"We require all code to be human authored"
Godot has updated its contribution policy and "take[n] steps" to reduce "demoralizing" AI contributions.
In a frank statement posted on its website, the Godot Foundation talked candidly about the overwhelming number of code contributions coming from new "AI-generated contributions" and revealed plans to require "all code to be human authored."
"A large part of the backlog comes from the fact that the number of qualified reviewers is small, reviewing pull requests (PRs) is demanding, and we can’t keep up with everything coming in," the Godot Foundation admitted in a blog post.
"This problem is compounded by the recent increase in AI-generated contributions, both by AI agents and by humans submitting AI-generated code. The amount of effort required to make a PR has gone down (and number of PRs has increased as a result), while the amount of work to review PRs and the amount of people available to review has stayed the same. This reviewer shortage was already a problem, but it was one that we successfully ignored. We can no longer ignore it."
The statement added: "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."
As a result, the team will now focus on encouraging new contributors to become future maintainers – "LLMs can't learn from specific feedback and thus can't benefit from maintainers providing feedback" – ensuring all contributions are human-made, adding barriers to "low-effort slop," and increasing the incentive to review pull requests.
This means the contribution policy will be updated to reflect new rules that prohibit autonomous AI agent use or vibe coding, AI-generated "substantial" code, no AI-generated text in human-to-human communication, and human approval.
Using AI agents or "vibe coding" already leads to an auto-ban from the GitHub repository "and will continue to do so." "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," the post concluded.
AI continues to be a contentious topic among developers and players alike. Earlier this year, a translator formerly employed by Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 studio Warhorse Studios claimed he had been "fired and replaced with AI," while Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn developer Lucas Pope is reluctant to talk about his current game for fear it'll "get slurped up by AI."