It Breaks a Village: Bevy's 6th Birthday

09 Sep, 2026

This post, like all my posts, was written by me. It came out of a lot of conversation and reflection with many people. It is long. I promise you there's value in reading it in full, and with an open mind, and not merely summarising it or reading the headers alone.

Opinions stated here are my own, not those of any person, organisation, or company I am associated with.

Thank you to everyone in the Bevy community I've spoken to over this topic.

(Last year: GiGF and Bevy's 5th Birthday)

Earlier this summer we had a string of positive things happen in the Bevy game engine. With the release of 0.19 the BSN macro finally merged. We have a declarative data model, UI is now tenable. Groundwork for actual arts tooling exists. This is a monumental achievement.

Paired with that, Rustweek 2026 was the most positive experience I've had with techie people in real life, I got to meet many wonderful people and spend days and evenings having wonderful conversations. I did not have a single negative experience and everyone I met was lovely to talk to and spend time with, I would love to spend time with these people again.

Since then, things have been troublesome.

I've been working on an overhaul of the Plugins API for a couple of months now. This aims to reframe the plugin system to make dependencies possible and future tooling more powerful. This design may or may not make it into the engine, but I am trying to argue that it is a good option. When I have an actual post about it, I'll post it on my technical blog. My motivations for it are posted elsewhere, but I'll be posting about it again soon.

This has been almost entirely on hold for the last 5 weeks as trying to write Bevy-related code right now makes me feel fully nauseous. Stomach churning, I-want-to-throw-up. My mind cannot keep from racing about what it means to be a contributor to open source in this moment in time.

I may be alone in this specific feeling, but I am not alone in feeling that contributing to Bevy right now feels extremely bad.

The "AI" Policy

Note: There has been increased discussion over the last few days that may make it seem I am commenting on immediately recent things, the majority of my talking points here were first enumerated and drafted weeks ago.

Bevy recently adopted a new "AI" policy¹ that is (by stated intention) marginally more permissive than previously. On paper, it's fine. The context of its development is where problems came up.

The stated reasoning for this new policy is that we need to be "realistic" about people's LLM use, and that the previous policy was "unenforceable." Instances were cited where someone's profile and Pull Request (PR) didn't pass a sniff test but nothing could be proven for sure when the only evidence was a particular kind of code smell or a private / suspicious github profile.

The burden of proof from this angle unfairly rested on an "accuser", not "the accused". This mirrors many justice systems, but a PR being rejected is not equivalent to imprisonment or a fine or death. It's a mild social consequence, equivalent to saying "no thanks" to someone handing out flyers for a show at the Edinburgh fringe or leaflets of strange local religious sect.

This policy was mostly decided upon ahead of time amongst SMEs and other parties before public discussion opened up for a "debate" and editing period. During this period a lot of LLM enthusiasts started openly dreaming about even more permissive policies, what they would do once full agentic modes were allowed. Meanwhile, almost all arguments against "AI" use were more or less thrown out or ignored. Since this policy merged, the ratchet has been turning.

This experience has been that of observing a knife get torn through the social muscles of the Bevy project.

The most public fanfare around this new policy has been in the Bevy's 6th Birthday post, if you don't count the Discord. I feel complicated about writing about this out in the open, so publicly. But I do not feel like I have much of a choice if I want Bevy to feel like something I can continue to use and contribute to.

Trust Is Broken and the Ground Is Uneven

Community cohesion has fallen apart under pressure of persistent trolling and conflicting community values.

The "AI" conversation has been positioned as two equal sides worthy of equal judgement. This is at odds with the context being a Game Engine as a creative tool people have sunk years of their lives learning, talking about, and promoting (myself included) in hope of rust having solid ground for artists / game developers. This context, vs the shallow buy-in of recent and more vocal LLM enthusiasts, was not acknowledged until late in the conversation. Acknowledgement did not mean material changes to the "AI" policy.

The "unenforceable nature" of the previous LLM policy has read largely as a pretense rather than a valid reason for revision. The current LLM policy is, if anything, viewed as temporary or easy to bend, the assumption is that there will be a next, more permissive LLM policy, so why trust it? Why trust it when people are already disrespecting its limits?

