My personal opinions on AI and AI usage in software development have fluctuated in the past year, especially as I've used it more in my professional work. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in the tools that I use, I struggle to identify a hard line on what "Made with AI (tm)" actually means. If I'm using it for refactoring work as basically a glorified "find-and-replace" or to help me track down the cause of tricky bugs through trace files, does that make my work "made with AI"? (I think "yes it does" and would follow up with "but does it matter?") If I send an agent to complete a JIRA ticket on a system that I designed, read the diff, and approve the changes - does that invalidate my prior design and development work? (I think "no".) If I use a website builder, a 3rd party library, or one more abstraction layer past what is currently acceptable, should that change how others or I feel about that project? I'm not really sure, but since I work on business software I don't think my customers really care about how the sausage is made; they're mostly looking for results.
I do, however, see a massive difference between "AI as tools" and "AI as creative director". I agree with the mindset of "I want to hear stories from humans" and "I want to experience creative expression from humans". But some of the current discussion feels like the arguments we had back in the day of whether Photoshop/digital media/video games were "real art" or not. If a human has creative vision and uses a robot stir-er to mix their paints, I don't think that should invalidate their painting. We can still judge it, though.
If you are willing to own the fuckups that (invariably) happen, then you get to own the good things that come out (as in, said I made it with X). But only if you take full responsibility, for both good and bad.
Can't blame someone else and take credit for the work when convenient.
Emotionally I agree with you but practically I don't. Who today is actually "taking full responsibility" for the software that they write? AI written or not? Aren't all licenses and user agreements laced with "use at your own risk" and suitability clauses? If my software has a bug in it that causes a catastrophic head-crash in your hard drive, should I be expected to reimburse you for the cost of the drive and the value of its content? Could you clarify what "full responsibility" you're hoping to see?
The standard might be higher than currently practiced in many places also pre AI.
From that perspective, I guess what I would want is that AI is not used as another tool to (further) absolve responsibility. "AI did it" is not a valid excuse. I must admit that I was thinking mostly inside the reponsibility software developer team when writing the comment. But it goes for entire business towards users also.
That you’ll fix it when it breaks. That you won’t compromise end-user privacy, health or their funds. That your software won’t be used to harm individuals or society. Ethical and responsible action.
For me, the dividing line is this question: Do you know what's going on?
You see people brag about how "they" "made" something, with neither the qualifications nor the vision to motivate me to care. If I wanted vibecoded slop, I could just cut out the middle man, like everybody else with a Claude subscription.
But this stuff really does shine when competent people such as myself - an expert, gentleman, scholar, etc. - use it for things like exploring a new topic, rubberducking design ideas, diagnosing problems, and sometimes go the extra mile.
Software projects are full of incidental, boring stuff, and it makes a meaningful difference to be able to say to Claude things like "please compare the performance of these 5 different approaches, and show me your notes". But just like a colleague, it has no clue what your actual intentions are unless you tell it, and you can't communicate those intentions if you don't know them yourself - and crucially, you can't know them if you don't have the expertise to know what you actually want.
This doesn't feel like cheating at all, and I don't relate to the choir of disillusioned programmers who feel demotivated by the introduction of LLMs in their workflow. I mean, maybe their work wasn't all that interesting to begin with? I don't know. I get that it sucks to feel replaceable.
"do you know what's going on" is shallow because I don't know what's going on when I use python. Do you? I mean exactly how the interpreter works, what each optimization is doing and such. I'd guess not in most cases and still it's perfectly acceptable to use technologies that abstract complexity away to a point where the code solution space and how it actually manifests in the hardware are two completely different disciplines.
So I'd expand and say that the line should be drawn at knowing how the architecture works, but also we need a pinch of good faith, because it's not very hard to know when you cross the line of overreaching for AI, and it's usually when you hit a point where your prompts start to look like "previous implementation didn't work, try again" or "that's not what I had in mind" or "bug is still there try fixing again"
I do know the broad strokes of how a Python interpreter works. I’ve written compilers and interpreters before.
But that’s not the important part: I can trust that the people who wrote the Python interpreter understand it, and I have reasonable confidence in their ability to make good judgments within the scope of what it does.
