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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

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, but the avenue is always open and the AI code is still present.

That I think is also an important issue if a project wants to keep AI out of its code.

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

#274
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also telling with all the comments of "just wait a few months the models are getting so much better" which has been said for years and will continue to be said for years. It's the same with any other scam with tenuous value (see cryptocurrency). At some point you just call it failed.

They have consistently been proven right. The only thing failing has been the plateau claimers. If anything, it has improved much faster than the optimistic predictions.

Then fork Godot and accept all the PRs you guys want?

No need to ruin existing software?

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

#275
Brandolini's law in action.

It takes 10x more effort to refute BS than to generate it. Reviewing code is refuting. So is verifying the correctness of propositions. Generating propositions is easy, Refuting it requires proving the truth value or finding contradiction.

For maintainers of open source whose time is scarce, their energies are wasted needlessly, and I am all for conserving and directing energies productively.

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

#276

Interesting that on one hand the valuation of these AI providers is based on the assumption that all code (and everything else producing digital artefacts) will be written using AI in the near future, on the other hand almost all popular open source projects fight to keep AI contributions out. Hard to reconcile. Personally I'm also experiencing a bit of AI hangover after using it a lot in my own open-source projects.…

I think drugs are actually a great analogy. An initial feeling of "oh my god I have superhuman capabilities" followed by a hangover of "ohno I have created a mess". Especially with AI sycophancy where it's like "Great idea!" all the time. (I am well aware most my ideas are not great, thanks). Honestly, even the way people talk about like vibe coding on their phones while they're with their kids or something, it almos…

> An initial feeling of "oh my god I have superhuman capabilities" followed by a hangover of "ohno I have created a mess".

Continuing the analogy: if this happens, then you are using the wrong drugs or you are using the drugs wrong. It's not like there's an axiom "you can't enhance your performance without detrimental side-effects."

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

#277

I wonder what people think about addressing this with process. For example, on GH: - Disable public pull requests. - Require people to open an issue or discussion. Issues and discussions should have stated length/quality parameters. If an issue is a wall of Claude-text, users should be prepared for this text to be automatically summarized into plain language. If you don't want your Claude-text to be machine-turned in…

Generally creating a lot of friction around contributing to a project defeats the whole purpose of open sourcing it.

A better policy might simply be to automatically (using AI for this is kind of an obvious thing to do) filter and classify incoming PRs and issues for complying with quality thresholds.

A huge PR that comes in without a clear discussion history in the issue tracker is kind of a rude thing to do. That should be an automatic close. Have some good contributor guidelines and then enforce them. With or without AI. Block repeat offenders that can't be bothered to stick to those. Most of the annoyance comes from having to do all this manually and getting distracted by all this noise.

A small, focused fix that comes in with a well articulated explanation of what was done and why is a different matter. It shouldn't matter if the contributor used AI or not.

The main issue is that the signal is drowned out with the noise with a lot of problematic contributions from new/unverified users. But those should be kind of easy to detect as well.

There are multiple ways to deal with this. But a blanket ban on AI is a bit throwing out the baby with the bath water.

I actually have the opposite problem on my OSS repositories. It seems people are to busy doing their own projects to actually open pull requests on my projects. There's a noticeable decline in the number of pull requests since last year.

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

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should not be weeding out bad PRs regardless of their source! A pull request is a social artifact whose value and meaning is dependent on its author; bad PRs from a human author often mean things such as "I'd like to learn how this works and join your community". So it can be both satisfying and worthwhile to spend your effort on cleaning it up, even if it starts to take as much or even more effort than doing it…

> You should not be weeding out bad PRs regardless of their source! A pull request is a social artifact whose value and meaning is dependent on its author; bad PRs from a human author often mean things such as "I'd like to learn how this works and join your community". I think the difference in perspective might come from the fact that to many people the code and features matters more than any community or the idea o…

The Godot maintainers have decided they don't support that perspective. In their words, they value "being cautious about feature creep" and "dedicated to high code quality"; they don't accept that all working code should be merged.

Aspiring contributors who'd like to make a different tradeoff are of course free to make a fork. But then all of the stuff in their fork won't benefit from the participation of the community, which I suspect most such people do value even if they identify as a "code first" person.

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

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a study showing that doctors who use AI to help detect cancer become less skilled at detecting cancer without AI. Not exactly an argument against using AI, is it? It's a bit like saying that GPS makes people worse at navigating by memory, which is true, but also not a strong argument for going back to paper maps. I feel the discourse is more about "stop using AI" and less about "how can we ensure our backu…

We should keep some people around who can read paper maps (and keep paper maps around too). We need to keep doctors around who can keep working without a computer. It's a civilization threatening issue not to. There might be plenty reasons, from natural disasters, to self-inflicted "geopolitics", when we suddenly have to take a technological step back, and it's in our interest to maintain "30-50 years ago" level of t…

Definite agree on having human-based redundant systems.

But I think the point the parent commenter made is: if there's not a functional difference in the result (i.e., job satisfies the definition of done), it doesn't matter if the AI generated the code or did the diagnosis.

But I think it's also fair to say that the process matters, even if the result is the same. If something exists for our benefit (e.g., there's no real alternative to learning-by-doing, and people need to know stuff for safety/security reasons), and we're fine with the trade-off, there's no reason to just give up the process to the AI.

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