Changes to Godot Engine Contribution Policies

Godot 引擎贡献政策变更

Over the last several years we have become overwhelmed by the large number of code contributions (pull requests), especially those from new contributors. The number of open PRs has become a meme in the community. In part, the number of open PRs is a healthy sign that: 在过去的几年里，我们被大量的代码贡献（Pull Requests，简称 PR）淹没了，尤其是来自新贡献者的 PR。待处理 PR 的数量甚至在社区中成为了一个梗。在某种程度上，待处理 PR 数量多是一个健康的信号，表明：

• People are interested in contributing to Godot and are willing to put in time to contribute,
• We are being cautious about feature creep,
• We are dedicated to high code quality.
• 人们有兴趣为 Godot 做出贡献，并愿意投入时间；
• 我们对功能蔓延（feature creep）保持谨慎；
• 我们致力于保持高质量的代码。

But ultimately, a large part of the backlog comes from the fact that the number of qualified reviewers is small, reviewing PRs is demanding, and we can’t keep up with everything coming in. 但归根结底，积压工作的主要原因在于：合格的审核人员数量稀少，审核 PR 的工作要求很高，我们无法跟上所有涌入的请求。

This problem is compounded by the recent increase in AI-generated contributions, both by AI agents and by humans submitting AI-generated code. The amount of effort required to make a PR has gone down (and number of PRs has increased as a result), while the amount of work to review PRs and the amount of people available to review has stayed the same. This reviewer shortage was already a problem, but it was one that we successfully ignored. We can no longer ignore it. 最近 AI 生成的贡献（无论是通过 AI 智能体还是人类提交 AI 生成的代码）有所增加，这加剧了这一问题。提交 PR 所需的努力减少了（导致 PR 数量增加），而审核 PR 的工作量和可用的审核人员数量却保持不变。这种审核人员短缺的问题一直存在，但我们之前成功地忽视了它。现在，我们无法再忽视了。

AI contributions have the added pain of being demoralizing. Reviewing PRs is already tedious work, but it is rewarding because reviewers generally feel that their efforts are contributing to educating a new contributor (who may become a future maintainer/reviewer). If your feedback on PRs 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. AI 贡献还带来了一种令人沮丧的额外痛苦。审核 PR 本身就是一项繁琐的工作，但它是有回报的，因为审核人员通常觉得他们的努力有助于培养新贡献者（他们可能会成为未来的维护者/审核者）。如果你的反馈只是被机器吸收，而不是用于指导潜在的未来维护者，那么将业余时间花在 PR 审核上就变得很难证明其价值了。

It is time for us to recognize that these problems aren’t going away and therefore we need to take steps to reduce the burden on maintainers while ensuring we still have a pipeline to mentor new contributors to become future maintainers. 是时候承认这些问题不会自行消失了，因此我们需要采取措施减轻维护者的负担，同时确保我们仍然有渠道指导新贡献者成为未来的维护者。

Accordingly, we are in the process of updating our contribution policies, including adding a stricter policy on AI contributions. The Foundation board and maintainers have been discussing a new policy for several months. Our focus will be on: 因此，我们正在更新贡献政策，包括增加针对 AI 贡献的更严格政策。基金会董事会和维护者已经讨论了几个月的新政策。我们的重点将是：

• Encouraging new contributors to become future maintainers, that involves teaching and growing the understanding of new contributors. LLMs can’t learn from specific feedback and thus can’t benefit from maintainers providing feedback.
• Ensuring all contributions are made by humans who can take responsibility for their code and be able and willing to fix it when needed. AI cannot take responsibility, and we can’t trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it.
• Adding barriers to low-effort slop. Unfortunately, this means we need to add barriers to contribution, but want to do it in a way that does not cut off our maintainer pipeline.
• Increasing the incentive to review PRs. PR review is the largest bottleneck in the engine right now. We need to ensure that people who choose to review PRs feel their time is well spent.
• 鼓励新贡献者成为未来的维护者：这涉及教学并提升新贡献者的理解能力。大语言模型（LLM）无法从具体的反馈中学习，因此无法从维护者提供的反馈中受益。
• 确保所有贡献均由人类完成：他们能够对自己的代码负责，并有能力且愿意在需要时进行修复。AI 无法承担责任，我们无法信任那些过度依赖 AI 的用户，因为他们可能并不了解自己的代码，无法进行修复。
• 为低质量的“垃圾”内容设置门槛：遗憾的是，这意味着我们需要增加贡献门槛，但我们希望以一种不切断维护者培养渠道的方式进行。
• 增加审核 PR 的激励：PR 审核是目前引擎开发中最大的瓶颈。我们需要确保那些选择审核 PR 的人觉得他们的时间花得值得。

We will amend our contributing policy to include a prohibition on new features or significant re-factoring from new contributors without explicit permission from maintainers. This ensures that new contributors take the time to learn the codebase and engage with maintainers to build trust by working on bug fixes and documentation before diving into significant projects. We consider a new contributor to be someone with 3 or fewer merged pull requests. 我们将修改贡献政策，禁止新贡献者在未经维护者明确许可的情况下提交新功能或进行重大重构。这确保了新贡献者在投入重大项目之前，有时间学习代码库，并通过处理 Bug 修复和文档工作与维护者建立信任。我们将拥有 3 个或更少合并 PR 的贡献者视为新贡献者。

Shortly we will also amend our contributing policy to align with the values described above. Our amended policy will include that: 不久后，我们还将修改贡献政策，以符合上述价值观。我们修订后的政策将包括：

• No autonomous AI agent use or vibe coding: This already leads to an auto-ban from our GitHub repository and will continue to do so.
• No use of AI to generate substantial pieces of code: We require all code to be human authored. AI assistance should be limited to menial things (like code completion, regex, or find and replace). If you do use AI in some capacity to author code, you must disclose it in the PR discussion.
• No AI-generated text in human-to-human communication: When our maintainers volunteer their time to review your issue, PR, or proposal, they do not want to talk to a machine. This is a basic principle of respect. Machine translations are still acceptable as long as the original content was written by a human.
• All PRs must be reviewed and approved by a human before merging: This is the case already, but we will make it more explicit in our policy.
• 禁止使用自主 AI 智能体或“感觉编程”（vibe coding）：这已经会导致在我们的 GitHub 仓库中被自动封禁，未来也将继续执行。
• 禁止使用 AI 生成大量代码：我们要求所有代码必须由人类编写。AI 辅助应仅限于琐碎事务（如代码补全、正则表达式或查找替换）。如果你确实在编写代码时使用了 AI，必须在 PR 讨论中披露。
• 人际交流中禁止使用 AI 生成文本：当我们的维护者志愿花费时间审核你的 Issue、PR 或提案时，他们不想与机器对话。这是尊重的基本原则。只要原始内容是由人类编写的，机器翻译仍然是可以接受的。
• 所有 PR 在合并前必须经过人类审核并批准：这已经是目前的做法，但我们将在政策中更明确地规定这一点。

Things change every day with respect to the current suite of AI tools available. We will continue taking a conservative approach in our policies towards them, but we will re-evaluate as things evolve. 关于当前可用的 AI 工具套件，情况每天都在变化。我们将继续在政策中对它们采取保守态度，但随着事态的发展，我们会重新评估。