maiybe

A wicked irony I didn't know!

Most likely then a team that builds on top of bevy as infra and not bevy team itself.

> adds to their brand as something for creators rather than corporations

I'm responding to the idea that banning AI contributions is on brand for being "for creators."

What about their action is creator friendly? Yes, they reject all low quality AI slop, which has some indirect positive benefit. They also won't accept high quality PRs unless they are hand crafted. How does that benefit creators? Most arguments it's "for creators" likely conflate the idea that AI-coding is inherently slop. If so, then we can say that directly instead of implicitly.

Quite simply, volume. Detailed human review is a serious bottleneck on code merging. Skillset includes how to make sure you can get quality code at speed without 100% in-depth human review. I wouldn't recommend merges without human eyes, but there is a spectrum of depth in review.

I have never found an MCP server that really crushed it. Totally agree. I think there's something required at a deeper level of integration to get AI coding working inside of engines. MCP is not it.

Yes, it's true, this is not a ban on AI coding with Godot. I didn't mean to conflate those, whoops. It stands to reason that there may be a small anti-AI perspective taking shape inside of the Godot engine team. This is one sign, but not confirmation of that suspicion.

> that's so much hype not grounded in anything.

Not grounded in anything? Really, anything? There's no evidence you've seen in the last three years that has had any impact on what you think is possible with AI coding?

I'm not a game dev by trade, I am AI researcher turned AI engineer (not the "AI engineer" of the modern era, like getting ML deployed in prod). That being said, I have tried and failed to make plenty of games over the years. Every mistake in the book. Making my own engine, trying to do 3D game as first approach, making mobile apps 2010, using Unity for personal projects, switching to Godot. I'm not at your level in game dev, but I've seen plenty at scale.

> I'm guessing your job is to promote this stuff based on that being your purpose of going to GDC

I'm not an AI hype maker, I'm a stunned observer. A person who has said "no way" AI will impact coding for the last 10 years. I am watching evidence in front of my very eyes and my workflow and simply adapting to the reality on the ground along with reasonable projection of capabilities into the future (based on velocity and reasonable assumptions). I don't need to convince you of anything, but I'm confident your beliefs won't hold up against the stockpile of evidence gathering now and in the near future.

Since you took a swing and miss on who I am, I'm going to guess that you are reluctant to incorporate these tools into your own workflow (perhaps having cast them off quickly after some frustrated probing) and have a deep-seated skepticism of the tech that doesn't really matter what I say.

Where's my inference coming from? The idea that you've conflated that AI coding by its very nature needs to be buggy and unstable. I wish you luck on holding the line as it slips past us on an exponential curve.

Thank you for clarifying! That totally changed my interpretation.

There is a surprising number of projects dedicated to making Godot work on mobile, and I am equally confused by that focus. I guess it's more possible with AI coding though, but couch game dev doesn't feel like a real thing.

I am struggling to understand the exact content of your message. I believe it's that Godot is unserious. Okay? Game engines serve a niche much smaller than broad consumer apps or SaaS platforms. Seems like a dunk I don't quite understand.

It's a game built in Godot that runs on mobile (a mobile game). Godot is C++, there is no porting of engine to run on mobile? Slay the Spire 2 is built in Godot and has 500k concurrent users.

I don't know, once you ban AI-assisted coding outright, it's much higher likelihood this ban will cause the Godot team to spend time and energy being AI detectives, especially if they don't agree with the intent of the contribution.

Well, this is fundamentally where we end up disagreeing. Within the timeframe of a single mobile app development cycle, the entire coding infrastructure of the world changed. Our collective day-to-day coding experience has morphed within 15 months.

Here, you're making a negative argument, it "can't" be done. Maybe. Historically, correct. I prefer to image what could be done. As insane a statement as it sounds just 15 months ago, a small dev team could get it done, I'll stand by that. Framing is up to you, to each their own!

I'd put my estimates at 3x speed improvements. The amount of infra required upfront? 5x one time cost. These are estimates from Godot mobile app work. We have been trying out: no reviews under specific file sizes, except at design bottlenecks or large refactors. Number of PRs is probably up 3x with maybe 20% increase in regressions? Number of tests in our CI is up 500% (again, approximate), but this is absolutely required or we'd be awash in uncaught regressions with the velocity of code changes.

