Godot bans AI-authored code contributions: 'We can't trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it'

The Godot Foundation is updating its contributor guidelines to explicitly ban AI-authored code, AI-submitted pull requests, and AI-generated text in human-to-human communication. The open source game engine — which powers titles like Slay the Spire 2 and The Case of the Golden Idol — has been dealing with a flood of low-quality AI-generated contributions that have worn down its volunteer maintainers.

The Foundation's blog post is direct about why: reviewing pull requests is already tedious work, and when that feedback goes to a machine rather than a human learning the codebase, there's no mentorship payoff. "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 wrote. The core accountability argument is equally blunt — "AI cannot take responsibility, and we can't trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it." The updated policy will require all contributions to come from humans who can be held responsible for their code and who can fix it when it breaks.

The ban isn't total on every AI touchpoint. Contributors can still use AI for "menial things" but must disclose it, and machine translations remain acceptable as long as the original text was written by a human. What's off the table is AI-generated text in direct human-to-human communication, which the Foundation calls "a basic principle of respect." The Foundation first flagged the AI slop problem publicly in February, describing the rising tide of low-effort pull requests as "increasingly draining and demoralizing" for reviewers — so this policy shift has been months in the making.

Godot is one of the most prominent open source game engines available, and its contributor community is largely volunteer-driven, which makes maintainer burnout a genuine existential risk for the project. The Foundation acknowledged that the overall volume of pull requests is actually a positive sign of growing interest in Godot — the problem is specifically the AI-generated portion draining reviewer energy. The policy will continue to evolve: "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."