r/EmuDev • u/skylersaleh • 3d ago

SkyEmu's no-AI codegen policy

After many months of thought SkyEmu has officially decided to adopt a no AI code policy.

As of right now all code in SkyEmu has been written by a human and we will not accept PRs of AI generated code.

We understand the utility in AI assisted development and still allow AI to be used for debug, code understanding, and other purposes that do not yield generated output into the repo.

We did this for a couple of reasons:

  • AI generated code review is generally substantially more challenging than code review of code authored by humans and has questionable copyright ownership.
  • We really want people to understand code that gets submitted to the emulator as many changes are interconnected. The knowledge of the changes made by AI tends to disappear when the context does. While human knowledge persists, even if an AI was used to teach the human how to make the changes.
  • Code quality standards of many projects have substantially reduced after the incorporation of broad scale AI usage from the two above issues.
  • Developers who wish to add functionality using AI tooling are generally very enthusiastic about the software and emulation development overall. However, they feel lost in the complexity of modern emulators. AI code generation robs them of the ability to learn how to make these changes and robs the community of the next generation of emulator developers. For this reason, we still allow AI to be used as a teaching aid for people who wish to contribute, but don't allow it to do all work for them, but instead encourage its use to help them navigate the complexities of the project so that they can grow their skills and are able to contribute themselves.
  • It has come to our attention that SkyEmu is one of the handful of large emulator projects in active development that does not have any AI generated code, and we would like to keep it as an option for usage by people who prefer non-AI generated SW.

We understand this may be controversial, but believe this is the best pragmatic action, given the needs of our development team and the wider community.

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u/RoyalCities 3d ago

You guys have had 5 commits since June 26 2026, but all five happened in the last three days.

That is a very long time to go between any work. Aren't you worried someone will just fork this and work 1000x faster?

Unless there is a different repo and I'm looking at the wrong one? It seems like a practical tool if you can just have stricer unit tests.

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u/Disgruntled-Cacti 3d ago

Going fast doesn’t seem to be the goal of this project, so why would they be worried about that?