Godot maintainers struggle with 'draining and demoralizing' AI slop submissions
(2026/02/18)
- Reference: 1771420245
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/02/18/godot_maintainers_struggle_with_draining/
- Source link:
Rémi Verschelde, a maintainer of the open source Godot game engine, is the latest to complain about the impact of "AI slop PRs [pull requests]", which he [1]says "are becoming increasingly draining and demoralizing for Godot maintainers."
His post was prompted by a comment from Adriaan de Jongh, game designer and director of small gaming company Hidden Folks, who [2]said that LLM-generated PRs for Godot are a "massive time waster for reviewers ... changes often make no sense, descriptions are extremely verbose, users don't understand their own changes ... it's a total shitshow."
A comment noted that the Blender 3D design project is facing the same issue and has recently proposed an [3]AI contributions policy , following others including the Linux Foundation, Fedora, Firefox, Ghostty, Servo and LLVM.
[4]
Verschelde appealed for "more funding so we can pay more maintainers to deal with the slop," and also spoke of the conflict between being welcoming to new contributors to let "any engine user have the possibility to make an impact" while also dealing with the onslaught of useless PRs.
[5]
[6]
"I don't know how long we can keep it up," he said.
GitHub itself is to blame, according to some comments, since the company is a big AI advocate. "This platform incentivizes this kind of behavior," [7]said one; and another [8]that it "is just exhausting to watch all this play out and GitHub promoting this, not fighting it."
[9]
Linux distro Gentoo is [10]in the process of migrating from GitHub to Codeberg thanks to "continuous efforts to force Copilot usage for our repositories."
One project, the self-hosting toolkit Coolify, has created an [11]Anti Slop GitHub Action , which its developer claims "could have closed 98 percent of slop PRs." The developer is not opposed to AI itself, and stated that "AI is one of the best things to ever be released and when used with experience and properly according to project guidelines it will pass all checks."
GitHub director of open source programs Ashley Wolf [12]acknowledged the problem of "what happens when low-quality contributions arrive at scale" last week, though choosing her words carefully so as not to blame AI itself. According to Wolf, "maintainers have always dealt with noisy inbound." Nevertheless, GitHub is introducing features to make AI slop easier to deal with, including PR deletion from the GitHub UI (user interface) which she said is coming soon.
[13]Gentoo dumps GitHub over Copilot nagware
[14]AI agent seemingly tries to shame open source developer for rejected pull request
[15]Rise of AI means companies could pass on SaaS
[16]GitHub ponders kill switch for pull requests to stop AI slop
Wolf also mentioned relevant features that have already shipped, including the ability to limit PRs to collaborators or disable them entirely. And maintainers can enforce temporary interaction limits for specific users.
Further refinements are under consideration. Wolf mentioned criteria-based gating, such as requiring that a PR be linked to an existing issue, or defining other rules that contributions must meet. There is also the inevitable suggestion that AI can be used to fix the problem it created, via automated triage.
[17]
Wolf's post follows the creation of an official GitHub discussion on the subject earlier this month, as we [18]reported . A GitHub product manager contacted us to state that "we don't think counting AI-generated PRs is the right metric," showing again the tension between the company's strong promotion of AI and the evidence of the damage it is doing to open source. ®
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[1] https://bsky.app/profile/akien.bsky.social/post/3meyerixvhs2p
[2] https://bsky.app/profile/adriaan.games/post/3mexoxyaui22x
[3] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/ai-contributions-policy/44202
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[10] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/17/gentoo_dumps_github_for_codeberg_over_copilot_nagware/
[11] https://github.com/peakoss/anti-slop
[12] https://github.blog/open-source/maintainers/welcome-to-the-eternal-september-of-open-source-heres-what-we-plan-to-do-for-maintainers/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/17/gentoo_dumps_github_for_codeberg_over_copilot_nagware/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/12/ai_bot_developer_rejected_pull_request/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/04/ai_replace_saas/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/03/github_kill_switch_pull_requests_ai/
[17] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aZXwMtrGNh2rd-GIfOdBeQAAAhI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/03/github_kill_switch_pull_requests_ai/
[19] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
His post was prompted by a comment from Adriaan de Jongh, game designer and director of small gaming company Hidden Folks, who [2]said that LLM-generated PRs for Godot are a "massive time waster for reviewers ... changes often make no sense, descriptions are extremely verbose, users don't understand their own changes ... it's a total shitshow."
A comment noted that the Blender 3D design project is facing the same issue and has recently proposed an [3]AI contributions policy , following others including the Linux Foundation, Fedora, Firefox, Ghostty, Servo and LLVM.
[4]
Verschelde appealed for "more funding so we can pay more maintainers to deal with the slop," and also spoke of the conflict between being welcoming to new contributors to let "any engine user have the possibility to make an impact" while also dealing with the onslaught of useless PRs.