We have PR auditing skills, PR writing skills, testing conventions, etc that all need to be self-monitored for bullsh*t Claude ignorance (e.g. you apply them many times, then review your own PRs manually before merge). None of that is free, but we have shipped significantly more code as a result.

For many years, it's been difficult to build game engines. It's never been easier today. A half-decently funded startup team could get to Godot feature parity within 6-12 months. There's no VC in games anymore (especially not middleware), so it's less unlikely, but they don't have a moat on features.

When you go to invest in an engine. One with Claude Code natively infused and another that says "meh" to AI. Which would you have your small indie dev team choose? Smart money says velocity. I suspect the Godot-slayer I am imagining will start getting buzz in /r/aigamedev subreddit as the only way to quickly code a game. A little better design and 3D work from Anthropic, and we are off to the races.

Regarding game dev hatred of AI, I've been to GDC for the last 3 years for the explicit purpose of talking about AI in games. The wall of hatred isn't holding strong. It used to be universal. Now, not so much. People on their laptops claude coding during presentations. 20% of talks being about AI in games, and _sponsored (!!!)_ talks about AI are getting the largest crowds at GDC this year. The times, they are a changin'. This is only a clever marketing move for a certain set of developers, which I totally agree are the (maybe?) majority today. I said 3-5 years though, not 6 months...

AI-assisted coding is good for creators. It happens to be good for corporations because it reduces costs, but it's actually much more powerful for creators with imagination. I don't know where that argument comes from.

If AI-assisted coding can help corporations make AAA games with 1/10th the resources, then it would stand to reason it also helps indies make AAA with 1/10th the resources? I have never understood this argument.

Godot has no peers because for the last 30 years in software, it's been hard for people to make their own game engines, which made open source engines totally impractical. W4 is a non-profit organization that happened to get just enough resources and traction to make it. That underlying assumption is not true anymore, making engines has never been easier in software history. Unreal/Unity are not the competitors I'm talking about.

On one hand, you could be right! I am making inferences on low data, judging the Godot team based on some of their _strong_ design choices. I would have a better argument if I spent the time tracking the Github issues that seemed quite wild that we encountered while building in Godot. Top of mind (low evidence, sorry) GDScript as a base scripting language (later reversed by C#), refusal to add async/await for GDScript, others that have escaped me.

What I am saying is squishy conjecture.

On the other hand, they're training new contributors to make internal AI-assisted PRs by requiring them to make non-assisted PRs? That sounds unlikely but I suppose possible.

That's basically the same argument Unity made a few years ago.

There isn't, until there is. These things take time. The tech has to be adopted, the people have to integrate into game jams, indies percolate. Godot is young, my predictions are 3-5 years.

Regarding competition though, the question is about the unique selling points of Godot that would be hard to replicate. Before AI coding, there is a _lot of momentum_ for leaders in the game engine world. Everyone specializes and it takes many years of game cycles to make the switch to a new engine. Not anymore!

So we have yet to see a dog-eat-dog game engine world, and in that world, ejecting AI-coding could in fact be a net negative. That's what I am arguing at least.

Regarding the unique selling points of the engine: 1. Open-source 2. Node/Scene encapsulation design: Big! - Easily my favorite part of GDScript. Easy to replicate. 3. Scripting languages: GDScript, buggy C# - AI-coding doesn't care what language as long as it's popular

My suspicion: A competitor could use a known compiled language (Rust) and a scripting language (luau) and get the same mileage as Godot and replace every one of their selling points with more performant code. Because they waited so long to deploy a marketplace, they have very little sticky bits to their market share.

I don't know about large teams or companies. I feel more confident with the conjecture: Conditioned on small teams, a team of seniors with AI coding beats a team of junior with AI coding by a wide margin, in my experience.

When accounting for "coding taste," I think there is equal or higher quality output over small teams, and if there is a decrease in software quality, it's nowhere near the implied amount (5-10% at most) with a massive gain in speed (approx 3x? 4x? hard to measure). Those numbers net out positive in the end, especially as the team starts to understand and ship with AI in the loop.