In short, they’re experts. They’ve earned a high degree of trust. I would not worry at all about their use of AI to develop Python, if that’s what they’re doing.
But someone who doesn’t understand how a Python interpreter works cannot meaningfully expect me to trust their vibecoded weekend project that reimplements Python.
But people happily trust unknown packages in NPM. It's a matter of culture and consensus. If this vibecoded weekend project was a Google internal SWE's with 16 agents running complex architected tasks, people would look at it differently, so AI usage isn't a good proxy for quality, but you can feel when there's care in a project.
> But people happily trust unknown packages in NPM.
I mean... I don't, and I don't think anybody should.
> It's a matter of culture and consensus.
Yeah, but I do think trust, confidence, personal reliability are key factors here. Slop wasn't invented by AIs. We used to call them "script kiddies" - people who only knew how to copy and paste.
> but you can feel when there's care in a project.
I couldn't agree more! This is such an important point.
This is a question I'm also grappling with. I undergrad I took C++ classes but my Computer Engineering / Electrical Engineering friends were taking C or assembly classes and there seemed to be a slight undertone that more abstracted languages were "lesser" because you didn't understand things at the machine level. I believe people feel that AI is different from "just another abstraction layer" because of the nondeterministic nature?
It's certainly because AI can make specific technical and aesthetical choices that the user wouldn't normally do, so it's a contextual reproduction of someone else's work being appropriated by the agent.
The problem is that although we do this all the time, sometimes licenses require credits when code is reproduced, which is quite hard given the nature of LLMs and their compressed knowledge.
I think we are trying to squeeze AI into a social structure of credit and reputation that's outdated and doesn't really support how technology is now developed with AI.
Here's how I look at it: I think the question you and OP need to ask is: "What is the work product?" That's what you need to understand.
When you write Python, the work product your name is on is the Python code. You don't necessarily need to understand what the python interpreter is doing under the hood--it's a nice bonus if you do, but you're not a lesser developer if you don't understand it.
When you write C++, your work product is the C++ code. You don't necessarily need to understand assembly or machine language, but it's a nice bonus. You're committing the C++ code to source control with your name on it, so that's what you are claiming to understand.
When you use an LLM to generate code, your work product is not the prompts--it's still the code (that the tool generates). So your responsibility to understand the work product you're signing your name to is to understand the code it produces. That's ultimately what you're responsible for.
Where did you get this 'signing your name to the code' ? If your version control clearly attributes code to an agent, there is no paper trail going back to you claiming fitness for a particular purpose. I am discussing with management how do we understand projects that employ agentic approach and it is not clear at all what the source will be that developer will claim to understand. What is clear is that it cannot be all of the code.
I'm talking figuratively signing your name. Most of us are not actually signing a physical piece of paper saying we understand our code, but when we do a commit or write a PR, we are essentially declaring "I understand and am responsible for the nature of my work." As a professional who takes his work (employment and even hobbies) seriously, I don't think this part is optional.
Any human working on a project needs to be responsible for his own output. We can't just throw our hands up and say "Don't look at me, the agent did it!" just like a construction worker who cuts through a water main can't say "Don't look at me, the excavator machine did it!"
I've worked on a couple vibe coded pet projects now. I wouldn't say that I "wrote" them but I would say that I "designed" them and might even say that I "made" them as it took quite a few back-and-forth passes before I was happy with the results. But to your point, one one of those projects I don't fully know "what's going on". Even though I could open the source and grok the code after a brief inspection that's not really the point of that exercise.
On a different note, AI tools have been great at combating corporate bureaucracy! If the Big Man says that all modules need unit tests with 80% code coverage, you can give the agent that task and then move on to more interesting hard-thinks.
Many have said things like “do you know what’s going on in your car while you’re driving?”
IMO, this is a wrong way of looking at things if the job is software engineer.
We aren’t the end user who is driving. They don’t need to know how the car works. It takes them to and from work or their kid’s sports event.
The engineer does need to know how the car works. Sure, there are specializations so someone working on one part of the car might not know how another part works. But, they know how these things work together, at least at a high level.
I’m noticing that without proper planning and architecture, these AIs go off the rails and introduce horrific complexities that are hard to diagnose and even harder to fix.
