(Sadly) Do we need a captcha on PR submissions and a confirmation that the submitter understands the code in the PR.
You want to allow for new devs to submit code. And I’m not against AI code at all, but the submitter should understand every change they are proposing. I’m not sure how you stop new devs from contributing without putting up many roadblocks in the way.
It would take less time for a competent developer to write any non-trivial PR themselves than it would for a vibe coder to have an AI generate it then learn it well enough (and test it well enough, assuming they aren't also testing with AI which you probably are) to be able to submit it.
AI code is the reason Godot and every other open source project is going to have to stop public PRs and only allow them from a team of vetted submitters. FOSS is going to have to go proprietary just to survive.
AI Slop PRs: Github accounts trying to increase their clout? Someone genuinely needs that change in the PR? A competitor trying to slow down open source competition?
Maintainers: It's draining and demoralizing. Open source tooling hasn't caught up with coding agents.
Open source future: Quite clear that everyone using the same open source version is ending. In the future, open source projects will have many forks. One fork is maintained by X entity. X can be a person, an AI, a person using AI. Another is maintained by Y entity. Pick the one you trust most or what you need it to do. Then there are projects where the AI uses an open source project but makes substantial modifications on the fly without caring about opening a PR for others.
Longer term thoughts:
- Maybe open source projects in a few years won't be code. They'll just be prompts, which are just ideas and specs.
- PRs will just be modifications to the prompt.