Developers of the indie game engine, Godot, known for having been used to make Slay the Spire 2, are putting a ban on AI going forward. The engine will only allow “human-authored” code because AI-generated pull requests and code have tainted and significantly slowed down the engine’s development.
As spotted by Kotaku, Godot Engine shared changes to its contribution policies on Tuesday, outlining how pull requests (requests to include community-made code in the official branch) have increased rapidly in number due to AI agents and users using the agents constantly submitting them. Pull requests are thus much easier to submit nowadays, meaning that reviewing them with a small team has become quite challenging.
Furthermore, Godot’s creators say that “AI contributions have the added pain of being demoralizing.”
“Reviewing PRs (pull requests) is already tedious work, but it is rewarding because reviewers generally feel that their efforts are contributing to educating a new contributor,” they added. “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.”
Godot is thus putting a ban on AI, with the goal of encouraging new contributors to become maintainers, to teach new contributors, to ensure all code is made by people who can take responsibility for it, cutting off “low-effort slop,” and giving the community more reasons to start reviewing pull requests, thus making the engine better.
These restrictions include a full ban on autonomous AI agents, which will get you permanently kicked off Godot’s GitHub, a restriction on using AI to write “substantial pieces of code” with mandatory disclosures on any amount of AI use, a complete ban of using AI in communication, and a mandatory human review of all pull requests before they’re merged.
With a full-blown game engine now going so hard against AI, I can’t help but wonder if other engine makers will do the same. Corporate publishers probably won’t because of all the “productivity” BS they keep regurgitating, but open-source programmers might actually start following in Godot’s footsteps. Hopefully.
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