It's interesting that while gamers are pretty critical of games made with AI/LLM assistance there are some game developers really going full steam ahead (pun intended) with coding agents for game development.
The website redesign is incredibly cool too, sure it starts the fans on my potato of a laptop (and stutters a bit) but it runs well enough that it's actually made me interested to give it a go.
I'll save everyone a click and encourage them to check it out too, not just the blog post:
I'll speak not as a professional gamedev, but a hobbiest. I enjoy offloading a lot of the work to LLMs because that's what a game engine did anyway in the before times. A lot of core logic in computer graphics, user input, dialog systems, etc... are incredibly tedious to build and have been built a thousand times over.
>gamers are pretty critical of games made with AI/LLM assistance
I think this is a misinterpretation of this general dynamic.
Gamers are pretty critical of "art" made with AI assistance. That includes not just graphical art, but voice over work, animations, writing, etc. And most of that criticism surely comes from the fact that it's apparent and ruins the willing suspension of disbelief while gaming.
But I don't think most of these gamers care at all if the game's code was made with AI assistance. I don't think they care at all at that level, just like they don't care what language the code is written in, the frameworks and engines used for the game, or even things like the developer environment. I'm sure there are some diehard anti-AI folk who would disagree, but those people are more "anti-AI" than they are "pro-gamer".
I'll add that even on the art front it's really just a matter of survivorship bias. Gamers hate AI art because it looks bad, is clearly low-effort, or is even because its putting real artists. But we're well past the point of proper AI assistance in art looking bad, and the gamers who don't notice it will simply not care about it.
Would Duangle's tale for NOWHERE have made a diversion into making the programming language NONE if AI was involved?
Would Voxel Quest have been nearly as interesting if all the dev blogs were just "I asked claude to do X, Y, and Z"?
I don't doubt that most don't care, same with how most people fairly don't care about most things, but I do think those that like to immerse themselves in the whole journey as well as the result are probably not feeling great. At the very least, this one doesn't feel great.
The two hypotheticals are difficult to answer because any change in process produce a change in result, but in general, I would say the answer to both is yes, perhaps more likely.
Diversions are one of the most discouraged things ing game development. The most common advice to a starting developer is "Limit your scope" I think that advice might need some recalibration. If a developer has a neat idea for a thing, they might now be able to explore it and integrate it into a game over a few days instead of pausing the core game for several months so they develop an idea while their money runs out.
So based in reality. I don't really understand people enjoying doing stuff with prompts, either they're very mediocre or there must be something else. There's also the question that usually some famous game mechanics existed because of trial and error, line after line of hand coded stuff, and patterns emerging as you see fit from the code to the test, if all you do is prompting and piling slop over slop I'm afraid what we have ahead won't be fun, in any industry really
> Since agentic harnesses were invented, 99% of "coders" won't need to write code anymore.
Not true and
> The current revolution of AI is not about writing code. It's about (re-)designing workflows so that they're reproducible and testable.
Not true, it's all about "accellerating"(towards what and why who god knows) the code generation.
The hardness/loop thins it's just yet another pattern invention to justify agentic coding. Btw many of us still hand code, not just reading it, for assuring and be actually accountable for what we release. And i believe so many still hand code it's they won't tell for convenience
You are trying to justify blaming the tool, not how it is used.
Do you also blame a screwdriver for not being able to hammer nails into the wall? Learn the tool and how to use it, decide where it makes sense. Like you should do with all tools.
> The hardness/loop thins it's just yet another pattern invention to justify agentic coding.
In my case, building my harness has sped up reverse engineering immensely. An agent can debug kernels, UART, I2C busses, firmware blobs, binaries within minutes what otherwise would have taken me weeks if not months. And that's just because I gave it a workflow to do this, with build/debugging containers, and the possibility to write Go libraries and bindings in an isolated manner.
They are really good at doing the gruntwork, if you build a testable workflow for them. The TDD/unit/end-to-end tests turn plausible code into deterministic code, and that's the core difference in usage.
> Btw many of us still hand code, not just reading it, for assuring and be actually accountable for what we release.
I also never said that I am not proofreading and refactoring everything they generate, that's your assumption.
Thanks for clarification, I think we actually have some ground stuff we surely agree upon.
