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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

#341

Post by andrewflnr »

Mabusto wrote: post #46
ivorius wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

One of the early selling points of LLMs was their ability to mimic styles. I haven't heard about that for a while though. Wouldn't that at least obscure the classic tells, if not eliminate them? I think the reason most (obvious) AI output is obvious is because people don't bother to hide it.

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

#342

Post by timcobb »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #277
timcobb wrote: post #152

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 s…

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

Is this friction? I think it's quality standards, and a flow that's relevant to a time when code is more of a commodity than before.

And contributing code isn't all that's valuable in OSS. Bug/UX reports and feature ideas are really valuable, more valuable now than code IMO.

Even before LLMs, I was much more likely to report an issue to an project if it was open source and I could go look at the code and confirm what's happening. Reporting a bug w/o this feels like wasting my time. Without source visibility, I'm usually inclined to just stop using the software (e.g. Microsoft products, or even "freeware"). With code viz, I can confidently report a bug with some sense of what the fix might entail, how long it might take, what my expectations for a fix might be.

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

#343

Post by bigstrat2003 »

TomasBM wrote: post #18
manvel_hn wrote: post #3

There are some curated lists of no-AI software. Would be nice to have an index / plot of how that changes in time. https://codeberg.org/brib/slopfree-software-index https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html

Interesting initiative. What are the guiding reasons behind these lists? I can't think of a functional reason for a no-AI policy: if it runs, it runs, regardless of who or what made it. Also, even if you avoid AI-generated slop, you can't really avoid the human-generated or human+AI-generated slop that passes your filters. Still, I can definitely think of good non-functional reasons: provenance, accountability, proof…

> I can't think of a functional reason for a no-AI policy: if it runs, it runs, regardless of who or what made it.

AI-written code is far less likely to run than human-written code. Even worse, it often gives the appearance that it will be fine, only blowing up down the line. That is an extremely strong functional reason to reject AI code.

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

#344

Post by jplusequalt »

peterbell_nyc wrote: post #300

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 cra…

I think "no-AI" policies are really just ways of gatekeeping low effort contributions from people who have no idea what they're doing. This is a good thing!

To use the current example of Godot--game engine development is really, really, __really__ hard. Building on your engine in a way that doesn't lead to performance regressions, introduce subtle bugs, etc. takes a lot of know how.

If you care about quality and performance, then rejecting work from people who aren't capable of understanding how their contributions impact the greater engine as a whole is a logical choice.

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

#345

Post by TomasBM »

basch wrote: post #298
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 t…

This is actually a good idea.

I mean, not sure if everyone wants that for their project, and there will surely be plenty of trade-offs.

But it would be a very good compromise: You (the maintainer) get only human-generated PRs in the canonical project, and they (pro-AI contributors) get a lower-threshold sandbox to play with. Best case scenario, you cherrypick the pre-filtered golden nuggets to bring back to the canonical project.

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

#346

Post by bigstrat2003 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #289

This makes sense in the short term, but we really need the industry as a whole to learn how to code with AI in a safe sustainable way. Open Source has a particular problem of taking a really long time to make changes, fix bugs, etc. A lot of design decisions are due to "we don't have time for this". AI can speed those things up and drastically increase the utility we can get out of open source. We just need to figure…

No we don't. It's a bad tool, and we do not need to just roll over and accept it as inevitable.

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

#347

Post by jplusequalt »

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…

>why can't AI-assisted PR reviews make it less tedious?

Godot is a performance critical system in the realm of a million lines of code (?).

Keeping your system both correct AND performant, requires people understand how it works. This kind of technical knowledge is slow to develop, so it's one of the most valuable skills to possess.

I don't see how you continue to understand your system when people are both generating code with AI and using AI to review it's output.

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

#348

Post by stronglikedan »

ThePhysicist wrote: post #82

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.…

> in the moment I'm using these tools I feel great and powerful, writing features in a span of hours that would've taken me weeks to write by hand. But inevitably some time later I will look at the code and notice all the subtle cracks and inconsistencies the tool introduced, and despair a bit at the mess.

My suggestion would be that instead of sometime later, review incrementally as part of your process. Treat AI as just the tool for writing, just as if you handed it off to a junior. Replace "junior" with "AI" in the SDLC and keep everything else the same.

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

#349

Post by TomasBM »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #343
TomasBM wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting initiative. What are the guiding reasons behind these lists? I can't think of a functional reason for a no-AI policy: if it runs, it runs, regardless of who or what made it. Also, even if you avoid AI-generated slop, you can't really avoid the human-generated or human+AI-generated slop that passes your filters. Still, I can definitely think of good non-functional reasons: provenance, accountability, proof…

> I can't think of a functional reason for a no-AI policy: if it runs, it runs, regardless of who or what made it. AI-written code is far less likely to run than human-written code. Even worse, it often gives the appearance that it will be fine, only blowing up down the line. That is an extremely strong functional reason to reject AI code.

That depends on the model and the toolkit it uses. In my experience from using Claude Code (Max, Opus 4.5+) intensely for the past six months, I maybe had 3 instances where the implementation broke functionally. And all of these breaking changes were resolved by Claude.

Obviously, this won't apply to every context: I work primarily with well-known langs (e.g., Python, JS), small to medium codebases (<500k LoC, for sure), and relatively few co-developers.

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

#350

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #316
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #243

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…

> A pull request is a social artifact whose value and meaning is dependent on its author; Says who? How can you say I'm categorically wrong when your entire point rests upon an opinion?

Says the definition? I don't really understand your response. A pull request is a request from Alice (the author) that one of Barbara, Chris, Daniel (the maintainers) should pull her code into a particular branch.

Many communities do have a norm that all authors are to be presumed equal, as long as they're prepared to take advice and learn from it. (That's where all experts start, after all.) That's the norm that Godot are trying to protect here. If they don't stop accepting AI-authored contributions, they worry, reviewers will start to implicitly load-shed by not reading PRs from people they don't recognize.

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