The rise of LLMs have made it easier than ever for non-technical people to generate or change source code. While this sounds wonderful it also generates a huge problem for open source projects – a flood of pull requests. For large open source projects like Godot, the managing of these pull requests (PR) is often already one of the biggest bottlenecks to improvement. Simply put it is time consuming for a human to review all of the changes that are submitted and verify they are both needed, technically correct and meet existing code standards. Now with a massive influx of new pull requests generated by AI, often low effort AI slop, the system is breaking down.
We talked about the effect of AI slop on Godot and other engines back in February and apparently it’s gotten worse since. To the point where the Godot Foundation have announced fairly dramatic changes:
- No autonomous AI agent use or vibe coding
- This already leads to an auto-ban from our GitHub repository and will continue to do so.
- No use of AI to generate substantial pieces of code
- We require all code to be human authored. AI assistance should be limited to menial things (like code completion, regex, or find and replace).
- If you do use AI in some capacity to author code, you must disclose it in the PR discussion.
- No AI-generated text in human-to-human communication
- When our maintainers volunteer their time to review your issue, PR, or proposal, they do not want to talk to a machine. This is a basic principle of respect.
- Machine translations are still acceptable as long as the original content was written by a human.
- All PRs must be reviewed and approved by a human before merging
- This is the case already, but we will make it more explicit in our policy.
While Godot do a good job of explaining why these changes were necessary, another open source project that banned AI contributions earlier – Zig, did an excellent breakdown of how AI PRs were hurting them to the point they rejected them completely. I highly recommend reading the article linked below for further insight into the problems the rise of LLMs have generated for open source projects.
Key Links
Godot – Changes to our Contribution Policies
Contributor Poker and Zig’s AI Ban
You can learn more about the Godot Engine contribution policy changes banning AI and why they had to do it in the video below.