Indie Game Engine Godot Bans AI After Massive Coding Mess

Back in February, the open-source indie game engine Godot, used to make hits like Slay the Spire 2, was in the midst of a pretty messy problem: its GitHub, which allows developers to contribute to the engine itself, was drowning in AI-generated pull requests. Contributors complained of a “shitshow” where nothing made sense, and game developers using the engine noticed a massive bottleneck where pull requests took significantly longer to gain approval. Currently, Godot’s GitHub has over 5,000 unresolved pull requests. It even caused Godot’s project manager, Rémi Verschelde, to speak out about the ongoing mess. 

“Honestly, AI slop PRs are becoming increasingly draining and demoralizing for #Godot maintainers,” Verschelde wrote on Bluesky in February.

On Tuesday, Godot revealed changes to its contribution policy that require “all code to be human-authored” in an attempt to curb the onslaught of AI-generated junk. The policy also enforces the engine’s preexisting ban on vibe coding. However, using AI for “menial” tasks like finding and replacing phrases, or autocompleting code, is still allowed as long as its accompanied by a proper disclosure.

“AI contributions have the added pain of being demoralizing,” the update reads. “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.”

The policy also requires that communication in messages, like descriptions of GitHub issues or pull requests, must be written by humans.

“When our maintainers volunteer their time to review your issue, PR, or proposal, they do not want to talk to a machine,” the policy reads. “This is a basic principle of respect.” Nice!

Godot’s contribution policy was already fairly anti-AI, mentioning that the team is “convinced that human effort results in better and more relevant contributions.” But this new, more explicit policy might help curb the bottleneck caused by contributors who ignored the team’s preference. Godot users seem pretty happy with the change, too.

“Thank god, hope this helps out in the long run,” one Reddit user wrote.

Godot is a fantastic little engine (I’ve worked with it myself!) that grew increasingly appealing after titans like Unity and Unreal began incorporating generative AI tools and introducing wacky policies that alienated developers. I know I’ll be using it again whenever I get around to my next game dev project.