According to Rémi Verschelde, project manager of Godot Engine and co-founder of the platform’s financial backer W4 Games, the never-ending wave of “AI slop” pull requests on Godot’s GitHub is becoming “increasingly draining and demoralizing” for its maintainers, to the point that over 4,600 pull requests are currently open on the engine’s GitHub page.
As spotted by Game Developer, Verschelde’s comment on Bluesky was made in response to a post by Adriaan de Jongh, the developer and publisher of the 2017 indie puzzle hit Hidden Folks, which stated that Godot’s GitHub has been overrun with countless undisclosed AI-generated pull requests. “Changes often make no sense, descriptions are extremely verbose, users don’t understand their own changes…It’s a total shitshow.”
In reply, Verschelde noted that the problem has become such an issue that Godot’s GitHub maintainers are being forced to “second guess every [pull request] from new contributors, multiple times per day.” Although he stated that Godot prides itself on “being welcoming to new contributors,” Verschelde also doesn’t see a way out of the situation, beyond further donations to help pay more maintainers. “Maintainers spend a lot of time assisting new contributors to help them get PRs in a mergeable state. I don’t know how long we can keep it up.”
A cursory glance at the closed pull requests on Godot’s GitHub page proves that this isn’t an exaggeration, as dozens of pull requests have been denied or reported as spam by Godot’s maintainers within the past month alone, with comments left by maintainers pointing out AI-written code appearing on a daily basis. Godot has been used to ship a bunch of hit indie games over the last few years like Brotato and Until Then and is a valuable alternative to proprietary game engines like Unity, which have been rolling out their own genAI tools.
While Verschelde stated that paying more maintainers would be the simplest option, he also stated that Godot may have to raise “the barrier to entry” for its contributors instead. When quizzed about the possibility of automating the process, he replied that it “seems horribly ironic to have to run an AI on our CI to detect AI slop.” Chet Faliszek, writer for several Valve titles including Left 4 Dead, Portal 2, and Half-Life 2: Episode One, believes that the onus to fix the system should be on GitHub instead. “Really is just exhausting to watch all this playout and github promoting this, not fighting it.”