Additionally, Bevy's previous policy offered a safe space² to people who otherwise have to deal with "AI" boosters, LLM enthusiasts, "AI" usage mandates etc. in their day jobs or personal relationships. This top-down cultural change has broken people's trust on a deeper level than has been reckoned with.

People have had their own positions viewed as merely a prefigure to "witch-hunts" and harassment campaigns. There isn't trust that our positions are held in good faith, instead that we will merely lash out in existentially threatening ways that do not "address the reality" or "have real arguments." This has extended to the point where merely asking if a PR is LLM Output gets push back, despite disclosure being a part of the current policy.

Backchannels Have Taken Root

This cuts both ways. Private communications on Bevy governance direction make people no longer trust governance. People do not feel heard or respected. Moderation issues are not brought forward by community members in good time. Stuff builds up, people are not happy. People have been talking behind each other's backs and this has contributed to several waves of paranoia and general distrust.

This is to be expected from an "AI" policy that came out of primarily asking SMEs first and then opening up a discussion for which "don't change the attitude of the 'AI' policy" was not on the table.

I bring this up with honesty as I've been active in these so-called "anti-AI"³ backchannels myself. I know how a lot of people are feeling behind closed doors. I also opened an "AI"-Sober Space as an alternative development space for the Bevy project and the people who use it. But this is an open space almost anyone can join, at least as long as they do so in good faith. We abide by the same code of conduct as the rest of the Bevy project, with an additional reminder that trolling is unwelcome.

Nothing to Showcase

The Bevy discord has a Showcase category where people can post their Bevy projects including game updates, crates, dev logs, tutorials.

The #showcase channel is no longer worth looking at, and is demoralising if you value growth and learning more than final artefact. A significant number of the posts are about "AI"-driven projects. A place where people would hype each other up about learning is now mostly an LLM-enthusiast space.

We see a similar thing in r/rust and other link aggregation forums, there is less enthusiasm now that there is a greater volume of low-effort posts. You can't moderate away how people feel about a topic, only what they post in official channels. People feel worse about sharing their work as it's sandwiched between low-effort, low-engagement-with-bevy work. They feel worse about looking in showcase because there is very little high-effort work or social engagement.

"Don't Be Mean About 'AI'" Rules

(note: this was written before the "remove memes and off-topic" discussion began. Since this was written, the "#memes" channel has been removed due to being "too difficult to moderate.")

In the lead up to the change in "AI" policy, a faux-apolitical "no dunking" rule was added to the community discord. This had the explicit purpose of cutting down on the number of memes about how people don't like AI posted in the off-topic channels.

I have these spaces muted, I'm not a usual participant, but this sat uncomfortably with me. This was and continues to be a cultural suppression of what was, previously, the community norms of Bevy. This was a one-sided change in policy to make things "less hostile" to "AI" users.

The "AI" policy itself also came with its own "don't be mean about 'AI'" rules. One of the community attempts at self-correcting the problems in Nothing to Showcase was to emoji-react to LLM projects in the showcase channels with the "🤖" emoji. This has been moderated away. There is no longer any gentle collective way to dissuade LLM users from posting low-effort work in the Bevy discord.

Aside: "AI" Output Is Not Valued by the Public

This is important as we're often trying to sell our games to the public.

Bevy inherits a lot of social clout from the general Rust attitude of "we value high-quality work." This is the cultural foundation for why people respect Rust and projects written in it almost by default. It's a given that someone cares. We are in a period where this reputation is slipping, not by an eternal september but by increasing association as LLM-enthusiasts "target" rust with their prompts.

In software we have this strange position taking hold, that our work is as valueless as the output of an LLM. Not that LLM output is just as valuable, no, that we are of as little value as it. This sometimes gets communicated as "They're just as good as you!" which is a slight against the programmers being talked about, more than anything.

Software is the outlier in how people culturally value LLM output. Game engines have a relationship to people outside of software.

Nobody intentionally buys "AI assets" from online marketplaces. Nobody asks "AI artists" for commissions or collaboration. The people who follow "AI art" accounts are... "AI" boosters, for the most part. Some people who are caught up in the spectacle. "AI" works on steam instantly receive backlash, and are seeing an increasing amount of backlash over time.

