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Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions

pcgamer.com

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

#351

Post by endominus »

marcosdumay wrote: post #323
basch wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do you volunteer to maintain the sloppy fork?

I think most pro-AI people would be happy to let an AI maintain the sloppy fork. What reason would they have to complain, after all?

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

#352

Post by IAmGraydon »

maiybe wrote: post #257
IAmGraydon wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Like who? Unity/Unreal? Those are completely different engines for a different audience. IMO, Godot has a unique market space and no real peers. I think this was a wise decision that only adds to their bra…

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 this argument.

We're talking about banning AI coding in the game engine itself, not game creators banning the use of AI to create actual games on top of the platform.

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

#353

Post by bonoboTP »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #100
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.…

The key problem is that traditionally, OSS contributions were self-selecting. Basically, to create a PR, you had to be invested in the project. To create a contribution of value, you had to understand the codebase, the conventions, engage a little with the project, and generally the folks doing it are doing so because they like the project, or because they are scratching a specific itch they have etc. What AI unlocks…

Exactly. People rediscover that gatekeeping and barriers-to-entry had positive aspects to them.

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

#354

Post by adamddev1 »

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…

"If it runs, it runs," is an very naive and irresponsible view of code.

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

#355

Post by overgard »

maiybe wrote: post #293
overgard wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a professional developer that's using these tools professionally and worked on multiple game engines and even written a few of my own... nope. Sorry, just, that's so much hype not grounded in anything. I'm guessing your job is to promote this stuff based on that being your purpose of going to GDC?

Also, you're really misunderstanding why people use Godot in the first place. They've always been way behind Unreal Engine and Unity on flashy features, that's not their value proposition. A lot of churn on half baked slop features would be counter to why people want to use it. Developers in a stressful industry want tools they can trust, not buggy unstable things that are constantly changing out from under their feet (a lot of teams freeze their engine version per-project for this very reason).

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

#356

Post by danaris »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #243
mexicocitinluez wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So you can run your project that way.

You don't get to dictate that other people run their projects that way.

> A pull request is a social artifact whose value and meaning is dependent on its author

...and the project to which it is submitted.

SpicyLemonZest is not the sole arbiter of what PRs mean and stand for.

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

#357

Post by danaris »

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.…

> 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.

Oh, it's not hard to reconcile at all.

On one side, you have people trying to sell you a product claiming that the product is the most amazing, indispensable thing ever.

On the other, you have the people dealing with the product's actual use evaluating it and finding it wanting.

The only reason this even looks hard to reconcile is because the people trying to sell you the product have been given more money than God (partly by people who think the product will become God).

Ignore the hype. Pay attention to the actual results.

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

#358

Post by overgard »

maiybe wrote: post #257
IAmGraydon wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Like who? Unity/Unreal? Those are completely different engines for a different audience. IMO, Godot has a unique market space and no real peers. I think this was a wise decision that only adds to their bra…

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…

You can use AI assisted coding in Godot though with addons and an MCP server. That's completely separate from AI pr's in the engine itself.

Also, slight tangent but I'm just going to point out that the new MCP server in Unreal Engine 5.8 totally sucks, so it's not like other engines are that far ahead there. The very first task I gave it was to cache a couple of values in a map, and it couldn't do it because it couldn't figure out how to set the key type to FName (basic stuff). But honestly, I'm not surprised, the surface area of Unreal Engine is HUGE and trying to explain it all to a general purpose agent through tool calls is going to hit limits.

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

#359

Post by overgard »

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…

> 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 tastefully.

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

#360

Post by basch »

TomasBM wrote: post #345
basch wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 canon…

Precisely. Cherrypick nuggets from poo. It's there if you care to wade into it. May occasionally strike gold.
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