Godot To Stop Accepting AI-Generated Code Contributions

"We can't trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it."

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Godot, the open-source game engine, has been doing pretty well lately, picking up sponsors like Battlefield Games, Mike Klubnika, Mega Crit, and JetBrains, and getting clearer about where it's headed. As interest and contributions continue to grow, the project is also paying closer attention to quality and is tightening its contribution guidelines.

The Godot Foundation announced in a recent blog post that it will soon ban the use of AI to generate significant portions of code, vibe coding, AI-agent-submitted pull requests, and AI-generated text in human-to-human communication, as part of its initiative to "add barriers to low-effort slop."

The decision is based on two main goals: encouraging new contributors to grow into future maintainers through learning and skill development, and ensuring all contributions come from humans who can take responsibility for their code and fix it when necessary. Godot notes that LLMs can't learn from specific feedback and that AI can't take responsibility.

"AI contributions have the added pain of being demoralizing. Reviewing PRs is already tedious work, but it is rewarding because reviewers generally feel that their efforts are contributing to educating a new contributor (who may become a future maintainer/reviewer).

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 new guidelines will limit AI use to "menial things" like code completion, regex, and find-and-replace, and require disclosure if AI is used to author code in a pull request. Machine translations are still fine, as long as the original text was written by a human:

"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."

It's already a rule that all PRs must be reviewed and approved by a human before merging, and the use of autonomous AI agents or vibe coding leads to an automatic ban from the GitHub repository.

"Things change every day with respect to the current suite of AI tools available. We will continue taking a conservative approach in our policies towards them, but we will re-evaluate as things evolve."

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