Indie Game Engine Developer Expresses Frustration Over Overwhelming AI-Generated Content

Rémi Verschelde, the project manager of Godot Engine and co-founder of its financial supporter, W4 Games, has expressed that the relentless influx of “AI slop” pull requests on Godot’s GitHub is becoming increasingly exhausting and disheartening for the maintainers. Currently, there are over 4,600 open pull requests on the engine’s GitHub page.

Verschelde’s remarks, shared on Bluesky in response to a post by Adriaan de Jongh, the creator of the indie puzzle game Hidden Folks, highlighted the overwhelming number of undisclosed AI-generated pull requests flooding Godot’s GitHub. He noted, “Changes often make no sense, descriptions are extremely verbose, users don’t understand their own changes… It’s a total mess.”

He further elaborated that the situation has escalated to the point where Godot’s maintainers are compelled to “second guess every pull request from new contributors, multiple times per day.” While he emphasized that Godot aims to be welcoming to newcomers, he sees little hope for resolution without additional funding to hire more maintainers. “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.”

A quick look at the closed pull requests on Godot’s GitHub reveals the severity of the issue, with numerous requests denied or flagged as spam in just the past month. Maintainers frequently comment on the presence of AI-generated code. Godot has powered several successful indie games in recent years, such as Brotato and Until Then, and serves as a valuable alternative to proprietary engines like Unity, which are introducing their own generative AI tools.

While Verschelde mentioned that hiring more maintainers could be a straightforward solution, he also suggested that Godot might need to raise “the barrier to entry” for contributors. When asked about the potential for automating the review process, he remarked that it “seems horribly ironic to have to run an AI on our CI to detect AI slop.” Chet Faliszek, a writer known for his work on Valve titles like Left 4 Dead and Portal 2, believes that the responsibility to address this issue lies with GitHub. “It’s really exhausting to watch this unfold while GitHub promotes it instead of combating it.”