Because it's not about the tool or the quality of the past contributions, but the quality of the current contribution. It's not new either, it's "show me the code" - it doesn't matter who you are, what you say, what you claim to have achieved in the past, the only thing that matters right now is this particular merge request and code.

I don't think the problem is the (AI generated) code per se, but as the article mentions, it's the human interaction. A reviewer can spend hours on reviewing the code and leaving feedback to the author, but if the author just feeds it into an AI (or worse, it's automatically fed into it) and processes it within seconds, only to start with a blank slate for a next change, what's the point of putting in all that effort?

Humans can learn and adapt, AIs can... ingest more stuff into their context, I suppose, but it's been proven that things break down if they have too much stuff in said context, and said context is limited.

If your contributions are genuinely indistinguishable from AI code, then this shouldn’t affect you. There would be no way to enforce it

The Godot maintainers do review based on the quality of contributor's past contributions. Those becoming especially proficient can even become maintainers.

Allowing AI use by 'trusted contributors' has been suggested and discussed, but there were enough reasons against it and not enough established benefit.

Because:

1. In the case of AI generated code, the tool is the author.

2. Its far easier to enforce.

3. The alternative gate keeps against new contributors.

Because of lot of AI PRs come from first time contributors who just discovered the tools. Maybe their PR is amazing, maybe it is trash. You never know until you review it.

You are not the author with ai.

It's far more time-consuming to judge the quality of someone's past contributions than to have the LLM redo the contribution with quality you can control far more.