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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

#371

Post by maiybe »

overgard wrote: post #359
maiybe wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Integrating AI-assisted PRs into an existing team is a skillset all in itself. What exactly is this skillset? Why should AI created PR's be any different from other PRs? To me this seems like a very sensible move.. they don't want to deal with bad code from uninvested contributors. I can't possibly see how that would harm them. If they want to use AI themselves, given their track record I trust they would do it tas…

Quite simply, volume. Detailed human review is a serious bottleneck on code merging. Skillset includes how to make sure you can get quality code at speed without 100% in-depth human review. I wouldn't recommend merges without human eyes, but there is a spectrum of depth in review.

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

#372

Post by maiybe »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #352
maiybe wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI-assisted coding is good for creators. It happens to be good for corporations because it reduces costs, but it's actually much more powerful for creators with imagination. I don't know where that argument comes from. If AI-assisted coding can help corporations make AAA games with 1/10th the resources, then it would stand to reason it also helps indies make AAA with 1/10th the resources? I have never understood this…

>AI-assisted coding is good for creators. It happens to be good for corporations because it reduces costs, but it's actually much more powerful for creators with imagination. I don't know where that argument comes from. >If AI-assisted coding can help corporations make AAA games with 1/10th the resources, then it would stand to reason it also helps indies make AAA with 1/10th the resources? I have never understood th…

> adds to their brand as something for creators rather than corporations

I'm responding to the idea that banning AI contributions is on brand for being "for creators."

What about their action is creator friendly? Yes, they reject all low quality AI slop, which has some indirect positive benefit. They also won't accept high quality PRs unless they are hand crafted. How does that benefit creators? Most arguments it's "for creators" likely conflate the idea that AI-coding is inherently slop. If so, then we can say that directly instead of implicitly.

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

#373

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #346
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.

It's a bad tool how? In that it doesn't automatically do everything perfectly from a 0-shot prompt?

We don't have to do anything. We could continue with the status quo and all the problems that entails. Or we could embrace progress and try to use technology to make our lives easier and better.

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

#374

Post by maiybe »

gpm wrote: post #364
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…

> Rust libraries like bevy Notably bevy also bans AI contributions...

A wicked irony I didn't know!

Most likely then a team that builds on top of bevy as infra and not bevy team itself.

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

#375

Post by KronisLV »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #279
KronisLV wrote: post #270

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". 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 communi…

> they don't accept that all working code should be merged.

That’s perfectly within their rights to do!

> Aspiring contributors who'd like to make a different tradeoff are of course free to make a fork.

Too many of those do fragment the development effort and hurt any project.

Here’s hoping that Godot doesn’t struggle too much with people who don’t care about their rules and spam PRs regardless and that the people who want to commit AI code regardless because it works and is good in their eyes at least demonstrate enough initiative to cheat convincingly (maybe actually read the code and make it their own). Godot is a pretty cool project!

Wonder what the middle ground would look like - a project with super high test coverage and tooling, that also requires at least 20 USD in Opus tokens spent on review on the behalf of the author or something, before an actual human being is bothered with it? Heh.

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

#376

Post by Mabusto »

ivorius wrote: post #60
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)

Right. Reviewers still have the advantage of being able to spot AI text because it's often overtly different. I just meant to say that, if you prompt ai "what would a human be proud of having written this code" you'll get an answer. They're not categorically incapable of fabricating an "opinion", they're just trained not to express one by default.

I’m teasing a bit, yes your point is well made, you could just prompt around it. I think the bigger picture is there isn’t going to be some magical panacea that fixes this, we’ll just have to accept some sort of Swiss cheese model, like in the world of aviation safety. This “test” could be just be another layer in the stack.

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

#377

Post by krainboltgreene »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #318
krainboltgreene wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because a human authored contribution, no matter how bad, can be trained to make it good and also improves the community.

> can be trained to make it good and also improves the community. AI can be trained. Also, AI can create code that improves the community. It's replies like this that leave me even more confused.

> AI can be trained.

I don't have access to a data center's worth of GPUs, unfortunately. You offering yours?

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

#378

Post by Mabusto »

jerf wrote: post #263
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)

"(It’s famously not well capable of sounding human)" Rather than a binary, I prefer to measure the question of "how much text does it take to be reasonably sure that it's an AI?" By that metric, it is getting better at a reasonable pace. People are also getting better at prompting their AIs to write in something other than the default LLM style. If you think you're good at picking up that style, you probably are. But…

I think you first need to make an assumption of good faith on the submitter’s part. Yes, someone actively hostile to a repo and trying to sneak in changes will be successful, they can just prompt around the challenge.

I think the bigger picture is there won’t be one catch-all solution and we’ll need to embrace the Swiss cheese model from the world of aviation safety, this is just a suggestion for one layer.

It raises the stakes though. Getting challenged for an AI slop PR isn’t great, but ok, try and redeem yourself. Getting caught trying to cheat that challenge, you might as well just close down your account, like what is the point of even spending tokens to do this? These slop PRs are just people trying to pad their GitHub profiles.

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

#379

Post by 12_throw_away »

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.

Literally some of the first advertised uses for LLMs were both "You can feed it bullet points and it will compose an entire email" and "You can take long emails and condense them into bullet points!" They've been doing this since day 1.

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

#380

Post by ryandrake »

alberto467 wrote: post #106
muvlon wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are no longer in the era of FOSS where contributions are purely motivated by either scratching your own itch, altruism or curiosity. Haven't been for over a decade, since that's how long companies have been checking out applicants' GitHub pages during hiring. These people are farming contributions to major FOSS projects as a form of CV-padding. The same is happening with vulnerability reports. The sloppers may gen…

Exactly. That’s the only real core issue. Wild AI usage is just a consequence. Developers who have a nice job and career, and are making good money, might think of doing open source to “contribute to society” or something like that. But new developers who are seeing those golden opportunities shut in front of their faces, they feel like they have to desperately fight for the last places on the lifeboat, so I don’t bl…

Yes, this was a huge problem even before AI. You had people spamming open source repos with 2 line "documentation cleanup" PRs that just capitalized some word or something. Totally pointless, but someone, somewhere is telling these people that it will help them get a job so they're all spamming. AI just let the spamming happen at scale.

Who the hell is looking at someone's "documentation cleanup" GitHub PRs and using them to boost their job application? I've served as an interviewer at every job I've worked and none of them tell you to even look at the candidate's GitHub, let alone allow its existence or nonexistence to influence your appraisal.

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