[5]
[6]
"I don't know how long we can keep it up," he said.
GitHub itself is to blame, according to some comments, since the company is a big AI advocate. "This platform incentivizes this kind of behavior," [7]said one; and another [8]that it "is just exhausting to watch all this play out and GitHub promoting this, not fighting it."
[9]
Linux distro Gentoo is [10]in the process of migrating from GitHub to Codeberg thanks to "continuous efforts to force Copilot usage for our repositories."
One project, the self-hosting toolkit Coolify, has created an [11]Anti Slop GitHub Action , which its developer claims "could have closed 98 percent of slop PRs." The developer is not opposed to AI itself, and stated that "AI is one of the best things to ever be released and when used with experience and properly according to project guidelines it will pass all checks."
GitHub director of open source programs Ashley Wolf [12]acknowledged the problem of "what happens when low-quality contributions arrive at scale" last week, though choosing her words carefully so as not to blame AI itself. According to Wolf, "maintainers have always dealt with noisy inbound." Nevertheless, GitHub is introducing features to make AI slop easier to deal with, including PR deletion from the GitHub UI (user interface) which she said is coming soon.
[13]Gentoo dumps GitHub over Copilot nagware
[14]AI agent seemingly tries to shame open source developer for rejected pull request
[15]Rise of AI means companies could pass on SaaS
[16]GitHub ponders kill switch for pull requests to stop AI slop
Wolf also mentioned relevant features that have already shipped, including the ability to limit PRs to collaborators or disable them entirely. And maintainers can enforce temporary interaction limits for specific users.
Further refinements are under consideration. Wolf mentioned criteria-based gating, such as requiring that a PR be linked to an existing issue, or defining other rules that contributions must meet. There is also the inevitable suggestion that AI can be used to fix the problem it created, via automated triage.
[17]
Wolf's post follows the creation of an official GitHub discussion on the subject earlier this month, as we [18]reported . A GitHub product manager contacted us to state that "we don't think counting AI-generated PRs is the right metric," showing again the tension between the company's strong promotion of AI and the evidence of the damage it is doing to open source. ®
Get our [19]Tech Resources
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/akien.bsky.social/post/3meyerixvhs2p
[2] https://bsky.app/profile/adriaan.games/post/3mexoxyaui22x
[3] https://devtalk.blender.org/t/ai-contributions-policy/44202
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aZXwMtrGNh2rd-GIfOdBeQAAAhI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[10] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/17/gentoo_dumps_github_for_codeberg_over_copilot_nagware/
[11] https://github.com/peakoss/anti-slop
[12] https://github.blog/open-source/maintainers/welcome-to-the-eternal-september-of-open-source-heres-what-we-plan-to-do-for-maintainers/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/17/gentoo_dumps_github_for_codeberg_over_copilot_nagware/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/12/ai_bot_developer_rejected_pull_request/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/04/ai_replace_saas/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/03/github_kill_switch_pull_requests_ai/
[17] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aZXwMtrGNh2rd-GIfOdBeQAAAhI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/03/github_kill_switch_pull_requests_ai/
[19] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Mythical Ham-Lunch
Demoralizing and pointless - so in other words hosting on Github is just like having a manager now?
Dizzy Dwarf
Like having a manager who doesn't know what he's talking about. But with confidence.
Mythical Ham-Lunch
... is there... another kind?
QET
Once a company reaches a certain size, that's the ONLY kind of manager employed there.
Any company above low~ish two-digit total employee count, and the risk percentage of the managers being only kind rises exponentially.
Doctor Syntax
Set a word limit below the expected number of words in a slop submission. Require a fee to be paid with longer submissions to be refunded if the reviewer determines that it was a valid submission and use the retained fees for a bounty scheme. At the very least any submitter who starts with AI will have to do some work to get it below the limit or they lose money. Sadly, it will probably raise very little for bounties but should bring back sanity.
Blackjack
These people need a list of GitHub alternatives and a migration guide.
Uh, wonder how many people would buy a ebook that helped with that vs just pirating it?
Separating the wheat from the chaff
--- GitHub director of open source programs Ashley Wolf acknowledged the problem of "what happens when low-quality contributions arrive at scale" last week, though choosing her words carefully so as not to blame AI itself. According to Wolf, "maintainers have always dealt with noisy inbound."
I believe this is a tactful way of putting it. Instead of throwing insults around, or tantrums, she gets to the heart of the matter. The true problem is the low signal-to-noise ratio. Generative AIs generate a lot of words, very few of which are actually useful. It takes effort to extract the value and being the lazy species that we are, that gets skipped 99% of the time. The correct response is to penalise time wasting PRs. If the platform doesn't allow it then move to a different platform.