Listen, I’ve got a lot of things to be angry about in this garbage fire of a career, but this particular piece of news has me absolutely feral. Rémi Verschelde — one of the primary maintainers of the Godot game engine, a motherfucking co-founder of a company that backs this project — just went on Bluesky and said, and I quote with my whole chest: “I don’t know how long we can keep it up.”
That’s not a complaint. That’s a death rattle. That’s a maintainer standing at the edge of the cliff, looking down, and going “yeah, probably gonna jump, thanks for asking.” And what for? What is destroying this man’s will to live? What is draining the life force from one of the most important open source projects in gaming?
Your fucking AI slop PRs. Yours. The ones you generated with your little ChatGPT cursor copilot vibe coding session because you saw a YouTube video telling you that you don’t need to learn to code anymore, you just need to “prompt.” That’s what. That’s what’s killing open source.
The Magnitude Of This Shitshow
Let me paint you a picture, since apparently you need it spelled out. Godot is one of the biggest open source game engines on the planet. Free. Open. Used by indie devs worldwide. It’s the little engine that could, the scrappy underdog that Unity and Unreal don’t even acknowledge because they’d rather pretend it doesn’t exist.
And now that engine’s maintainers are spending their time doing what, exactly? Reviewing LLM-generated garbage that “makes no sense.” Reading verbose PR descriptions written by AI that reads like a first-year CS student who discovered a thesaurus. Asking contributors if they actually understand the code they just submitted, only to get defensive responses like “I used AI to write the description because I’m bad at English” — as if that’s somehow a defense rather than the entire goddamn problem.
Rémi says they now have to “second guess every PR from new contributors, multiple times per day.” Not because the old ones were better. Not because of legitimate technical complexity. But because there’s a nonzero chance the PR was generated by an LLM that doesn’t understand the Godot codebase, doesn’t understand the problem it’s trying to solve, and was submitted by someone who thinks pressing “Generate” is equivalent to contributing to human civilization.
The Absolute State Of AI “Contributors”
And here’s where it gets beautiful. Here’s where the comedy writes itself, if you’re the kind of person who finds systemic destruction of open source maintainers’ mental health amusing (which, let’s be honest, I am, because otherwise I’d be crying in a corner).
The PRs aren’t just bad. They’re convincingly bad. They look professional. The descriptions are verbose. They cite edge cases. They use the right terminology. It’s like watching a polished turd glide through the review process — you can’t just reject it on sight because it looks legitimate, which means a human now has to actually dig into it and figure out whether it’s garbage or not.
And then — AND THEN — when you try to call it out, the “author” doesn’t even understand their own changes. Adriaan de Jongh (game designer, director at Hidden Folks) put it perfectly: “changes often make no sense, descriptions are extremely verbose, users don’t understand their own changes … it’s a total fucking shit show.” That’s not me being dramatic. That’s an industry veteran watching the corpse of good-faith open source contribution rot in real-time.
The Funding Problem No One Wants To Talk About
Here’s the really nasty part of this equation that nobody at your startup wants to acknowledge: these maintainers are working for FREE. Or at best, they’re working on donations and the occasional corporate sponsorship. Godot has a funding page. They fund.godotengine.org. That’s where their resources come from. A handful of paid maintainers, fighting against a tide of garbage that increases every single month.
And now Rémi is asking for more funding so they can PAY PEOPLE to deal with the slop. Not to build features. Not to improve the engine. To SIT THERE AND FILTER OUT THE GARBAGE that your AI-assisted “contributions” have flooded the repository with.
Think about that for a second. Your “innovation” has created so much work that the solution isn’t better tooling or better processes — it’s literally asking for money so humans can be employed to be your content filter. That’s not a feature. That’s a parasite. That’s an organism that feeds on the host and calls it productivity.
GitHub Is Complicit And We All Know It
And let’s not let Microsoft and GitHub off the hook here, because they are absolutely, unambiguously complicit in this destruction.
GitHub is owned by Microsoft — one of the most aggressive AI boosters on the planet. They shipped Copilot. They built the entire “AI is the future of coding” narrative. They created the incentive structure that says “just ship AI-generated code, it’s fine, it’s the future.” And now they have the absolute audacity to roll out features that let you disable PRs entirely, like that’s a solution rather than an admittance of failure.
“Oh but GitHub is introducing PR deletion from the UI!” Cool. That’s like saying “we noticed your house is on fire, here’s a bucket.” The platform that incentivized this behavior is now offering band-aids while the patient bleeds out.
And remember: Gentoo is migrating to Codeberg specifically because GitHub keeps nagging them about Copilot. The Linux Foundation, Fedora, Firefox, Ghostty, Servo, LLVM — they’re all discussing AI contribution policies. Not because they love bureaucracy. Because their maintainers are screaming for help and nobody’s listening except each other.
This Is Your Revolution?
So tell me again how AI coding assistants are “democratizing” software development. Tell me again how “vibe coding” is the future. Tell me again how we don’t need to learn syntax because LLMs will handle it.
Because from where I’m sitting, what I see is a generation of developers who think clicking “generate” is the same as crafting code. Who submit PRs they don’t understand to projects they don’t comprehend, because the tool made it easy and nobody told them easy != good.
The open source maintainers are drowning. The people who actually keep the internet running are being buried under a mountain of confident garbage. And the companies that built the tools that created this mess are out here selling “AI productivity” to your CTO while the maintainers burn out and quit.
I don’t know how long we can keep it up either, Rémi. And I’m furious that no one with power is doing anything about it except wringing their hands and rolling out slightly-better PR deletion UI.
Fund your maintainers. Or watch them quit. Those are the options. The revolution eats its own, and right now it’s eating the people who actually give a shit about code.