Godot Game Engine No Longer Accepts AI Code
- Reference: 0184274618
- News link: https://games.slashdot.org/story/26/07/02/1839237/godot-game-engine-no-longer-accepts-ai-code
- Source link:
> The Foundation says the pileup of Godot pull requests pending review isn't all bad: It's a sign that interest in using and contribution to Godot is increasing. But 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. "If your feedback on PRs is just being absorbed by a machine and not going towards mentoring a potential future maintainer, it becomes much harder to justify spending your free time on PR review," the Foundation said.
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> As the problem becomes increasingly unsustainable, the Godot Foundation says it's in the process of updating its contribution policies, focusing on "adding barriers to low-effort slop" contributions, encouraging maintainers to review code, developing new contributors into future maintainers, and crucially, requiring that all contributions come from humans who are accountable for their code -- and fixing it if it fails. "AI cannot take responsibility, and we can't trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it," the Foundation said.
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> The Foundation says we can expect Godot's contributing policy to soon include explicit rejections of AI-authored code, noting that contributors should only use AI assistance for "menial things" and must disclose its use. Additionally, the Foundation will reject any AI-generated text in human-to-human communications, saying it's "a basic principle of respect" -- though it says machine translations "are still acceptable" if the original text was human-authored. "Things change every day with respect to the current suite of AI tools available," the Foundation said. "We will continue taking a conservative approach in our policies towards them, but we will re-evaluate as things evolve."
[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/open-source-game-engine-godot-will-no-longer-accept-ai-authored-code-contributions-we-cant-trust-heavy-users-of-ai-to-understand-their-code-enough-to-fix-it/
[2] https://godotengine.org/article/contribution-policy-2026/
The open source world is going to fork bomb (Score:1)
I've already seen forks over technical and political differences and now AI. Meanwhile the AI companies are getting trillions to laugh at you.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you're right, but that it will be a brief storm as people start to figure out they can have AI deal with the AI-generated tickets. And then adapt and adopt.
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Sure, and then AI to fix all of the AI generated bugs. And AI to fix those bugs. And AI to fix those bugs.....
Who's paying for all of these tokens?
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Em... "brief storm"? If the "AI companies" profit both from the generation of slop, and from the defense against slop? I think they own both sides.
Spot on... (Score:4, Interesting)
> reject any AI-generated text in human-to-human communications, saying it's "a basic principle of respect"
I cannot agree more with this sentiment. It feels outright insulting to asked to read LLM output in a context where it is *supposed* to be human feedback. Tell me what you would have told the LLM to say, I can take it from there. I don't need you to LLM it up, because it will bury your point in a bunch of crap.
Could it provide useful info? Maybe, but I can do that myself if so. I want *your* thought on something, however incomplete it might be.
Re: Spot on... (Score:2)
You are quite correct in that copy and pasting LLM responses to humans is disrespectful.
In this particular instance though, the Godot maintainers have been disrespectful to humans attempting to contribute for several years.
In other words - yes, we should decry honest devs getting swamped with AI crap. No, the Godot devs had it coming and do not deserve our pity, despite being OSS.
Re:Spot on... (Score:4, Interesting)
Software development is changing. I started coding in BASIC in the 1980's and have been coding now for over 40 years, over 30 years professionally. I'm good at what I do, but the AI is faster. Claude can churn out code faster than I can, and it's often better, catching some conditions I would have missed. That said, it often messes up, misses the mark, or goes in directions that aren't right for the larger context in which the code exists.
Today, professional software development is best done by AI with skilled human guidance and review.
Rejecting AI generated code in today's environment is trying to turn back time. On the other hand, rejecting a submission where there is no human who can "understand, own, and be able to fix the code they submit" makes perfect sense. There is a big difference between asking an AI to generate a fix and blindly submitting the first thing it spits out, versus having an extended session with an AI, correcting it where it goes wrong, vetting and testing the patch with human review and testing, then submitting the PR.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm finding that Claude 4.6 is having a hard time remembering to use MS Graph cmdlets instead of deprecated ones and often gets the switches wrong. That said, it's been really helpful despite those issues. And when I paste in the error to show what went wrong it corrects itself. Though in doing so it often uses a passive voice that seems to imply I'm the one who thought New-MsolUser would work. It has saved me a lot of time - I just need to be careful with it.
Oh, and here's a fun prompt I like to throw
Re: (Score:3)
Well, what about someone who isn't very good at putting their ideas into reasonably structured writing? Or isn't very good at your native language?
Don't get me wrong, my gut says the same thing you did - don't make me read your AI summary, just tell me direct (bet you didn't know my gut could read). But I work with an Indian guy who uses it in emails to clean up his imperfect English. And I've seen people frustrated because they didn't know how to word something, and an AI cleared it up.
And if we hav
The "already tedious" work of reviewing pull reque (Score:1)
Godot is ...not a good game engine. It is in a very tiny niche of devs who attempt to avoid costs at all ... costs and still get stuff done. Almost no games made with Godot have ever amounted to anything. I am sorry, but it is true. We seriously considered Godot after the Unity runtime debacle a few years back, but we were put off by the Godot attitude, which seems to be... for lack of a better expression... "fuck you". The quip about the "already tedious" work of reviewing pull requests fits perfectly. The
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Not being familiar, I looked through a list of Godot titles. I thought I recognized a couple, never played them though. Then I got to the end and saw DeltaV: Rings of Saturn, which I have enjoyed.
Any chance you want to share what you were working on? You've piqued my curiosity. Or if you worked on any titles I may have played (as if you'd know what I've played...).
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Easy to be a critic, hard to be a open source contributor or reviewer.
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That was my point. We *did* try to contribute. We thought our contributions were reasonable. We were rebuffed. So, yeah, sure, two sides to a story.
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Your statement has no merit, because it misses the point.
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you should fire your development team because they seem to worry more about the politics of the developers than the quality of the software
Rejections (Score:2)
So, create an AI to reject them. You will probably lose some real submissions, but so what.
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Or to flush that idea out a bit more, an AI to sift through them, organize, categorize, summarize, and merge or close when appropriate. AI is a solution to the same problem it creates in this case. In a lot of cases really. Shouldn't be long before someone has an AI to filter AI slop on YouTube.
And if you look at it like that, Godot is basically saying "we don't want to change our processes in the face of technology that has already forced them to change".
While I appreciate stubbornness, sometimes
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"stubborness" is Godot in a nutshell. They might prevail with this in the future at some point. I do hope they will. We do need more options. If they do, we'll see changes. Unless this happens - stay clear.
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Or don't lose any real submissions, drive up project quality, and not waste time / resources trying using technology to solve a people problem?
Low effort to "write" code generates lots of slop (Score:2)
Who could ever have predicted that. The thing is, this does not even need to be low-quality code (although most LLM code is), the low quality prompting will already kill its usefulness totally and make it negative-worth "contributions".
In a more general sense, whenever some tech becomes something the masses can make, contributions to real projects need to establish gate-keeping, reputation and qualification standards, because most people have no understanding of quality or even the basics of real engineerin
Oh my, are we waiting? (Score:3)
Waiting for Godot?
Ohhhh-hhhh-hh-ooo
Re:Oh my, are we waiting? (Score:4, Informative)
[1]Yes: [wikipedia.org]
> The name "Godot" was chosen in reference to Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, as it represents the never-ending wish of adding new features in the engine, which would get it closer to an exhaustive product, even though it never would.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godot_(game_engine)#History
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, but now we're waiting for Godot.
To update their policies and procedures.
I have Zero Mostel's face stuck in my mind now, covering his cheeks and moaning. Ever see the play?