The maintainers of Godot Engine are sounding the alarm about an influx of AI-generated pull requests that look legitimate at first glance but require massive amounts of time to properly review and reject.
Rémi Verschelde, a core maintainer of the open-source game engine, publicly addressed the problem after game developer Adriaan de Jongh raised concerns about AI-generated contributions straining open-source projects. Verschelde didn’t mince words about the situation.
“Maintainers spend a lot of time assisting new contributors to help them get PRs in a mergeable state,” Verschelde explained. “I don’t know how long we can keep it up.”
The problem isn’t just bad code. AI-generated pull requests often appear professional and well-formatted with confident descriptions. They compile without errors and touch multiple files in ways that seem thoughtful. But once maintainers dig deeper, these contributions reveal fundamental problems.
They ignore project conventions. They duplicate existing functionality. They create edge-case bugs. They lack proper tests. They require significant rewriting to become usable. In short, they consume reviewer time without providing value.
Even rejecting these pull requests costs the team hours. Someone has to read the code, test it, identify the issues, and explain why it can’t be merged. That’s time not spent actually improving the engine.
The term “AI slop” has emerged to describe these contributions. They’re generated by language models with little human understanding of Godot’s architecture or design philosophy. Some contributors appear to be padding their GitHub profiles with green squares. Others seem to be experimenting with autonomous coding agents. Many just want to help but lack the skills to validate what the AI produces.
Godot isn’t alone. Other major open-source projects including curl have reported similar problems. The barrier to submitting code has dropped dramatically while the barrier to reviewing it properly remains the same.
The only solution costs money
Verschelde proposed a straightforward but expensive fix. “If you want to help, more funding so we can pay more maintainers to deal with the slop is the only viable solution I can think of,” he said.
The math is simple. AI has made it easier to generate code contributions faster than small teams can review them. Without more paid maintainers, something has to give. Either the project locks down contributions with stricter requirements or the existing team burns out trying to keep pace.
Godot is a major free and open-source game engine used for both 2D and 3D development. The project relies on community contributions submitted through GitHub pull requests. That open model has been a strength. Now it’s being stress-tested by automation that makes submitting code trivially easy while making review harder than ever.
