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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

#291

Post by maiybe »

dofm wrote: post #283
jerf wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people who hand write code for a game engine will beat the people who try to vibe code a game engine. But they'll both be beaten by people using AI intelligently to generate code, but not letting it drive everything. Who look at every line and apply their experience to fixing what the AI generates until it outputs more or less what you would have, only more quickly. The false dichotomy that some of you are trying…

> But they'll both be beaten by people using AI intelligently to generate code, but not letting it drive everything. I mean, this remains to be seen. Is this actually much faster or better than coding by hand? (Not a facetious question: it's one I grapple with all the time)

I'd put my estimates at 3x speed improvements. The amount of infra required upfront? 5x one time cost. These are estimates from Godot mobile app work. We have been trying out: no reviews under specific file sizes, except at design bottlenecks or large refactors. Number of PRs is probably up 3x with maybe 20% increase in regressions? Number of tests in our CI is up 500% (again, approximate), but this is absolutely required or we'd be awash in uncaught regressions with the velocity of code changes.

We have PR auditing skills, PR writing skills, testing conventions, etc that all need to be self-monitored for bullsh*t Claude ignorance (e.g. you apply them many times, then review your own PRs manually before merge). None of that is free, but we have shipped significantly more code as a result.

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

#292

Post by bluefirebrand »

pferde wrote: post #88
frb wrote: post #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…

No, reviewing PRs in general is a delightful process. The tedious part is in the initial triage when the PR comes from a previously unknown submitter, and you cannot be sure what is the intention of the submitter, what is their technical level, whether they are talking out of their ass or not. It's basically the same issue as spam in emails. It was bad before, and automation made it a zillion times worse.

> No, reviewing PRs in general is a delightful process

I don't know if this is a very universal feeling. I personally find reviewing code is tedious compared to writing it

Not just the process of reading the code and understanding it, but the back and forth can be miserable if the submitter isn't meeting you part way

I dunno. Maybe I'm the odd one out for thinking reviewing PRs is more of a chore than a joy

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

#293

Post by maiybe »

overgard wrote: post #290
maiybe wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many years, it's been difficult to build game engines. It's never been easier today. A half-decently funded startup team could get to Godot feature parity within 6-12 months. There's no VC in games anymore (especially not middleware), so it's less unlikely, but they don't have a moat on features. When you go to invest in an engine. One with Claude Code natively infused and another that says "meh" to AI. Which wou…

Oh god. If you really believe you can vibe code an engine in 6 months I challenge you to do it. I think you'll find you've wildly underestimated what goes into an engine.

Well, this is fundamentally where we end up disagreeing. Within the timeframe of a single mobile app development cycle, the entire coding infrastructure of the world changed. Our collective day-to-day coding experience has morphed within 15 months.

Here, you're making a negative argument, it "can't" be done. Maybe. Historically, correct. I prefer to image what could be done. As insane a statement as it sounds just 15 months ago, a small dev team could get it done, I'll stand by that. Framing is up to you, to each their own!

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

#294

Post by shimman »

cute_boi wrote: post #267
pineappletooth_ wrote: post #254

For people that don't get it just check this: https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/115280 https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/116410 For a project that already struggled with the ammount of PRs to review before AI era is not fair to mantainers to keep dealing with things like this. That's why the real big change in the policy is that new contributors can't take big features or refactors.

> This contribution is part of a university course project where we are required to make a real open-source contribution This university is very stupid university. Is there anyway to know which university is forcing these kids to spam open source project?

Yeah the entire community telling devs for the last 15 years that open source contributions is how you get a job. Stupid statements get stupid incentives.

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

#295

Post by Fraterkes »

maiybe wrote: post #235
nemomarx wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the AI tools are that effective, the maintainers can just use them themselves? That way they would have the full oversight on how it's done. PRs with just the results and final code doesn't seem better even if we assume ai coding will be much faster.