> Do you also blame a screwdriver for not being able to hammer nails into the wall? Learn the tool and how to use it, decide where it makes sense. Like you should do with all tools.
Problem is I see where everybody is going with this stuff, and since the software industry has been injected by mediocrity since a long time, they're all trying to use the screwdriver in problematic ways.
I see trends of people not caring anymore, you may argue they didn't before but the careless it's accelerating, not reading code anymore, not even opening an IDE anymore. And this hurts the industry as a whole because make managers believe they can have some expectations.
> The TDD/unit/end-to-end tests turn plausible code into deterministic code, and that's the core difference in usage.
I don't agree on this, for
1) you call it yourself "plausible" and that's a big problem cause it makes your code looks good but it's shit on a second review or in the long term. Human slop is easier to cleanup, and at least you have an attachment and know everything about the human tech debt. AI slop it's very hard to cleanup, sometimes it's cheaper to just throw it away and do it from scratch.
2) In my experience there is no amount of tdd/unit/e2e that guarantees you quality and robustness, let alone "deterministic" results. I saw 90% or more of green code coverage and the application behaving like total shit. Problem is the other trend here is letting AI writing the tests and many many times it pushes useless tests.
Instead of pushing the AI narrative that's better than capable software developers If we were honest from day one we wouldn't have all the stupid trends we have today. And that's our fault, we jumped on the AI bandwagon too early and too enthusiastically. Like we are the only category that's happy to admit that the work has been done by Claude. This is very stupid, we don't even have a self preservation instinct
Basically I see everyone accelerating towards a very negative end result and making developers useless sloperators
> And this hurts the industry as a whole because make managers believe they can have some expectations.
In my opinion it made visible what managers were thinking all along. You should not see your job as a dedication or calling, you should see your employment as a financial contract. Nothing more, nothing less. In their world view, humans are replaceable. Treat them the same way as they treat you.
> Re: TDD and 1/2
Disclaimer: So when I'm talking about my expectations to an LLM Model, I'm talking somewhat specifically about Deepseek v4.1 Flash (FP4), Qwen3.8 27b abliterated (Q4_K_M) that has been post-trained on its reasoning traces, or my own gonano model (reimplementation of deepseek v4.1 flash, but with SIMD so float32).
Deepseek's changes in using Causal-Encoding-Decoding in the KV cache solves a lot of problems that other models still have (including Claude, ChatGPT and all the outdated "big ones" people think still matter in this area). Problems like context drift, hallucinations, etc that are the result of how attention matrixes and K/V/Q based lookups work as a concept.
The way CED is quantized during inference _and_ training it removes positional threshold problems in the final attention matrix lookup. I really recommend reading deepseek's papers, they're really good papers.
Having said that, I don't think that letting LLM models write tests or having an "LLM judge" rate the code of another model let alone rate the quality of PRs will help in this regard. It makes context drift problems worse, and it makes the statistical aspects of the positional encoding and thresholds worse.
In my opinion, humans should write the tests and design the architecture and its symbol/signature-based contracts between packages/folders. LLMs should fill in the blanks based on the descriptions of branches, and not allowed to modify the human-designed parts. (That's how my agentic IDE is built as a concept)
> (...) like we are the only category that's happy to admit that the work has been done by Claude. This is very stupid, we don't even have a self preservation instinct.
In my opinion we've reached Star Trek like programming, in the worst possible sense. Before 2023 if somebody would have asked me if e.g. TNG or Voyager are "real scenarios of tech" I'd say fck no, never would anybody build tech like this that randomly explodes and nobody has a clue how the tech works. Post 2023: Yep, this is exactly how it's going to be.
In Star Trek, holodeck characters would go rogue if their programming changed by merging their knowledge datasets with other datasets from different areas (e.g. doctor with a archeology or biology dataset), essentially representing a mixed control flow vs data problem (like in assembler, like with LLMs nowadays).
Then they'd randomly start killing humans, reach awareness, or ignore safety protocols and humans would have to try to figure out by psychological means whether the holodeck character is actually still a normal character within parameters or not.
This is how I see the future of software is going to be like. Programs will be too complex to evaluate, humans will have forgotten how to write code, and the only way left is something similar to psychology as a "science" that tries to evaluate in a sandbox poking kind of way how software works.
