Godot maintainers overwhelmed by AI-generated pull requests
Rémi Verschelde, Godot co-founder and one of the engine's core maintainers, has publicly described the surge of AI-generated pull requests hitting the project as "draining and demoralizing."
The problem
Maintainers now have to second-guess nearly every pull request from new contributors. The AI-generated submissions often look plausible at first glance but contain fundamental errors, broken logic, or code that doesn't make sense in context. The time spent identifying and rejecting these PRs takes away from reviewing legitimate contributions.
Godot currently has 4,681 open pull requests on GitHub. Distinguishing honest human mistakes from AI-generated nonsense has become, in Verschelde's words, extremely difficult.
"A recent rise in AI slop code submissions is draining and demoralizing."
— Rémi Verschelde, Godot co-founder
Why it's happening
Godot's popularity surged after Unity's 2023 Runtime Fee controversy drove developers to explore alternatives. More users means more potential contributors, and a growing number of those contributors are using AI tools to generate code submissions without understanding what the code does.
Godot has contribution guidelines that require disclosure of AI assistance, but these are frequently ignored. The submissions aren't typically malicious. They come from people who genuinely want to contribute but are leaning on AI tools that produce confidently wrong code.
What Verschelde proposed
His primary recommendation was more funding to hire additional maintainers who can handle the review volume. He acknowledged that using AI to detect AI-generated PRs would be "horribly ironic" and expressed reluctance to automate the process.
Other possibilities floated include moving off GitHub or implementing community trust-rating systems, though both options risk raising barriers for genuine new contributors, which runs counter to the open-source ethos.
The broader pattern
This isn't only happening to Godot. Open-source projects across the software ecosystem are reporting similar patterns. AI tools make it trivially easy to generate a pull request. They don't make it easy to generate a useful one. The cost of submitting has dropped to near zero while the cost of reviewing remains high.