Game Developers see "AI" as a liability, Players see "AI" output as asset-flip vapourware. When people hear that "AI" is part of a project, many of them lose trust in that project. This holds true even when it's "just" code. It's viewed as an abdication of responsibility, an abdication of care.

People are consistently picking up on "AI" tells in video, writing, images, no matter the "improvements" in models. This is a matter of needing to filter out information from the world. "AI output" is noise, not signal, and in order to make human connections over a mediation layer like the internet you need to be able to filter out noise quickly.

An Input/Output Worldview

The main argument for LLM usage we saw was "it works." This is debatable, though if you think it's not you can skip to the paragraph after next, and confirmation bias can make it seem like it works a lot more than it actually does. I am not naive nor am I a purist, I have touched these machines to understand what they're capable of. I'm also not impressed. I know people who are forced to use these machines⁴ and they're not impressed.

The inherently stochastic⁵ nature of these models makes so-called "hallucination"⁶ an intractable problem. But true believers imagine they don't need to worry about this, insisting that people will check their work even when people have little emotional buy-in to carefully and fully understand "AI" output, and may not have enough time.

This "It works" framing has problems on its own because it treats a complex system (game engine development, use, and maintenance) as if it is built out of units of concept input and code output alone. This is a pretty easy sell, as this lines up with how we think about code. This is also how organisations and the people in them tend to start thinking over time under extractive pressure. It is an abstraction.

What this framing ignores is what it does to the people involved in the project. People who embrace these LLMs are encouraged to view people who don't as thoughtless luddites⁷ or annoying puritans. People who do not use these machines (or are forced to, but don't want to, a population that makes up a significant chunk of "AI users") are discouraged, demotivated, and devalued. A feeling of personal worthlessness sinks in and is actively encouraged by ignoring the social part of the equation of production.

The "AI" Booster Bar Problem

The dynamic between "AI" boosters and people who don't want to use LLMs is not on level ground. "AI" boosting in a space with people who want to be "AI Sober" is disruptive and antagonistic, knowing that you're doing it is baiting or outright trolling. There are many tactics that have been developed and propagated at this point, many of which revolve around devaluing and demoralising the subject being trolled. This is analogous to someone baiting someone in recovery into relapse, or someone depressed to suicide. Provoking dysregulation is the underhanded goal.

The problem with "The Nazi Bar problem" is that people get defensive about the comparison. There are positions one can take and espouse or behaviours one can perform that will drive people away from you or a space you manage out of fear, frustration, or contempt. "The Nazi Bar problem" spells that out, it does not equate all positions being analyzed under it as equivalent to neo-nazi positions.

"The Nazi Bar problem" describes what happens when people caustic to a feeling of safety, collaboration, or community try to take root in a space:

1. A community has a space (The Bar)
2. A "nazi" turns up to the bar, antagonises the regulars (actively or passively).
3. The "nazi" starts bringing their "nazi friends".
4. The regulars stop going to the bar.
5. The bars only regulars are "nazis". It is now a "nazi bar".

Again, it's not just about nazis, as much as in the last 12 years of politics it has been quite relevant to talk about them. Required reading in this particular space is Gil Durán's recent journalistic work "The Nerd Reich"⁸, or "The TESCREAL bundle" (Gebru & Torres, 2024), but this is a digression.

The point is that caustic, antisocial behaviour causes people who previously were valued in the space to leave. When these people have left, the behaviour of the persons whose caused them to leave becomes the new community norm. This is distinct from usual community churn, normal conflicts.

"The Nazi Bar problem" also has a solution. A solution which is quite easy to explain:

1. A community has a space (The Bar)
2. A "nazi" turns up to the bar, antagonises the regulars.
3. Divergence: The bar manager, who has control over who can enter the space, kicks out the "nazi" and bans them + any of their associates.

This requires an open eye and a willingness to challenge caustic behaviour no matter what threats of violence to the space or the career of the bar managers the "nazi" might wield. (3/Divergence) is always an option. Even if it doesn't immediately undo (4) and (5). Even if it's uncomfortable.