Integrating AI-assisted PRs into an existing team is a skillset all in itself. The team is taking a pretty strong stance against external AI-assisted PRs, which makes you think they'd take a weak stance against internal AI-assisted PRs? It's hard to draw the exact line, but maybe? For our team, the outcome is the PR, and you have to set up _a lot of testing infrastructure_ to prevent regressions. It's a skillset like…

Any resources for getting better at that skillset (high-velocity but largely stable ai-enhanced coding, if I understand you correctly)? I’m always pretty skeptical of these claims but I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong

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

#296

Post by uyzstvqs »

avaer wrote: post #35

Totally valid. If someone thinks they're building better open source with their AI, let them fork; their AI can maintain downstream. If it's really better, people will join the fork. Good luck. In all likelihood anyone attempting this will realize the value that a maintainer provides. On the odd chance they discover a new working model and produce better software, all the better, everyone wins.

> If it's really better, people will join the fork.

That already happened. Redot is a major fork that's more community-driven and positive. They're also fine with AI use, as long as you review, understand, and take responsibility for everything you do with it. https://github.com/Redot-Engine/redot-engine

They're also building a brand new game engine from scratch! https://github.com/Redot-Engine/DraconicEngine

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

#297

Post by ahartmetz »

RicardoLuis0 wrote: post #264
ahartmetz wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joke's on him, many Rust people are current or former C++ people.

just because someone writes or wrote C++ doesn't make them a "C++ person", and "C++ people" are very much against rust

Only true Scots... err C++ people are against Rust, I see :>

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

#298

Post by basch »

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…

All these projects should seamlessly run a fork in parallel that accepts AI and has AI for review and approval. Both camps are happy.

Basically a play sandbox for contributors to not get jaded. A honeypot to contain the verbosity vomit, while also serving as positive public relations by keeping young contributor morale from starting in the basement.

Everyone has been that person once early in their life who is told they aren’t welcome and never comes back. Maybe it was SourceForge or IRC, maybe it was Wikipedia.

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

#299

Post by Yizahi »

someonebaggy wrote: post #77
captainbland wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like a denial-of-service attack on the human mind. I think this may be an example of deliberate hostile design, attempting to force users to adopt LLM based solutions to then summarise the vast output. Pushing back against AI contributions as such in this context makes sense, especially in software with an existing proven track record of great value delivery like Godot.

There's no chance that anyone saw that far ahead in the future and planned it. It's emergent behaviour.

While it certainly didn't enter a mind of any director making decisions (because they can't comprehend not defecting in a prisoner's dilemma, being sociopaths), it was plainly obvious to every person even remotely connected to IT in the past two decades. If one makes a better and faster spam generator and the same unchanged program also works in reverse, by sifting through spam and condensing it to a readable summary, that it will be immediately co-opted in a spam arms race by all sides of the war and become essentially mandatory.

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

#300

Post by peterbell_nyc »

So many thoughts

AI can materially improve PRs - you just have to do it right.

Firstly there are not going to be a material number of non-AI patches written in the future. I know some people still ride horses, but when compared to the 17th century the percentage of travel primarily enabled by literal horse power is way down. Same way goes "artisinal, hand crafted code"

Secondly the problem isn't the AI - it's the crappy prompts and lack of intermediate artifacts and quality gates (deterministic and adversarial) in the generation pipelines.

Thirdly, don't disallow AI (I mean, feel free, you're doing something without charging for it - do you) - disallow crappy PRs, verbose descriptions. and bloated code that doesn't fit your coding standards.

Fourthly, ship your standards. Document what a good PR looks like, the comments and examples, the search for open PRs to ensure it isn't a dupe or a won't fix. Then ship your coding standards - have some LLMs infer them from your current code base and review (bonus - anything it infers correctly that you don't agree with, get it to re-code to your new standards).

Then set up a PR reviewer - start with deternministic gates for the format of the PR and some broad heuristics, then run it through adversarial reviews. Anything that looks great, feel free to run by a human either before the merge or after just to keep an eye on things.

The deterministic gates will cheaply get rid of 95% of the slop (AI and human - I've seem plenty of human slop over the years) so you can focus tokens on the good stuff.

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