While the Godot game engine is an open-source piece of software, that doesn’t mean that the project’s maintainers want to deal with “AI slop code” – this is what unwanted AI-generated code was branded earlier this year when maintainers were vocal about an increasing amount of nonsensical content uploaded to the Godot Engine GitHub. Now, more rules have been put in place.

The non-profit Godot Foundation, which financially supports the project, has laid down some rules to make it harder for “low-effort slop” to be submitted. These rules include “No autonomous AI agent use or vibe coding” and “no use of AI to generate substantial pieces of code”. Human review is already enforced, which is something we’ve seen outlined in Linux’s kernel rules, too.

Godot Engine is taking a “conservative approach” to AI-generated code

As an open-source project, the Godot Foundation says its maintainers have “become overwhelmed by the large number” of Pull Requests (PR) on GitHub, to the point where the number of PRs has “become a meme in the community”. Each PR essentially equates to a code contribution from a developer.

Nonetheless, having so many open PRs means there’s an active community – even if it does mean maintainers have to worry about feature creep (working on too many features at once) and keeping up a high quality of code. Both of these factors have to worry about the onslaught of AI-generated content and the threat it poses to maintaining a coherent piece of software.

Shortly we will also amend our contributing policy to align with the values described above. Our amended policy will include that:

• 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.

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.

Source: Godot Foundation

The Godot Foundation further explains PR rules and guidelines in a contributing policy here. It treats people with three or fewer merged Pull Requests (content that makes the cut) as new contributors. PR Review has become “the largest bottleneck” for the engine as of late, and these measures should help the process become less of a strain on the project.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.