A troll might, when presented with this framework, argue that the people they're trolling are the real caustic members of the community pointing to the ways people react to getting purposefully antagonised. One of the main jobs of a moderator is to be present enough in the community to be able to tell these things apart. This would be classic DARVO. We can imagine this as the following:

1. A community has a space (The Bar)
2. A "nazi" turns up to the bar, antagonises the regulars.
3. The "nazi" cries out about how irrational and angry the regulars are being.
4. The bartender chastises the antagonised customers for lashing out, kicks them out.
5. The regulars are gone.
6. The bars only regulars are "nazis". It is now a "nazi bar".

I do not bring this up to argue an equivocation between positions in this post specifically. I'm already out of the scope I promised myself I'd keep to. I bring this up to describe the way the Bevy community has changed radically over the last 4 months or so, I have seen people who were previously valued members of the community get pushed out due to caustic behaviour. I've seen the people who pushed them out be polite once they got their way, their previous behaviour ignored.

Aside: Are "AI Boosters" the Real Disadvantaged-Marginalised-Subaltern Party?

No, and this is an extremely suspicious framing. The largest structural and monetary support ever leveraged is being put behind "AI" rollout. "AI users" include people who would rather not touch this due to workplace mandates and the alternative being "get fired." Push-back is under structural pressure, not use, and use does not imply approval.

This attempt to reframe people who are leveraging the cultural-economic weight of an international trillions-dollar spending spree as somehow disadvantaged is an active reframing that one doesn't need to buy into or admit through the door. "AI" Booster positions are bought and paid for and forced into every space with the backing of the most overpowered corporations and professional clout networks that have ever existed. Pushing back against it is what involves sticking out your neck.

There Are no Clocks on the Walls, but There Is an Exit.

I do not believe that people who use these machines are tainted, impure, or otherwise destined to a thousand years of torture and pain. They are a combination person-llm gestalt, some willing and some unwilling.

These machines are designed with a major user-facing⁹ goal in mind: user retention. One does not need to provide real value, only the feeling that one would be an idiot to not keep their attention on this machine and how it makes them feel. This includes spinning a narrative about the efficiency of such machines and the effect on people's workflows.

This UX goal takes advantage of the people who use them, not as a substance but as a relationship between institution and subject. This relationship can be seen between casinos and gamblers, or between local supply chains and addicts, or it can be seen within an unhappy marriage. The relationship creates a situation where it is hard to let go, and easy to justify why you must stay.

If there is a single takeaway from this post: "AI involvement" and "AI use" isn't fate. You can quit these things. Sometimes you can do it on your own, sometimes it takes the people around you, sometimes you'll never get control of it. Sometimes there is an amount of space these things have in your life that doesn't make them a problem. But there is always an exit, even if the architect designed the space to make it hard to reach for.

The Other Half of This Post

This has been a very "AI policy"-fallout focused post. Here's a list that would take an additional week or dozen for me to expand on:

1. Bevy is in a severe crisis of trust.
2. Bevy has needed more moderators for years.
3. Bevy has needed more SMEs for almost as long, or the SME category needs to be disbanded into something like Mentors. Rustc has mentorship as a key part of its social reproduction, Bevy is of a size and complexity where it may make more sense for mentorship to be the "north star" of expertise, not individual technical ability or output.
4. Bevy was already relatively hostile to non-programmers as a toolkit. BSN was part of how to address this by enabling tooling, the "AI" stuff re-asserts hostility.
5. Bevy needs outreach to artists.
6. Bevy needs more money and more people working on it.
7. There is tension between people for whom Bevy is their Normal Software Job vs Game Engine for Personal and Professional Creative Projects.
8. Both Un/Paid Maintainers and Unpaid Contributors are facing varying levels of burnout.
9. (6) is an easy axis of exploitation for anyone with enough money. Both (6) and (8) also allows the thought to fester "instead of people, I'll get claude to co-maintain." This is not an equivalent or better solution to More Maintainers, nor is it an inherently rational intermediate step.
10. Solving (2) and (3) requires solving (1) first otherwise there is no trust in the new moderators and SMEs/Mentors.
11. Solving (1) is, at this point in time, very complex and easy to manipulate by bad actors. For the avoidance of doubt the bad actors here are, specifically, "AI-booster" people. Not "AI users" in general, but the boosters.
12. Dust has settled, a short time has passed, the amount of cortisol in people's bodies is lower than it was a month ago. This makes it easy to believe (1) no longer applies, that everyone who was affected is now gone and one can assume everyone who is still around agrees with the current state of things. This isn't the case.

