Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions

It's a fair policy. Getting those verbose, AI-authored walls of text is very annoying, especially when you're expected to thoroughly review it. It's like a denial-of-service attack on the human mind. I can only imagine how frustrating this can get in open projects that get a lot of contributions. However, I don't think this will discourage AI-based coding at all. In fact, I see two potential outcomes of these policies: - Negative: Submitters just add stylistic markers to make their accounts and output seem human-generated. This is like syntactic sugar: the core content and the size of contributions stay the same, but the style gets quirkier. - Positive: Submitters actually provide to-the-point, no-bullshit commits and comments - "here's the code, here's why I made that change, here are the effects of that change". Even if AI-generated, these small contributions may become much easier to verify & validate. We may even see some standardization in terms of what qualifies as an appropriately sized contribution, what requires more thorough review (e.g., adding unverified dependencies), etc. I personally wouldn't care if it was AI-generated or not, as long as the content fit the latter category.

Interesting that on one hand the valuation of these AI providers is based on the assumption that all code (and everything else producing digital artefacts) will be written using AI in the near future, on the other hand almost all popular open source projects fight to keep AI contributions out. Hard to reconcile. Personally I'm also experiencing a bit of AI hangover after using it a lot in my own open-source projects. I find it's a bit like taking drugs (not that I have much experience with that) in the sense that in the moment I'm using these tools I feel great and powerful, writing features in a span of hours that would've taken me weeks to write by hand. But inevitably some time later I will look at the code and notice all the subtle cracks and inconsistencies the tool introduced, and despair a bit at the mess. I now plan to use these tools less for extensive feature development and more for planning, debugging and narrow refactoring where I can put very strict guardrails on them. I'd still say it accelerates my work but not by a factor of 10, more like 1.5-3 (which is still a lot) given the care you need to ensure what is being built is actually good. For what I really like these tools is that I need less mental focus to do coding, but on the other hand I have this new kind of fatigue of being in a constant chat loop with a machine and trying to get it to do stuff based on natural language, never knowing how it will interpret what I write and wrote before. In that sense, these tools don't feel satisfying, it's like operating a machine where you try to push some buttons to get it to do something but the internal wiring changes all the time so you never know exactly what a given button combination will do and you have to figure it out by watching the machine and constantly adapting.

There are some curated lists of no-AI software. Would be nice to have an index / plot of how that changes in time. https://codeberg.org/brib/slopfree-software-index https://noai.starlightnet.work/list.html

"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 Foundation said. That is to the point!

A point of wild speculation. This is likely to be the slow decline of Godot. As someone with 2 years of Godot experience (which seems like a lot given their lifespan), the underlying infra isn't strong enough to ward off the many competitors that will embrace AI at the heart of the engine. Ironically, the best engine right now for AI-assisted coding is Godot! It has plain text scene files, and Opus does a half decent design - screenshot - iterative flow to get things off the ground before artists clean it up. Being an open source maintainer is HARD work I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. However, the Godot team has very strong opinions that don't really drive especially better software. There is a small history of being confrontational in their github PRs, and a strong opinionated approach. They mostly inherited their current spot in the market from mistakes and commercial pressures of the top two engines (cough Unity per-install fees). The removal of AI-generated contributions is pitched as helping them maintain a better core product, but in reality, (my prediction) it will end up massively hampering velocity over the next 3-5 year horizon. At the same time, it used to be impractical to make your own game engine to make a game. Now, with AI-assisted coding, strong game devs have a viable option, despite the added complexity. Rust libraries like bevy provide the training wheels to a half decent dev + AI assistant that can build more bespoke smaller engines for indies. To gain Godot's level of indie marketshare, a single breakout engine project that embraces vibecoding could be enough. I expect that will gobble up eager /r/aigamedev Redditors and the new swarm of unemployed juniors fresh out of college.