SDL Adds Policy To Forbid LLM/AI Generated Code Contributions

The SDL library widely used by cross-platform games and part of the Steam Runtime has now established a policy to block code contributions made using AI / Large Language Models (LLMs).

SDL is the latest open-source project to say no to code generated by AI/LLMs. After a ticket was opened last week questioning if the Simple DirectMedia Layer has a policy around AI/LLM contributions, stakeholders took to coming up with such a policy. This policy follows GitHub Copilot used on some recent SDL reviews and a belief that some other recent contributions may have been made using LLMs like Claude Code.

Ryan C. Gordon "Icculus" took to writing an AGENTS.md that notes AI cannot be used to generate code for contributions to this project:

"AI may not be used to generate code for contributions to this project.

"AI" in this case means a Large Language Model ("LLM"), such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Grok, etc.

AI-generated code is based upon sources of unknown origins and may not be compatible with the Zlib license, or may introduce conflicting license terms if they include code from other projects.

AI can be used to identify issues with contributions to this project, but the solutions to those issues should be authored by humans.

We have found that AI will frequently hallucinate issues that are not actually problems in practice, report incorrect information, and describe problems that are actually not issues at all. If AI identifies a problem with this codebase, please make sure you understand what it is saying and have independently confirmed that the issue exists before submitting a bug report or pull request.

Any pull request to this project will ask you to confirm that you are the author and that you are contributing your changes under the Zlib license."

The SDL GitHub pull request template also added an option to confirm that the pull does not contain code from other sources like AI/LLMs. See this pull request for the now-merged AI/LLM policy for this important piece of the cross-platform gaming ecosystem.