This is it really, a list of Problems and Actionable Solutions and Concerns.

On Bringing This Up

Sarah Ahmed's research on complaints highlights how by complaining to an institution, organisation, group of people, the problem being described may be discarded and the Complainer may be viewed as the problem instead. Or, the ability to complain can be proof that one clearly has enough energy and focus to do the real work instead of this dramatic nonsense, so why are you bothering with the complaint? Clearly I'm doing all this to lash out, not solve problems. Clearly all I want is for someone else to leave, for someone else to shut up, for me to be upheld as the Most Correct, right?

If I'm so nauseous thinking about bevy why am I writing this? It's because I care, I care a lot and I want to get my perspective, emotions, and reasoning through when previously they've not managed to stick. What is the point of any of this? Game development, I would hope. In my mind, communities are what make game development happen, not technologies. With the best tech gear and engines in the world someone working alone without friends or colleagues or any hope for future camaraderie struggles to get anything of value done. That same person can make a masterpiece with a 15 year old laptop, SDL1, a good environment, and good people around them. I want to get things done, but the social-cultural structure has shifted in a way that makes this difficult.

Moving Forward

In the aftermath of all this, some people are hurting and coming across as paranoid, angry, irrational, and skittish because of how the environment has treated them, how it's treated us. This is, to some extent, being taken advantage of to paint LLM-enthusiasts as more level-headed and "rational" in comparison.

People need to be valued, humble, and learn from each other. Moderation needs to be expanded, the ranks of SMEs need to be grown with people who care about their work and teaching other people, not just Input/Output of artefacts.

Myself and others contest that Bevy's previous "AI policy" ever had a problem of enforcement, Bevy instead had and continues to have a moderation problem both on and off discord. There are not enough active moderators, especially not outside of the north american continent, and not empowered enough to act when people behave badly. "Vibes-based" bans and timeouts have been performed in Bevy before LLMs and their enthusiasts became a bigger project management and culture problem.

This Is a Game Engine

Bevy is a Game Engine. Game Engines are to be used not only by hardened engineers, engine developers, and technology enthusiasts but by working artists. A game engine that is hostile to working artists will not attract such people, and will drive people who are already here away. This will result in Audience Capture, where feedback from those who stick around is the main kind you get, and already has to an extent. Not to a degree that cannot be undone, but one where people outside of narrow and unsustainable niche are being alienated.

People who work on Bevy who are not part of the Bevy foundation are mostly providing their free time and energy to do so. I've used a lot of my off hours to try to solve problems I've run into, or to answer questions from people, or otherwise contribute to a culture.

This situation we're in is unfortunate, as up until now this has been one of the very few times in my life I've felt welcome and happy in an open-source community.

But I'm not leaving, at least not formally. We can take refuge in other bars for now. We can understand that there is no such thing as "Just a Tool". We can understand that value comes from the social relations that construct an artefact, not the artefact itself. We can talk about AI-entryism and how to identify, combat, and reverse it.

People like it when others show them care. I have spent weeks drafting this post, talking with people, refining topics, trying to understand what's going on so that the direction things have been going in can be adjusted. People feel taken advantage of, hurt, put upon. This period has radically shifted people's ability to trust open-source spaces for the worse.

Had the last 2 months of community pain not happened, this post would have mostly have been a praise of BSN and discussion of where the editor should go, from the perspective of an active user of the engine. It would have been about my work on Plugins. It would have been progress on my own game. It might have been a fifth the length.

I know this was long. I hope you read the whole thing. I actively don't like writing about this stuff, it's so easy to twist or misunderstand. But the alternative, silence, would be taken as endorsement of where the status quo has drifted to. This whole thing didn't feel this way even two months ago.

My next post will be something else, some creative hope. I miss working on my game, I miss writing about other things. I have to believe things can change for the better.

See you next year.

#ai #bevy #community #conflict #heartbreak