vibecoding could be enough. I expect that will gobble up eager /r/aigamedev Redditors and the new swarm of unemployed juniors fresh out of college.

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

#193

Post by skydhash »

felix-the-cat wrote: post #168

I'm curious how they would know - can't someone just tell Claude not to use excessive comments and write code that matches the style and conventions of the codebase it's being used against?

Most LLM users wants to do less work, not more. Shaping LLM output to be human like is a lot of work, and that assumes you know what the human version looks like.

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

#194

Post by anang »

romaaeterna wrote: post #159

Are they gatekeeping to protect against AI "slop" or are they gatekeeping to protect an inefficient and non-scalable review process against velocity? I've seen policies like this in various places and they do not generally seem to be based quantitative measures of code functionality, security, and efficiency. There are other approaches to take to deal with large numbers of incoming PRs: improved CI, AI-readable stand…

In my experience success in a project isn't about the amount of code that can be produced, it's more about the thoughtfulness behind features and fixes. A lot of the work going into reviewing pull requests is understanding it in the context of the project's broader goals.

This gets a lot harder when there is a giant wall of text that the pull requester doesn't understand and can't really discuss outside of asking AI (and probably getting "The reviewer is right to push back - I was too aggressive in my blah blah blah" as an answer).

A lot of (but maybe not all) pull requests are fundamentally a human to human task, even if there is a lot of technical details involved.

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

#195

Post by rschiavone »

maiybe wrote: post #192

A point of wild speculation. This is likely to be the slow decline of Godot. As someone with 2 years of Godot experience (which seems like a lot given their lifespan), the underlying infra isn't strong enough to ward off the many competitors that will embrace AI at the heart of the engine. Ironically, the best engine right now for AI-assisted coding is Godot! It has plain text scene files, and Opus does a half decent…

This is exactly what will make Godot shine in 2 years while the rest of the world will be busy cleaning up inefficient code.

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

#196

Post by ryan_n »

maiybe wrote: post #192

A point of wild speculation. This is likely to be the slow decline of Godot. As someone with 2 years of Godot experience (which seems like a lot given their lifespan), the underlying infra isn't strong enough to ward off the many competitors that will embrace AI at the heart of the engine. Ironically, the best engine right now for AI-assisted coding is Godot! It has plain text scene files, and Opus does a half decent…

> To gain Godot's level of indie marketshare, a single breakout engine project that embraces vibecoding could be enough.

What are you basing this off of? There are already plenty of game engine projects like what you describe here. Doesn't seem to have affected Godot thus far, unless I'm missing something.

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

#197

Post by bloomca »

maiybe wrote: post #192

A point of wild speculation. This is likely to be the slow decline of Godot. As someone with 2 years of Godot experience (which seems like a lot given their lifespan), the underlying infra isn't strong enough to ward off the many competitors that will embrace AI at the heart of the engine. Ironically, the best engine right now for AI-assisted coding is Godot! It has plain text scene files, and Opus does a half decent…

> the underlying infra isn't strong enough to ward off the many competitors that will embrace AI at the heart of the engine

Who are the competitors? Something lower level like bevvy? The way I see it even with vibe coding you need to do a lot of infrastructure work to make editing easy, and anybody except Unity is far off from them.

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

#198

Post by TomasBM »

whateverboat wrote: post #76
TomasBM wrote: 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…

This was the original rule in linux kernel as well. No more than 200 loc per patch. We should also introduce this to git commits and pull request descriptions: 1. 400 chars/10 lines per commit 1b. Not more than 3 commits in the initial pull request 2. 20 lines of explanation for pull request 3. not more than 3 pull request open at any one time

Seems like this policy would apply pretty well regardless of who/what generated the code.

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

#199

Post by lenkite »

pigeonwarz wrote: post #120
Mabusto wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

This could easily be circumvented by having the AI generate an explanation of the chosen portion of code and have the human rewrite it in their own words. It is much easier, imo, to swap clauses and put synonyms in place of other words within existing writing then it is to synthesise new text.

AI slop PR's aren't really generated by people willing to do even this much effort.

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

#200

Post by snarfy »

ivorius wrote: post #16
TomasBM wrote: 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…

They could allow AI PRs, but then have another AI PR reviewer reject them if they do not match the definitions for `to-the-point` `no-bullshit` commits.
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