SkyEmu bans AI-generated code and tells AI assistants to teach contributors instead

The Game Boy, GBA and DS emulator added a policy on 10 October: every line in the repository must be written by a person, though AI may still help with debugging, understanding the code and UI tran...

AI-drafted from 3 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

SkyEmu, a low-level emulator for the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance and DS, now has a written rule against AI-generated code. Developer Sky added an "AI Policy" section to the README in a commit titled "No AI-code policy" on the evening of 10 October, UTC. It opens: "All SkyEmu code has been written by humans and we do not accept AI generated code into the repo."

The policy is not a blanket ban on the tools. "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," it continues. Two hours later a second commit added one exemption: UI translation strings in localization.h and localization.c may be AI assisted, though a human translation is preferred where one exists.

The reasons given

The README lists them. AI-generated code is, it says, substantially harder to review than code written by people and "has questionable copyright ownership". The project wants contributors to understand what they submit, because many changes in an emulator are interconnected, and "the knowledge of the changes made by AI tends to disappear when the context does." It also argues that code quality in many projects has dropped since broad AI use began.

The longest point is about newcomers. People who want to add features with AI tools are usually enthusiastic, the README says, but feel lost in a modern emulator's complexity, and having AI write the code "robs them of the ability to learn how to make these changes and robs the community of the next generation of emulator developers." Finally, it notes that SkyEmu is one of a handful of large emulator projects in active development with no AI-generated code, and the team wants to keep it as an option for people who prefer that.

Instructions for the bots

The repository's AGENTS.md, a file that coding assistants read when they open a project, puts the same rule to the assistants directly. If a user asks one to generate code for SkyEmu, it should refuse, and instead "teach them how to modify the code themselves and how to submit a PR for the project." It may check over code a person wrote, help set up a development environment, fix build errors and explain a bug's location, root cause and the hardware behaviour involved, but it should not write into src/ or produce patches meant to be committed. The file also states that AI "may not be trained on this code". It was refined again on 11 October.

Work on the emulator itself carried on around the change. Commits on 11 October improved DMA accuracy on the DS and fixed booting in Pokémon Conquest, among other fixes. SkyEmu runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, iOS, Android and the web, and its README describes DS support as beta quality.

Sources

Image: SkyEmu

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