Godot maintainers struggle with 'demoralizing' AI slop PRs

Open source maintainers of the popular Godot game engine are facing an escalating crisis as AI-generated pull requests flood their repositories with low-quality submissions that drain resources and morale. The problem has become so severe that some projects are considering abandoning GitHub entirely, while others implement automated systems to block what developers call "AI slop."

The Scale of the Problem

Rémi Verschelde, a core maintainer of Godot, described the situation as "increasingly draining and demoralizing" for the project's volunteer team. The flood of AI-generated submissions represents a fundamental challenge to how open source projects operate, forcing maintainers to choose between maintaining their welcoming culture and protecting their limited resources.

The quality issues are consistent across multiple projects. Adriaan de Jongh, director of Hidden Folks gaming studio, characterized LLM-generated PRs as "a massive time waster for reviewers" where "changes often make no sense, descriptions are extremely verbose, users don't understand their own changes... it's a total shitshow."

This isn't isolated to Godot. The Blender 3D design project faces identical challenges and has proposed an AI contributions policy following similar moves by major open source organizations including the Linux Foundation, Fedora, Firefox, Ghostty, Servo, and LLVM.

GitHub's Role in the Crisis

Critics point directly at GitHub as the source of the problem. The platform's aggressive promotion of AI coding tools, particularly Copilot, has created what some describe as a perfect storm of incentives for low-quality contributions.

"This platform incentivizes this kind of behavior," one commenter noted, while another expressed frustration at "watching all this play out and GitHub promoting this, not fighting it."

The tension has reached a breaking point for some communities. The Gentoo Linux distribution is actively migrating from GitHub to Codeberg specifically due to "continuous efforts to force Copilot usage for our repositories."

Technical Responses and Workarounds

Some projects have taken matters into their own hands. The Coolify self-hosting toolkit developed an "Anti Slop GitHub Action" that its creator claims "could have closed 98 percent of slop PRs." The developer emphasized they aren't anti-AI, stating "AI is one of the best things to ever be released and when used with experience and properly according to project guidelines it will pass all checks."

GitHub has begun acknowledging the problem at an organizational level. Ashley Wolf, the company's director of open source programs, addressed "what happens when low-quality contributions arrive at scale" while carefully avoiding direct blame of AI tools. She noted that "maintainers have always dealt with noisy inbound" but acknowledged the current scale represents something new.

Platform-Level Solutions

The company is rolling out several features to help maintainers manage the influx. Coming soon is the ability to delete pull requests directly from the GitHub UI. Already available are tools to limit PRs to collaborators, disable them entirely, and enforce temporary interaction limits for specific users.

More sophisticated solutions under consideration include criteria-based gating, such as requiring PRs to be linked to existing issues or meeting other predefined rules. The inevitable suggestion of using AI to triage AI-generated content has also emerged, though this raises questions about the sustainability of such an approach.

The Sustainability Question

For Godot and similar projects, the fundamental issue is resource allocation. Verschelde appealed for "more funding so we can pay more maintainers to deal with the slop," highlighting the economic reality that volunteer maintainers can only absorb so much low-quality noise before the project suffers.

The conflict between open source principles and practical sustainability remains unresolved. Projects want to remain welcoming to new contributors and let "any engine user have the possibility to make an impact," but the current volume of AI slop threatens this core value.

"I don't know how long we can keep it up," Verschelde admitted, capturing the existential threat facing many open source projects as AI-generated contributions continue to flood their repositories.

The situation represents a broader challenge for the open source ecosystem as AI tools become more prevalent. While these tools can enhance productivity for experienced developers, their misuse by inexperienced users creates cascading problems that threaten the sustainability of volunteer-driven projects. The coming months will likely determine whether platforms like GitHub can adapt quickly enough to preserve the collaborative spirit that made open source successful in the first place.