Open source game engine Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions: ‘We can’t trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it’

Godot has been suffering from a slop problem. In February, the maintainers of the open source game engine, which powers games like Slay the Spire 2 and The Case of the Golden Idol, said they were deliberating how to address a rising tide of AI slop pull requests, which had become “increasingly draining and demoralizing” for the project’s code reviewers.

Today, after months of discussion, the Godot Foundation and its maintainers are drawing a line in the sand. In a blog post, the Foundation announced that Godot’s guidelines for contributors will soon be amended to forbid AI-authored code, pull requests submitted by AI agents, and AI-generated text in human-to-human communication.

“It is time for us to recognize that these problems aren’t going away and therefore we need to take steps to reduce the burden on maintainers while ensuring we still have a pipeline to mentor new contributors to become future maintainers,” the Godot Foundation said.

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.

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.

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.”