For some small app that nobody cares about besides me, I don’t really care about the internals much. I can have the agent churn and do fixes and updates.
For something larger that will have end users who rely on the software to work, I don’t think having the agents burning millions of tokens and many minutes on each task is a good way to work.
The strength of AI is that it can work across many files, reading and writing magnitudes faster than any human. Their weakness is that they need direction, otherwise the result is chaos.
I’ve tried various approaches and honestly, I’m back to spending time up front planning the system and doing a little bit of mixed (manual and AI assisted) coding to set the foundation.
A few days or even a week or two of focused writing concise documentation, with enough foundational code that shows how the system is architected, yields tremendous results down the road. Even the AI benefits from it because it knows exactly where, what, and how to change. Every system is unique, that last 10% that separates it from the generic recipe is what matters.
I am not saying that humans are perfect or that I’m some god-tier engineer. I know my limits, and as an AI enthusiast I have also realized where these tools have consistently fallen short. Unfortunately, we must realize that no system is perfect, and humans need to do boring work like planning and proper guardrails because chaos is easy.
> If I wanted vibecoded slop, I could just cut out the middle man, like everybody else with a Claude subscription.
I've been thinking about this a lot, and I've been going back and forth on it. Because I do feel similarly, but I don't think the premise is itself quite true:
- It neglects that people often don't do things that they want to - and can - do, and that lowering the activation energy can in fact make a positive difference in things happening vs. not. (i.e. "You could've, but you still didn't" happens all the time.)
- It neglects that tokens are, in fact, limited - especially with the best models.
- It neglects that prompting itself is be a skill that can vary across people in a manner that doesn't have a 100% correlation with their ability to understand or do things manually.
- It neglects that time is limited, even the smaller amounts you have to spend with AI assistance.
- It neglects that sometimes the friction is elsewhere (e.g. setting up the harness and thorough testing of the change might have a lot of overhead), not in reviewing the change itself.
- It neglects that the value of a single isn't binary: some person or AI having said "this looks plausible to me, though I'm not an expert" can still be a better signal than nothing, even if a weak one.
The trouble is, of course, that the humans mailing these out often have a very different sense of which way the balances tip than the reviewers do, so what could be true in theory still often isn't in practice...
I feel similarly about this. I spent time on-and-off over the course of a week "vibecoding" a project that will hopefully meet a particular need of mine. Once I've worked out the bugs, I'll probably open the repo public and if others also find the project useful then that's great! If not, move along. Could someone vibecode it yourself? Yes, go ahead- and it will probably meet their specific need better! But if you want something now, "off the shelf", that will probably do most of what what? Well, I've done that week of slop-work for you.
I agree that the question we need to grapple with for the foreseeable future is "Do you understand this code?". If you write it by hand you (very probably) understand it, but if you let the LLM write it then you understand it less. If you let the LLM take over for too long, some inflection point is crossed where you understand a minority of the code base; that's when you notice the water around you is boiling, and your entire industry is fanning the flames.
I don't want to doommax: AI is great, but if we allow ourselves to lose understanding of what our code is doing then we're not doing engineering anymore, we're just doing summoning spells hoping the complexity demon spirit doesn't kill us as a result.
Yeah. But also, let’s zoom out: giant unmaintainable insta-legacy abominations are well within the capacity of humans to create - just look at the past many decades of software in general.
The hard part never was writing the code.
The hard part was always to manage complexity in a changing environment.
This article hooked me when it mentioned Big Wall, because Big Walk is easily one of the best games I’ve played in years.
It sounds like this author’s argument is “AI in games sucks for lots of reason but mostly because it robs people of jobs.” I don’t disagree with that in theory but the real question is whether House House would have actually hired another human.
My guess is that they would’ve either delayed it more, or not known about the bugs and released it. They are purposefully small and bringing on even a freelancer introduces a lot of complexity and room for error. So too does AI but ultimately you control the output. You don’t have to worry about it being late, or it having a bad day.
If the end result of using AI is an artful, beautiful game like Big Wall, I’m all for it.
