Godot bans AI-authored code, citing reviewer burnout from 'slop' PRs

The Godot game engine is amending its contribution guidelines to prohibit AI-authored code, pull requests filed by AI agents, and AI-generated text in human-to-human communication. The move follows months of internal debate that began in February, when maintainers of the open-source engine—used by games like Slay the Spire 2 and The Case of the Golden Idol—described the growing volume of machine-generated pull requests as draining and demoralizing to review.

The Godot Foundation frames the problem as one of accountability and mentorship rather than raw code quality. Reviewing PRs is already tedious volunteer work, and maintainers lose motivation when their feedback is absorbed by a model instead of helping cultivate a future human contributor. The Foundation’s blunt rationale: AI can’t take responsibility for its output, and heavy AI users often don’t understand their own submissions well enough to fix them when they break.

The updated policy will add friction against low-effort contributions while still requiring that a human stand behind—and be able to repair—any code they submit. AI assistance remains permitted for ‘menial’ tasks but must be disclosed, and machine translation is still allowed when the original text was human-written. The Foundation calls the stance conservative and says it will revisit the rules as AI tooling evolves. The decision reflects a broader tension across open source, where maintainer time is the scarce resource that a flood of automated contributions threatens to exhaust.