Godot Cuts Ties with AI and Bans Automatic Contributions
The team behind the open-source game engine Godot has decided to put an end to contributions generated by artificial intelligence. They announced that they are reformulating their contribution policies to virtually ban the use of AI. The reason? A flood of pull requests that, according to them, seem to have been generated by machines and not by humans. And the problem doesn't stop there. They believe that many heavy AI users cannot respond meaningfully to review feedback. "AI cannot take responsibility, and we cannot trust that intensive AI users understand the code well enough to fix it," the maintainers said in their announcement.
Automatic contributions are seen as demotivating by the Godot team, echoing comments made earlier by Rémi Verschelde, one of the maintainers. He had previously mentioned that these contributions were an increasingly exhausting waste of time. A game studio that uses Godot even stated that AI contributions are mostly "total junk," coming from users who do not understand what they are proposing. In light of this situation, the Godot team acknowledged that the problem will not go away on its own and decided to take action.
New Rules to Maintain Quality
To start, new contributors, defined as those with three or fewer accepted pull requests, will need explicit permission from the maintainers to submit new features or significant refactorings in the Godot code. This aims to exclude "vibe coders" and AI agents, promoting a group of contributors who truly understand the Godot code and are willing to communicate with the team to learn more. Additionally, discussions about contributions must remain strictly between humans. No AI agents or bots clogging communication channels, unless they are being used for translation between languages.
Any contribution made by autonomous agents or "vibe coded junk" will result in an automatic ban from the Godot repository on GitHub. The team is also extending this ban to include the use of AI in generating any substantial part of the code. "AI assistance should be limited to trivial things, like completing code, regex, or search and replace," they explained. If you use AI in any way to create code, you must disclose this in the pull request discussion.
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