The developers of the popular free game engine Godot have announced strict restrictions on the use of artificial intelligence in code and significantly tightened rules for new contributors. The reason was a huge influx of low-quality automated code merge requests, which led to an overload and burnout of the review team.
The developers of the popular free game engine Godot have announced strict restrictions on the use of artificial intelligence in code and significantly tightened rules for new contributors. The reason was a huge influx of low-quality automated code merge requests, which led to an overload and burnout of the review team.
The project team reported this on the official Godot blog. According to the platform’s maintainers, the problem of a shortage of code reviewers has existed before, but the rapid development of generative AI has turned it into a crisis that can no longer be ignored.
The report notes that reviewing developer proposals is a tedious task that used to be rewarding due to the opportunity to train new specialists. However, the advent of artificial intelligence tools has completely changed this process.
«If your feedback on queries is simply absorbed by a machine and not directed towards mentoring a potential future maintainer, it becomes much harder to justify spending your free time,» the Godot developers share. They add that artificial intelligence is not capable of taking responsibility for what it writes, and the authors of such queries often do not understand the code submitted and cannot fix it.
To solve this problem, the team is implementing several strict rules. From now on, the use of autonomous AI agents and so-called vibecoding is completely prohibited — attempts to create programs without understanding the logic of the process. Violation of this rule will automatically block accounts on GitHub. In addition, the generation of significant code fragments using large language models is prohibited. AI is allowed to be used exclusively as an auxiliary tool for auto-completion or writing regular expressions, but the author is obliged to report such assistance in the description of the work.
The rules also prohibit sending AI-generated text when communicating on the platform. The project’s maintainers want to see meaningful dialogue with people, not machine-generated responses. However, the use of online translators remains permitted.
An additional barrier will be the restriction for newbies, which are developers with fewer than three accepted requests. They will no longer be able to propose new features or large-scale code refactorings without prior approval from the Godot administration. Instead, they are advised to start by fixing minor bugs and writing documentation to better understand the project structure and gain the trust of the community.
The Godot game engine is one of the most popular open source game development tools in the world. Demand for the engine has increased significantly since Unity’s controversial pricing changes a few years ago.
