Godot Engine, Tool Behind Slay the Spire 2, Bans AI-Written Code Submissions

The team behind Godot Engine, the free and open-source game engine best known in recent months for powering Slay the Spire 2, has announced it will no longer accept code contributions written by artificial intelligence. According to Destructoid, the project’s maintainers say the decision comes after a flood of AI-generated pull requests began overwhelming their small volunteer review team.

Why Godot is drawing the line on AI code

As Destructoid reports, Godot’s developers noticed a sharp rise in the number of pull requests submitted through automated AI agents, making it far easier for anyone to generate code changes without genuinely understanding them. That surge has made the already time-consuming task of reviewing contributions even harder for the volunteers who maintain the engine.

Beyond the extra workload, the team says the shift has taken an emotional toll on reviewers. Destructoid quotes the Godot maintainers explaining that reviewing pull requests “is already tedious work, but it is rewarding because reviewers generally feel that their efforts are contributing to educating a new contributor.”

They added that when feedback “is just being absorbed by a machine and not going towards mentoring a potential future maintainer, it becomes much harder to justify spending your free time on PR review,” according to the same report.

What the new rules actually ban

Per Destructoid’s breakdown of the policy, Godot is introducing several concrete restrictions. Autonomous AI agents are now completely banned from submitting code, and anyone caught using them risks being permanently removed from the project’s GitHub.

Contributors are also barred from using AI to write “substantial pieces of code,” and any use of AI assistance at all must now be disclosed upfront. The policy further prohibits AI-generated text in community communication and makes human review mandatory for every pull request before it can be merged into the engine.

According to Destructoid, the underlying goal is to keep encouraging new contributors to grow into long-term maintainers, ensure that whoever writes code can actually take responsibility for it, and cut down on what the team calls “low-effort slop” cluttering the project’s queue.

A notable stand from an indie darling’s engine

Godot has become one of the most talked-about tools in independent game development, and its association with a high-profile release like Slay the Spire 2 gives this policy extra visibility. Unlike many commercial engines backed by publishers pushing AI-assisted workflows, Godot is community-driven and relies heavily on volunteer trust, which appears to be central to why its maintainers are drawing such a firm line.

Destructoid notes that it remains to be seen whether other engine makers will follow suit, though corporate-backed platforms may be less inclined to abandon AI tooling given ongoing industry claims about productivity gains. Open-source projects with community-first cultures similar to Godot’s could be the most likely to adopt comparable restrictions going forward.

Read also: Godot Engine Bans Most Generative AI Code Contributions from Developers