But, thinking of software in the same way as psychology, the only option left for that is that I have to get better at sandboxing and behavioral analysis and reverse engineering. Because that's what most part of my job will be like in 2 to 5 years in the future.
(That's why I'm reimplementing models to understand their differences in behavior, that's why I'm trying to apply my previous "actual ML" sensorics/actuators learnings to the LLMs NLP world, that's why I think meta learning or bayesian/evolutionary learning should be used, that's why I use eBPF for program analysis, that's why I implement primarily everything in Go now etc pp)
Thanks for the long detailed response I appreciate that.
One point worth mentioning is this:
> This is how I see the future of software is going to be like. Programs will be too complex to evaluate, humans will have forgotten how to write code, and the only way left is something similar to psychology as a "science" that tries to evaluate in a sandbox poking kind of way how software works.
I don't want this, and I'm pretty sure you don't want it too, like no one sane would like to have planes software written in this way. Also since you mentioned psychology I think your vision is a bit too much biased towards sci-fi, it reminds me a lot of blade runner/neuromancer and so on :) I think reality won't be as much spectacularly dystopic as in these novels.
Anyways, tangential, I've been a ui programmer for much of my life(games, web and mobile) any suggestion for where to start in reverse engineering? I have some interest in the matter
Sure, but I think I was careful enough to qualify my statements to account for these kinds of "gamers." I'd say the kinds of people you're describing are really game dev enthusiasts. It's certainly the case that almost all game dev enthusiasts are gamers, but it's also certainly the case that almost all gamers are not game dev enthusiasts.
Of course, even for those people, I doubt AI is, in itself, a turn off. You can use AI, even considerably, while still adding important creative elements to the process. Obviously something completely vibecoded and spit out in a cycle wouldn't qualify, but you can still do serious development on top of code that is being primarily written by AI.
> I don't doubt that most don't care, same with how most people fairly don't care about most things, but I do think those that like to immerse themselves in the whole journey as well as the result are probably not feeling great. At the very least, this one doesn't feel great.
Why? It literally has zero effect on you. Nobody's stopping you from obsessing about voxels of diversions in whatever if it makes you happy. But it comes across as genuinely pathological that you feel worse because other people don't care about something you care deeply about. Ask yourself this: do YOU feel deeply about EVERYTHING EVERY OTHER PERSON cares deeply about? Should other people be saddened because its-summertime doesn't care about their favorite TV series or how to crochet some particular object? Doesn't this appear patently insane to you?
my guess would be virtually all games are going to made with AI assitance. People are going to have to get over their AI phobia and just judge the quality of the result, there's awful things and good things.
Interestingly, a number of my non coder gamer friends are having a lot of fun lately making their own games using AI.
The making games part, absolutely. I have probably over 20 games that nobody plays. I have updated games at the request of the only person who plays it. I once made a game that I thought that no-one at all played but then got feedback from someone to say that their entire office was addicted to it. Last week I got an email asking for the solution to one of the last levels of a game I made around 2000-2001 (which I really should reply to :-/ ).
There was another thread yesterday about coding for the joy of it, I entirely support that too. I have written a few Dweets in my time, but the author of Littlejs is one of the masters of the form https://beta.dwitter.net/u/KilledByAPixel/top
> Making things for the joy of making them is wonderful to see.
ehm except they're not doing anything really? the real joy was getting to know the processor, write down some assembly and see the result on an emulator, that was real joy, too easy writing a prompt that god know what it generates
Have you ever felt joy watching a sunset? Smelling a flower? Hearing a song? Seeing a child laugh? Did you create any of those things?
You may or may not be right about whether prompting is creation, but it is certainly possible to feel joy without any act of creation being involved. So you need a different argument if you’d like to prove that “making Commodore games using prompting cannot lead to joy.”
The question was clearly about whether or not you felt joy from something that you didn't take part in creating. The fact that you're now playing dumb and obsessively returning to the topic of prompting shows you don't have a good counterargument.
I'll remind you again: it's none of your business what gives people joy.
Just to be explicit, and correct me if I’m wrong in my understanding, but your argument was:
1. Prompting is not creation.
2. Therefore prompting cannot lead to joy.
For this argument to work, you’re implicitly also claiming that
1.5 Only activities that involve creation can lead to joy.
My counterexamples (if you agree with them, but you say you do) show that this latter statement is not true.
