Godot: Changes to our contribution policies [with regard to AI]

From the post:

Over the last several years we have become overwhelmed by the large number of code contributions (pull requests), especially those from new contributors. The number of open PRs has become a meme in the community. In part, the number of open PRs is a healthy sign that:

• People are interested in contributing to Godot and are willing to put in time to contribute,
• We are being cautious about feature creep,
• We are dedicated to high code quality.

But ultimately, a large part of the backlog comes from the fact that the number of qualified reviewers is small, reviewing PRs is demanding, and we can’t keep up with everything coming in.

[...]

Accordingly, we are in the process of updating our contribution policies, including adding a stricter policy on AI contributions. The Foundation board and maintainers have been discussing a new policy for several months. Our focus will be on:

• Encouraging new contributors to become future maintainers, that involves teaching and growing the understanding of new contributors.
  • LLMs can’t learn from specific feedback and thus can’t benefit from maintainers providing feedback.
• Ensuring all contributions are made by humans who can take responsibility for their code and be able and willing to fix it when needed.
  • AI cannot take responsibility, and we can’t trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it.
• Adding barriers to low-effort slop.
  • Unfortunately, this means we need to add barriers to contribution, but want to do it in a way that does not cut off our maintainer pipeline.
• Increasing the incentive to review PRs.
  • PR review is the largest bottleneck in the engine right now. We need to ensure that people who choose to review PRs feel their time is well spent.

[...]

Shortly we will also amend our contributing policy to align with the values described above. Our amended policy will include that:

• No autonomous AI agent use or vibe coding
  • This already leads to an auto-ban from our GitHub repository and will continue to do so.
• No use of AI to generate substantial pieces of code

  • We require all code to be human authored. AI assistance should be limited to menial things (like code completion, regex, or find and replace).

  • If you do use AI in some capacity to author code, you must disclose it in the PR discussion.

• No AI-generated text in human-to-human communication

  • When our maintainers volunteer their time to review your issue, PR, or proposal, they do not want to talk to a machine. This is a basic principle of respect.

  • Machine translations are still acceptable as long as the original content was written by a human.

• All PRs must be reviewed and approved by a human before merging
  • This is the case already, but we will make it more explicit in our policy.