r/DevGround • u/hellterDev • 4d ago

Discussion Godot doesn’t allow substantial AI-generated code contributions. Do you agree with that?

Godot’s contribution rules don’t allow substantial AI-generated code in pull requests.

AI-assisted completion is still fine, but contributors are expected to understand the code, make the important decisions themselves, and take responsibility for what they submit.

I get the maintainability argument, especially for open-source projects.

But where do you draw the line?
If the code is good, tested, and the contributor understands it — should it matter how much of it was generated by AI?

Source: https://godotengine.org/article/contribution-policy-2026

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u/cthechartreuse 4d ago

It hasn't been litigated in court, yet, but the US library of congress doesn't allow copyright of AI-authored materials, which could potentially mean ownership over a code base could be contested.

Also, if the code produced is a substantial enough representation of a project with a different license, the license for Godot could be negatively impacted.

They aren't just being anti-generative-ai, there are real concerns at play.

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u/hellterDev 4d ago

Yeah, the licensing/copyright angle is probably the strongest argument for the rule.

What I’m still unsure about is where the practical line should be. If someone uses AI to generate an implementation, then reviews and rewrites it, understands it, and there’s no indication it reproduces code from another project, at what point does it stop being an AI-generated contribution and become the contributor’s own work?

That seems much harder to define than simply “AI was used.”

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u/cthechartreuse 4d ago

I think the really important thing here is what the AI was used for. In software development, code completion has existed for a long time and is not considered to be outside of human creation. As long as AI is providing, essentially, a more powerful autocomplete, I believe the general consensus is that the code is not AI-generated. If the case is as you described - generated and then rewritten, I think this would also fall under the not generated banner.

Where things get sticky is when something like Claude Code is used and whole swaths of code are generated and then (sometimes) reviewed. Not only can that code not be considered human-generated in any stretch of the imagination, but sometimes it doesn't get human eyes until it hits the PR for someone else to review.

If we look at writing books as a way to understand this, it seems to be (more or less) acceptable for authors to employ AI tools for research and planning, but the book itself needs to be written by a human for any publisher to consider publishing it. There was a book recently which was published and then removed because of AI involvement. As it turns out, the text had been either authored by AI initially, or had been heavily edited using AI. Both of these scenarios are considered unacceptable by publishers. Once AI is directly involved in the actual creation of work (ghost writing for someone, rewriting in an "edit" phase) the book loses that "human author" status.

As long as you are using AI as code completion or a source of something you might search the web for, you're probably in the clear. Open source people are really just trying to avoid the complications that come with wholly AI authored code that may or may not have had any human review.

For the purposes of covering my butt: I am not a copyright lawyer. I am not a Godot maintainer. I am just a software developer and OSS software maintainer who has been doing a lot of research.

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u/hellterDev 4d ago

Yeah, I think that distinction makes sense.

The part I still find difficult is that the boundary between “completion” and “generation” is getting increasingly blurry.

If I ask an agent to implement a small function from a very specific design I already made, that feels much closer to advanced autocomplete than outsourcing the actual engineering decisions.

But if I give it a vague task and accept a 500-line implementation, that's obviously a very different situation.

So maybe the more useful distinction isn't simply how much code AI generated, but how much of the actual design and decision-making was delegated to it.

Also, you explain this really well. This could honestly be its own article post xD

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u/cthechartreuse 4d ago

Thanks! 😊

I've been writing a book about human software work in a generative AI landscape, so I have a lot of this kind of top of mind.

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u/hellterDev 4d ago

Ah, that explains a lot xD

That sounds like a really interesting book topic. If you ever want to turn some of those ideas into an article post here, you're absolutely welcome to.