So if you’d like to show that “prompting cannot lead to joy”, you need to fix up your proof. I’m not claiming that you’re wrong! But the reasoning gave cannot possibly be correct.
> Have you ever felt joy watching a sunset? Smelling a flower? Hearing a song? Seeing a child laugh? Did you create any of those things?
What has to do with prompting? you don't prompt for experiences like that, we are lucky that we live in a world full of authentic unexpected experiences. WTH has to do with prompting.
> 1.5 Only activities that involve creation can lead to joy.
Exactly, joy and meaning, like basically ALL psychiatrist and what not they're telling us since the start of the 21st century.
If you happen to like something that got out of a prompt, then imo you're a mediocre who doesn't know better, the same that listen to shit music, movies, games and what not. The same miserable mediocre that doom scrolls social, ingest fake news, propaganda and ai slop and doesn't know better.
I'm not saying mediocre as derogatory term to the person it's just what it is.
The entire point of technology is to provide shortcuts. Compilers are shortcuts to creativity. So are IDEs. So are game engines.
Laziness is not an inherent vice and working hard is not an inherent virtue, no matter how long the gold stars for effort linger in your memory.
> The entire point of technology is to provide shortcuts.
Convenience not shortcuts, they're very different.
> Compilers are shortcuts to creativity. So are IDEs.
I argue that they're not shortcuts, but convenient ways for making you more productive. And compilers made use productive 1000x not AI that allegedly made us 10x(and it's actually not)
They are causing things to be made that they enjoy. And most likely having far more creative involvement than you’re giving credit for. I hang out on Ai game dev forums. Typical creations are garbage, but good stuff is made through human sweat and ingenuity, regardless of AI.
On the train jumping demo, I'm noticing a lag after pressing space bar before I see my character jump. I remember even with the 8-bit Nintendo, the controller would be polled and my sprite immediately updated every 60Hz screen draw cycle. Despite all the new technology, that simple thing doesn't happen here.
I feel like creativity of humanity is highly dependant of the tools that are available. 8bit computers with their strenghts and limitations were one such tool. Flash was another. I feel like 3D never landed on anything even remotely similar.
In theory you can do anything in 3d. In practice, it's hard so you tend to gravitate to stale mechanics and bland styles that were done a thousend times.
This lack of limitations combined with complexity of making anything even remotely creative in 3d caused IMHO 3d games to never achieve any significant fraction of the creativity that 8bit and Flash stuff contained.
i have a good answer. you can create a game from scratch with ai, but that will take much longer, cost more, and be buggier, because about half the code is usually the engine itself.
so not only is it a ton of code to write but it's a lot to debug and test. that said, it's a lot of fun writing your own engine from scratch if you are into that kind of fun. but if you want to make a game, why write the engine also?
not in my experience, might cost more in the initial setup possibly (well within my plans limits anyways), then after that modifying and building the game is really incremental the AI game engine seems way more adaptable a fit for purpose. Costly thing with games (in terms of tokens) is generally dealing with images.
It's interesting that while gamers are pretty critical of games made with AI/LLM assistance there are some game developers really going full steam ahead (pun intended) with coding agents for game development.
The website redesign is incredibly cool too, sure it starts the fans on my potato of a laptop (and stutters a bit) but it runs well enough that it's actually made me interested to give it a go.
I'll save everyone a click and encourage them to check it out too, not just the blog post:
https://littlejsengine.com/
EDIT: And it looks like there's an ongoing jam for it too, mentioned in the blog post:
https://itch.io/jam/littlejs-jam
It’s fun to build some small games with the kids for kicks. I’m definitely going to explore LittleJS for sure
I'll speak not as a professional gamedev, but a hobbiest. I enjoy offloading a lot of the work to LLMs because that's what a game engine did anyway in the before times. A lot of core logic in computer graphics, user input, dialog systems, etc... are incredibly tedious to build and have been built a thousand times over.
>gamers are pretty critical of games made with AI/LLM assistance
I think this is a misinterpretation of this general dynamic.
Gamers are pretty critical of "art" made with AI assistance. That includes not just graphical art, but voice over work, animations, writing, etc. And most of that criticism surely comes from the fact that it's apparent and ruins the willing suspension of disbelief while gaming.
