It's a fair policy. Getting those verbose, AI-authored walls of text is very annoying, especially when you're expected to thoroughly review it. It's like a denial-of-service attack on the human mind. I can only imagine how frustrating this can get in open projects that get a lot of contributions.

However, I don't think this will discourage AI-based coding at all. In fact, I see two potential outcomes of these policies:

- Negative: Submitters just add stylistic markers to make their accounts and output seem human-generated. This is like syntactic sugar: the core content and the size of contributions stay the same, but the style gets quirkier.

- Positive: Submitters actually provide to-the-point, no-bullshit commits and comments - "here's the code, here's why I made that change, here are the effects of that change". Even if AI-generated, these small contributions may become much easier to verify & validate. We may even see some standardization in terms of what qualifies as an appropriately sized contribution, what requires more thorough review (e.g., adding unverified dependencies), etc.

I personally wouldn't care if it was AI-generated or not, as long as the content fit the latter category.

> - Negative: Submitters just add stylistic markers to make their accounts and output seem human-generated. This is like syntactic sugar: the core content and the size of contributions stay the same, but the style gets quirkier.

From my experience reviewing, most contributors never read the policies, especially those making a "quick AI PR". I don't expect the new policy to change this much.

> Positive: Submitters actually provide to-the-point, no-bullshit commits and comments

That would be a dream.

> I personally wouldn't care if it was AI-generated or not, as long as the content fit the latter category.

The problem is that a lot of AI contributions are lazily produced without review. Those that have been properly reviewed for correctness (tested to ensure actually working with no obvious undesirable side effects, tweaked where needed to be readable and understandable, fitting the other guidelines of the project, etc) will be indiscernible from human-only contributions, but there are a lot of people who make no such effort so the majority are not nearly this good.

> It's like a denial-of-service attack on the human mind.

I think this may be an example of deliberate hostile design, attempting to force users to adopt LLM based solutions to then summarise the vast output. Pushing back against AI contributions as such in this context makes sense, especially in software with an existing proven track record of great value delivery like Godot.

This was the original rule in linux kernel as well. No more than 200 loc per patch. We should also introduce this to git commits and pull request descriptions:

1. 400 chars/10 lines per commit

1b. Not more than 3 commits in the initial pull request

2. 20 lines of explanation for pull request

3. not more than 3 pull request open at any one time

In my day job, I do a lot of AI coding but almost never have Claude actually create the PR titles or descriptions for me. It produces too much content, and the justification/background sections are often not quite right.

Most PRs to me are not coming out of nowhere anyway, rather they're "here's the linked issue, I started out addressing it by doing X and Y, but then Y got hairy so I switched to Z, hope that makes sense but happy to discuss further as well."

And most feedback is not "let's have you explain the design to me in a diff comment" but rather please explain this design in a code comment so that the next reader of the source will have your context.

If a commit is written by AI but reads as authored by a human, the developer has done their job and nothing will be flagged.

If commits written by AI wouldn't be substantially different, there would be no need to reject them.

So I agree with you that it won't discourage AI-based coding. But that's not even the intent.

> I personally wouldn't care if it was AI-generated or not, as long as the content fit the latter category.

It's pragmatic. Linus once said, the reason C++ is not allowed in the kernel is to keep the C++ people out.

How strict is this no AI policy?

Say AI is used to identify and rewrite a single function that improves performance or fixes a bug, then the developer carefully reviews and tests it and submits a nice tight PR with all human communication.

So they don’t want that? They would just reject it?

If I’m understanding correctly, under the policy the higher performance function / bug free submission would be rejected and they could ask for a rewrite.

Should it then be rewritten from scratch, and clean room engineered so it doesn’t resemble the AI too much?

All these projects should seamlessly run a fork in parallel that accepts AI and has AI for review and approval. Both camps are happy.

Basically a play sandbox for contributors to not get jaded. A honeypot to contain the verbosity vomit, while also serving as positive public relations by keeping young contributor morale from starting in the basement.

Everyone has been that person once early in their life who is told they aren’t welcome and never comes back. Maybe it was SourceForge or IRC, maybe it was Wikipedia.

Yes - if I can tell that you used AI (except maybe because of an unnaturally high work rate, or obviously an AI declaration, which is good!), you fail. Keep up the quality and I don't care too much.

I have some misgivings about AI, but I'm not a fundamentalist - you can't be or the machine will squish you, frankly - but please, don't spam me with text or code that could be much shorter. Relevant quotes:

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead"

"Brevity is the soul of wit"

I recently wrote a tool to help me read AI generated PRs and it’s pretty sad that it’s got to this point.

My agents operate on their own branch for a feature, they commit code changes after each step or phase with a description of what was changed, why, and what’s left.

This helps with PR reviews as it prevents a giant wall of text but it’s still verbose. However doing it this way cuts down on the wall of text at the expense of increased PR frequency.

The whole point of not-accepting AI authored code is because this line is not respected=>"Submitters actually provide to-the-point, no-bullshit commits and comments". You're putting way too much faith into the human minds ability to resist clout-chasing. AI isn't able to humanize code without human supervision.

Better way is to provide a Claude.md with strong stylistic guidelines and loc requirements. Else it will be a chicken and mouse game of what is from AI.

DoS attack is exactly what I describe an AI generated PR!!

> I personally wouldn't care if it was AI-generated or not, as long as the content fit the latter category.

Perhaps reconsider "If your feedback on PRs is just being absorbed by a machine and not going towards mentoring a potential future maintainer..."

> Submitters just add stylistic markers to make their accounts and output seem human-generated

https://xkcd.com/810/

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