The foundation behind the open-source Godot game engine—the backbone for titles like Slay the Spire 2, Buckshot Roulette, and The Case of the Golden Idol—is officially pushing back against the rise of generative AI. Citing a wave of “demoralizing” and “low-effort slop,” management has announced a series of strict new policies for contributors.
For those who aren’t deep into engine development, the core issue comes down to the “pull request” (PR) system. Because Godot is built on the work of volunteers, any changes to the engine must be reviewed by maintainers. Lately, that process has been clogged by AI agents and users submitting massive amounts of code that require significant effort to review but offer little educational value to the community.
New Rules for AI in Godot
The foundation’s updated contribution policy for 2026 is clear: they want human-authored work. The new rules prohibit autonomous AI agents and “vibe coding,” where users ask bots to generate large swathes of code. While you can still use AI for menial tasks like regex or find-and-replace, any use of AI to author code must now be disclosed in the PR discussion.
Furthermore, the foundation is banning 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,” the foundation stated in their blog post. All pull requests must now be reviewed and approved by a human before they can be merged.
Protecting the Community
Beyond the technical headache, the foundation is worried about the social fabric of the project. Godot relies on a mentorship model where experienced maintainers train new volunteers. When reviewers spend their time checking machine-generated code, that cycle of education is broken.
“AI contributions have the added pain of being demoralizing,” the team wrote. “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.”
To further address the backlog, Godot is also implementing a gatekeeping measure: new contributors with three or fewer approved pull requests will be blocked from submitting significant refactoring or new features without explicit permission. The goal is to ensure new contributors take the time to learn the codebase and build trust through bug fixes and documentation first.
This stance puts Godot in a starkly different position than Epic Games. While Epic has leaned into generative AI for the upcoming Unreal Engine 6, allowing for custom model integrations, the Godot Foundation is drawing a firm line to protect the labor of its volunteer maintainers.