But I don't think most of these gamers care at all if the game's code was made with AI assistance. I don't think they care at all at that level, just like they don't care what language the code is written in, the frameworks and engines used for the game, or even things like the developer environment. I'm sure there are some diehard anti-AI folk who would disagree, but those people are more "anti-AI" than they are "pro-gamer".
I'll add that even on the art front it's really just a matter of survivorship bias. Gamers hate AI art because it looks bad, is clearly low-effort, or is even because its putting real artists. But we're well past the point of proper AI assistance in art looking bad, and the gamers who don't notice it will simply not care about it.
It depends on how you define "Gamer".
Would Duangle's tale for NOWHERE have made a diversion into making the programming language NONE if AI was involved?
Would Voxel Quest have been nearly as interesting if all the dev blogs were just "I asked claude to do X, Y, and Z"?
I don't doubt that most don't care, same with how most people fairly don't care about most things, but I do think those that like to immerse themselves in the whole journey as well as the result are probably not feeling great. At the very least, this one doesn't feel great.
The two hypotheticals are difficult to answer because any change in process produce a change in result, but in general, I would say the answer to both is yes, perhaps more likely.
Diversions are one of the most discouraged things ing game development. The most common advice to a starting developer is "Limit your scope" I think that advice might need some recalibration. If a developer has a neat idea for a thing, they might now be able to explore it and integrate it into a game over a few days instead of pausing the core game for several months so they develop an idea while their money runs out.
So based in reality. I don't really understand people enjoying doing stuff with prompts, either they're very mediocre or there must be something else. There's also the question that usually some famous game mechanics existed because of trial and error, line after line of hand coded stuff, and patterns emerging as you see fit from the code to the test, if all you do is prompting and piling slop over slop I'm afraid what we have ahead won't be fun, in any industry really
Since assembler was released, 99% of "computers" didn't need to make punch cards anymore.
Since compilers were invented, 99% of "programmers" didn't need to write assembler anymore.
Since agentic harnesses were invented, 99% of "coders" won't need to write code anymore.
The current revolution of AI is not about writing code. It's about (re-)designing workflows so that they're reproducible and testable.
Shitty workflows always led to shitty outcomes, they're just way easier to spot now.
> Since agentic harnesses were invented, 99% of "coders" won't need to write code anymore.
Not true and
> The current revolution of AI is not about writing code. It's about (re-)designing workflows so that they're reproducible and testable.
Not true, it's all about "accellerating"(towards what and why who god knows) the code generation.
The hardness/loop thins it's just yet another pattern invention to justify agentic coding. Btw many of us still hand code, not just reading it, for assuring and be actually accountable for what we release. And i believe so many still hand code it's they won't tell for convenience
You are trying to justify blaming the tool, not how it is used.
Do you also blame a screwdriver for not being able to hammer nails into the wall? Learn the tool and how to use it, decide where it makes sense. Like you should do with all tools.
> The hardness/loop thins it's just yet another pattern invention to justify agentic coding.
In my case, building my harness has sped up reverse engineering immensely. An agent can debug kernels, UART, I2C busses, firmware blobs, binaries within minutes what otherwise would have taken me weeks if not months. And that's just because I gave it a workflow to do this, with build/debugging containers, and the possibility to write Go libraries and bindings in an isolated manner.
They are really good at doing the gruntwork, if you build a testable workflow for them. The TDD/unit/end-to-end tests turn plausible code into deterministic code, and that's the core difference in usage.
> Btw many of us still hand code, not just reading it, for assuring and be actually accountable for what we release.
I also never said that I am not proofreading and refactoring everything they generate, that's your assumption.
Thanks for clarification, I think we actually have some ground stuff we surely agree upon.
> Do you also blame a screwdriver for not being able to hammer nails into the wall? Learn the tool and how to use it, decide where it makes sense. Like you should do with all tools.
Problem is I see where everybody is going with this stuff, and since the software industry has been injected by mediocrity since a long time, they're all trying to use the screwdriver in problematic ways.
I see trends of people not caring anymore, you may argue they didn't before but the careless it's accelerating, not reading code anymore, not even opening an IDE anymore. And this hurts the industry as a whole because make managers believe they can have some expectations.
