Godot veteran Rémi Verschelde has expressed dismay at the number of “AI slop” pull requests (PRs) being generated for the free, open-source engine by large language models (LLMs).
Discussing the situation on Bluesky, Verschelde—who has spent almost a decade working on the engine and co-founded major Godot backer W4 Games—said identifying and sorting AI-generated pull requests is becoming “draining and demoralizing’ for Godot maintainers, who are being stretched to their limits.
“If you want to help, more funding so we can pay more maintainers to deal with the slop (on top of everything we do already) is the only viable solution I can think of,” wrote Verschelde in response to a post from Hidden Folks director Adriaan de Jongh, who raised the issue.
Verschelde explained Godot maintainers are now having to second guess every pull request from new contributors to determine whether code has been written (at least partially) by a human, and whether the author actually understands the code they’re submitting.
He added that it’s also becoming increasingly difficult to understand whether mistakes are the result of human error—perhaps due to inexperience—or AI usage.
“Godot prides itself in being welcoming to new contributors, letting any engine user have the possibility to make an impact on their engine of choice,” continued Verschelde. “Maintainers spend a lot of time assisting new contributors to help them get PRs in a mergeable state. I don’t know how long we can keep it up.”
When asked by one Bluesky user whether it’s possible to automate some AI detection, Verschelde said it would be “horribly ironic” to have to run an AI tool to detect AI slop. “We might have to do this eventually if some good solutions emerge, but I’m really not keen on feeding the AI machinery,” he added.
There are currently 4,681 open pull requests for Godot on GitHub at the time of writing.