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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

#241

Post by maiybe »

Silamoth wrote: post #234
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…

Funny enough, I see it the exact opposite. LLM slop code degrades software quality. While one person may appear to move quickly, the software quality suffers dramatically. It takes them (or other team members) more time to fix the issues than it would have to just do it right the first time. I mean, even with the advent of “AI” agents, is software today any better than it was 3 years ago? I think teams embracing too…

I don't know about large teams or companies. I feel more confident with the conjecture: Conditioned on small teams, a team of seniors with AI coding beats a team of junior with AI coding by a wide margin, in my experience.

When accounting for "coding taste," I think there is equal or higher quality output over small teams, and if there is a decrease in software quality, it's nowhere near the implied amount (5-10% at most) with a massive gain in speed (approx 3x? 4x? hard to measure). Those numbers net out positive in the end, especially as the team starts to understand and ship with AI in the loop.

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

#243

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #217
dspillett wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally wouldn't care if it was AI-generated or not, as long as the content fit the latter category. The problem is that a lot of AI contributions are lazily produced without review. Those that have been properly reviewed for correctness (tested to ensure actually working with no obvious undesirable side effects, tweaked where needed to be readable and understandable, fitting the other guidelines of the projec…

> The problem is that a lot of AI contributions are lazily produced without review. That sounds like a contributor problem. Not an AI problem. I still don't understand a "no AI" policy whose only purpose is to weed out bad PRs. You should be weeding out bad PR's regardless of their source. I don't see why treating a purely human-authored, but bad, piece of code should be treated any differently than an AI-authored on…

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 yourself would have.

You're not the first person I've seen argue that authorship doesn't matter, so I don't want to blame you for it, but I really don't understand where that idea is coming from. To me it seems obviously wrong.

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

#244

Post by nemomarx »

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…

but their stated reasoning is that they do open PRs to train up new contributors and eventually get them into the community where they'll be more trusted. That doesn't suggest a hardline stance against the tools to me necessarily at least.

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

#245

Post by throwfaraway135 »

optionalsquid wrote: post #238
fzeroracer wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drama is in a nutshell someone made a really stupid post claiming only the woke use game engines. Godot community manager said guess that makes us woke (paraphrased), conservatives went batshit, got blocked on Twitter or elsewhere for going insane and a few innocent tweets got caught in the crossfire. Someone went off and made a fork of Godot as a 'non-political version' which went in the only obvious direction i…

The fork also had its own drama, resulting in one of the more active developers of the fork, plus the guy who helped kick off the original drama, splitting off to create yet another fork. Both forks are still active, I believe. It was all very silly

Most of it was silly, but being banned on github for a reasonable objection is still very tyrannical.

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

#246

Post by overgard »

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.…

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 almost sounds like a compulsion.

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

#247

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

kjeksfjes wrote: post #134
0xMalotru wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a "why" a the end of the list https://codeberg.org/brib/slopfree-software-index#why-care-a...

> 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…

The people under GNSS jamming in war zones might disagree with you about the value of being able to read a map.

(And I'm unfortunately no longer as certain that "Well, that sort of thing can't happen where _I_ live." as I would have been a decade ago.)

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

#248

Post by maiybe »

ryan_n wrote: post #196
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.

That's basically the same argument Unity made a few years ago.

There isn't, until there is. These things take time. The tech has to be adopted, the people have to integrate into game jams, indies percolate. Godot is young, my predictions are 3-5 years.

Regarding competition though, the question is about the unique selling points of Godot that would be hard to replicate. Before AI coding, there is a _lot of momentum_ for leaders in the game engine world. Everyone specializes and it takes many years of game cycles to make the switch to a new engine. Not anymore!

So we have yet to see a dog-eat-dog game engine world, and in that world, ejecting AI-coding could in fact be a net negative. That's what I am arguing at least.

Regarding the unique selling points of the engine: 1. Open-source 2. Node/Scene encapsulation design: Big! - Easily my favorite part of GDScript. Easy to replicate. 3. Scripting languages: GDScript, buggy C# - AI-coding doesn't care what language as long as it's popular

My suspicion: A competitor could use a known compiled language (Rust) and a scripting language (luau) and get the same mileage as Godot and replace every one of their selling points with more performant code. Because they waited so long to deploy a marketplace, they have very little sticky bits to their market share.

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

#249

Post by ianm218 »

terminalbraid wrote: post #231
ianm218 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a false dichotomy. We’re getting lots of new productive output in some areas and in other areas it is too much slop.

Your argument might carry some weight if you added any kind of argument past "lots of new productive output" and then silence.

I feel like the topic has been discussed ad nausiem but:

* Software security - I.e. Mozilla blog post on using Mythos for software security [1]

* Algorithms - AlphaEvolve makes real progress on matrix multiplication [2]

* Open source - Backlog crushing in openvpn [3]

* Corporate - CloudFlare Oauth workers [4]

People are clearly using AI to ship real work that people end up using directly or indirectly. Projects like Godot are also in a weird spot though.

[1]. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/privacy-security/ai-security-zer...

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13131

[3] https://stanislas.blog/2025/12/claude-code-opus-open-source-...

[4] https://github.com/cloudflare/workers-oauth-provider

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

#250

Post by shimonamit »

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…

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