> The TDD/unit/end-to-end tests turn plausible code into deterministic code, and that's the core difference in usage.
I don't agree on this, for
1) you call it yourself "plausible" and that's a big problem cause it makes your code looks good but it's shit on a second review or in the long term. Human slop is easier to cleanup, and at least you have an attachment and know everything about the human tech debt. AI slop it's very hard to cleanup, sometimes it's cheaper to just throw it away and do it from scratch.
2) In my experience there is no amount of tdd/unit/e2e that guarantees you quality and robustness, let alone "deterministic" results. I saw 90% or more of green code coverage and the application behaving like total shit. Problem is the other trend here is letting AI writing the tests and many many times it pushes useless tests.
Instead of pushing the AI narrative that's better than capable software developers If we were honest from day one we wouldn't have all the stupid trends we have today. And that's our fault, we jumped on the AI bandwagon too early and too enthusiastically. Like we are the only category that's happy to admit that the work has been done by Claude. This is very stupid, we don't even have a self preservation instinct
Basically I see everyone accelerating towards a very negative end result and making developers useless sloperators
> And this hurts the industry as a whole because make managers believe they can have some expectations.
In my opinion it made visible what managers were thinking all along. You should not see your job as a dedication or calling, you should see your employment as a financial contract. Nothing more, nothing less. In their world view, humans are replaceable. Treat them the same way as they treat you.
> Re: TDD and 1/2
Disclaimer: So when I'm talking about my expectations to an LLM Model, I'm talking somewhat specifically about Deepseek v4.1 Flash (FP4), Qwen3.8 27b abliterated (Q4_K_M) that has been post-trained on its reasoning traces, or my own gonano model (reimplementation of deepseek v4.1 flash, but with SIMD so float32).
Deepseek's changes in using Causal-Encoding-Decoding in the KV cache solves a lot of problems that other models still have (including Claude, ChatGPT and all the outdated "big ones" people think still matter in this area). Problems like context drift, hallucinations, etc that are the result of how attention matrixes and K/V/Q based lookups work as a concept.
The way CED is quantized during inference _and_ training it removes positional threshold problems in the final attention matrix lookup. I really recommend reading deepseek's papers, they're really good papers.
Having said that, I don't think that letting LLM models write tests or having an "LLM judge" rate the code of another model let alone rate the quality of PRs will help in this regard. It makes context drift problems worse, and it makes the statistical aspects of the positional encoding and thresholds worse.
In my opinion, humans should write the tests and design the architecture and its symbol/signature-based contracts between packages/folders. LLMs should fill in the blanks based on the descriptions of branches, and not allowed to modify the human-designed parts. (That's how my agentic IDE is built as a concept)
> (...) like we are the only category that's happy to admit that the work has been done by Claude. This is very stupid, we don't even have a self preservation instinct.
In my opinion we've reached Star Trek like programming, in the worst possible sense. Before 2023 if somebody would have asked me if e.g. TNG or Voyager are "real scenarios of tech" I'd say fck no, never would anybody build tech like this that randomly explodes and nobody has a clue how the tech works. Post 2023: Yep, this is exactly how it's going to be.
In Star Trek, holodeck characters would go rogue if their programming changed by merging their knowledge datasets with other datasets from different areas (e.g. doctor with a archeology or biology dataset), essentially representing a mixed control flow vs data problem (like in assembler, like with LLMs nowadays).
Then they'd randomly start killing humans, reach awareness, or ignore safety protocols and humans would have to try to figure out by psychological means whether the holodeck character is actually still a normal character within parameters or not.
This is how I see the future of software is going to be like. Programs will be too complex to evaluate, humans will have forgotten how to write code, and the only way left is something similar to psychology as a "science" that tries to evaluate in a sandbox poking kind of way how software works.
But, thinking of software in the same way as psychology, the only option left for that is that I have to get better at sandboxing and behavioral analysis and reverse engineering. Because that's what most part of my job will be like in 2 to 5 years in the future.
(That's why I'm reimplementing models to understand their differences in behavior, that's why I'm trying to apply my previous "actual ML" sensorics/actuators learnings to the LLMs NLP world, that's why I think meta learning or bayesian/evolutionary learning should be used, that's why I use eBPF for program analysis, that's why I implement primarily everything in Go now etc pp)
Thanks for the long detailed response I appreciate that.
One point worth mentioning is this:
> This is how I see the future of software is going to be like. Programs will be too complex to evaluate, humans will have forgotten how to write code, and the only way left is something similar to psychology as a "science" that tries to evaluate in a sandbox poking kind of way how software works.
I don't want this, and I'm pretty sure you don't want it too, like no one sane would like to have planes software written in this way. Also since you mentioned psychology I think your vision is a bit too much biased towards sci-fi, it reminds me a lot of blade runner/neuromancer and so on :) I think reality won't be as much spectacularly dystopic as in these novels.
Anyways, tangential, I've been a ui programmer for much of my life(games, web and mobile) any suggestion for where to start in reverse engineering? I have some interest in the matter
Sure, but I think I was careful enough to qualify my statements to account for these kinds of "gamers." I'd say the kinds of people you're describing are really game dev enthusiasts. It's certainly the case that almost all game dev enthusiasts are gamers, but it's also certainly the case that almost all gamers are not game dev enthusiasts.
Of course, even for those people, I doubt AI is, in itself, a turn off. You can use AI, even considerably, while still adding important creative elements to the process. Obviously something completely vibecoded and spit out in a cycle wouldn't qualify, but you can still do serious development on top of code that is being primarily written by AI.
> I don't doubt that most don't care, same with how most people fairly don't care about most things, but I do think those that like to immerse themselves in the whole journey as well as the result are probably not feeling great. At the very least, this one doesn't feel great.
Why? It literally has zero effect on you. Nobody's stopping you from obsessing about voxels of diversions in whatever if it makes you happy. But it comes across as genuinely pathological that you feel worse because other people don't care about something you care deeply about. Ask yourself this: do YOU feel deeply about EVERYTHING EVERY OTHER PERSON cares deeply about? Should other people be saddened because its-summertime doesn't care about their favorite TV series or how to crochet some particular object? Doesn't this appear patently insane to you?
my guess would be virtually all games are going to made with AI assitance. People are going to have to get over their AI phobia and just judge the quality of the result, there's awful things and good things.
Interestingly, a number of my non coder gamer friends are having a lot of fun lately making their own games using AI.
An interesting phenomenon that I have noticed is that there has been a proliferation of Commodore 64 games.
This shows people are using AI to make games that they know hardly anyone will play.
Making things for the joy of making them is wonderful to see.
> This shows people are using AI to make games that they know hardly anyone will play.
People have always done this tbh, I've probably built like a dozen+ games at game jams that even I barely remember.
The making games part, absolutely. I have probably over 20 games that nobody plays. I have updated games at the request of the only person who plays it. I once made a game that I thought that no-one at all played but then got feedback from someone to say that their entire office was addicted to it. Last week I got an email asking for the solution to one of the last levels of a game I made around 2000-2001 (which I really should reply to :-/ ).
There was another thread yesterday about coding for the joy of it, I entirely support that too. I have written a few Dweets in my time, but the author of Littlejs is one of the masters of the form https://beta.dwitter.net/u/KilledByAPixel/top
> Making things for the joy of making them is wonderful to see.
ehm except they're not doing anything really? the real joy was getting to know the processor, write down some assembly and see the result on an emulator, that was real joy, too easy writing a prompt that god know what it generates
That is for them to decide. You may choose to use different methods. I don't think you are entitled to decide what brings joy to others.
No i'm not entitled, but there are facts based on reality: prompting isn't creating, it's a slot(or slop) machine
You still don't get to decide what "the real joy" is in absolute terms.
What are you the lawyer of the prev poster? Anyway I can rule out what it isn't, you're not creating anything what it isn't then? how can it be joy?
Have you ever felt joy watching a sunset? Smelling a flower? Hearing a song? Seeing a child laugh? Did you create any of those things?
You may or may not be right about whether prompting is creation, but it is certainly possible to feel joy without any act of creation being involved. So you need a different argument if you’d like to prove that “making Commodore games using prompting cannot lead to joy.”
> Have you ever felt joy watching a sunset? Smelling a flower? Hearing a song? Seeing a child laugh? Did you create any of those things?
yes and has nothing to do with prompting congratulations
The question was clearly about whether or not you felt joy from something that you didn't take part in creating. The fact that you're now playing dumb and obsessively returning to the topic of prompting shows you don't have a good counterargument.
I'll remind you again: it's none of your business what gives people joy.
Just to be explicit, and correct me if I’m wrong in my understanding, but your argument was:
1. Prompting is not creation.
2. Therefore prompting cannot lead to joy.
For this argument to work, you’re implicitly also claiming that
1.5 Only activities that involve creation can lead to joy.
My counterexamples (if you agree with them, but you say you do) show that this latter statement is not true.
So if you’d like to show that “prompting cannot lead to joy”, you need to fix up your proof. I’m not claiming that you’re wrong! But the reasoning gave cannot possibly be correct.
Ok let's try to argue you said
> Have you ever felt joy watching a sunset? Smelling a flower? Hearing a song? Seeing a child laugh? Did you create any of those things?
What has to do with prompting? you don't prompt for experiences like that, we are lucky that we live in a world full of authentic unexpected experiences. WTH has to do with prompting.
> 1.5 Only activities that involve creation can lead to joy.
Exactly, joy and meaning, like basically ALL psychiatrist and what not they're telling us since the start of the 21st century.
If you happen to like something that got out of a prompt, then imo you're a mediocre who doesn't know better, the same that listen to shit music, movies, games and what not. The same miserable mediocre that doom scrolls social, ingest fake news, propaganda and ai slop and doesn't know better.
I'm not saying mediocre as derogatory term to the person it's just what it is.
how do you feel about people that love going to pachinko
very badly
Who are you to judge other people's ways of enjoying their life?
In the end you are moving a bunch of electrons. With or without AI. You are just annoyed by AI. But creativity has nothing to do with AI or no AI.
AI is a shortcut to creativity and a accellerator to lazyness. This is very well know by now, I'm not saying something crazy
The entire point of technology is to provide shortcuts. Compilers are shortcuts to creativity. So are IDEs. So are game engines. Laziness is not an inherent vice and working hard is not an inherent virtue, no matter how long the gold stars for effort linger in your memory.
> The entire point of technology is to provide shortcuts.
Convenience not shortcuts, they're very different.
> Compilers are shortcuts to creativity. So are IDEs.
I argue that they're not shortcuts, but convenient ways for making you more productive. And compilers made use productive 1000x not AI that allegedly made us 10x(and it's actually not)
They are causing things to be made that they enjoy. And most likely having far more creative involvement than you’re giving credit for. I hang out on Ai game dev forums. Typical creations are garbage, but good stuff is made through human sweat and ingenuity, regardless of AI.
On the train jumping demo, I'm noticing a lag after pressing space bar before I see my character jump. I remember even with the 8-bit Nintendo, the controller would be polled and my sprite immediately updated every 60Hz screen draw cycle. Despite all the new technology, that simple thing doesn't happen here.
probably because space bar does not jump during that demo.
I love LittleJS so much!
And I invite everyone to join their Discord: https://discord.gg/zb7hcGkyZe
The author is very welcoming and helpful.
I feel like creativity of humanity is highly dependant of the tools that are available. 8bit computers with their strenghts and limitations were one such tool. Flash was another. I feel like 3D never landed on anything even remotely similar.
In theory you can do anything in 3d. In practice, it's hard so you tend to gravitate to stale mechanics and bland styles that were done a thousend times.
This lack of limitations combined with complexity of making anything even remotely creative in 3d caused IMHO 3d games to never achieve any significant fraction of the creativity that 8bit and Flash stuff contained.
Then again, I really haven't tried Roblox.
why's it even needed? AI seems really good at doing it without any supporting libraries / frameworks.
i have a good answer. you can create a game from scratch with ai, but that will take much longer, cost more, and be buggier, because about half the code is usually the engine itself.
so not only is it a ton of code to write but it's a lot to debug and test. that said, it's a lot of fun writing your own engine from scratch if you are into that kind of fun. but if you want to make a game, why write the engine also?
not in my experience, might cost more in the initial setup possibly (well within my plans limits anyways), then after that modifying and building the game is really incremental the AI game engine seems way more adaptable a fit for purpose. Costly thing with games (in terms of tokens) is generally dealing with images.
It will be mindblowing if the Youtube demo and screenshots were replaced with actual playable games.
the youtube demo is playable!
https://littlejsengine.com/