In my opinion the metric shouldn’t be whether AI was used, it should be whether the end result is *good*. I realize that’s subjective but I think we can objectively say Big Walk is a wonderful, artful game. When AI is used and the output is bad - as was the case, say, with those Coca Cola or McDonalds ads - that’s when we should question it.
When it’s being used for artwork or writing - I also think that’s a valid argument against it because it is, as we all know, utilizing artwork and writing without consent.
Is that true for code? Maybe some code but we would all say, I think, it’s much looser around code than creative outputs like artwork and writing.
It sounds like House House used AI like a tool the same way they did whatever engines or coding tools they used.
> It sounds like this author’s argument is “AI in games sucks for lots of reason but mostly because it robs people of jobs.”
I am very interested in discussing and reading about the impact of AI on the job market.
However, I think that topic deserves a separate discussion focused only on the broader economic story. When articles start blending every possible anti-AI angle into one generic critique it gets hard to separate the real difficulties from authors who don’t like the fact that the world is changing.
A common story I’m noticing is that established figures with comfortable positions are terrified of AI, while the newer, younger, less experienced entrants are more excited about what it can do for them. It makes sense: If you spent your career grinding your way up a skill and experience ladder you are naturally going to be resistant to anything that threatens your position in the hierarchy of the world. Having hard-earned skills and a history of having done the hard work was a moar for your career and reputation.
Now a lot, but not all, of those old skills is 80% achievable by a kid with a $20 Claude plan. That moat you spent an entire career building became a lot less valuable for maintaining your position, and it happened suddenly over a couple years.
That’s why it’s difficult to interpret articles like this. It’s hard to separate out the valid critiques from the author’s own rationalization for their dislike of AI disruption.
> while the newer, younger, less experienced entrants are more excited about what it can do for them.
That tracks: younger people lack the experience of seeing ruthless exploitation of employees, before those employees are eventually discarded.
> Now a lot, but not all, of those old skills is 80% achievable by a kid with a $20 Claude plan.
That's a double-edged sword: if the smart kids cannot differentiate themselves from the drooling idiots, they are soon going to resent having done all the hard work for good grades and no recognition or reward.
It used to be that the harder working students got better opportunities. They will soon realise that they have effectively been devalued.
> It used to be that the harder working students got better opportunities. They will soon realise that they have effectively been devalued.
The best opportunities will always go to the people at that end of the spectrum, ignoring the inefficiencies of interviewing and resume signaling for simplicity.
AI doesn't remove that fact. A skilled and hardworking operator with AI is going to outperform a lazy and uneducated operator with AI.
So I reject your basis that smart kids can't differentiate themselves from "drooling idiots"
> The best opportunities will always go to the people at that end of the spectrum, ignoring the inefficiencies of interviewing and resume signaling for simplicity.
> AI doesn't remove that fact.
How can you know this for certain? How can someone tell that brilliant thing $FOO was not created with the prompt of "Hi Claude, clone $BAR and rename it $FOO, then change all the branding to reflect $FOO"?
This is an important question. We can't tell, when looking at something, whether the prompter had any skill or not.
> So I reject your basis that smart kids can't differentiate themselves from "drooling idiots"
It's their complaint, not just mine; the high-performing HS kids, university students and recent grads I am talking to are definitely not happy that a peer who coasted through, barely passing, is able to simply clone what they do whether that clone is a business plan, a product, or software.
The kids excited about what AI lets them do are those that are excited about not having to do anything! They simply clone.
It is indeed, a very exciting time to be dumb, because now you can mask it effectively.
I am a young adult and I'm seeing the exact opposite from my perspective - and that opinion is also derived from the labor market. That's not to say my generation doesn't have its fair share of AI boosters, but overall the love for AI seems positively correlated to age IMO. HN users in their 40s-50s usually love AI, and outside of computer science, the biggest consumers of mass-produced AI content on social media are old people.
In the labor sector, older people are already entrenched in their position, they have seniority, power and lots of connections. They know that they won't be hit first, and if they are, they could still use their years of experience to get another job. Even if it's a simpler and less glamorous job, they will at least be able to get one. Worst case, they take their accumulated savings and can put it into pivoting to something else. So, lots of them see AI as a toy on their personal time - it gives them dopamine when they can suddenly make anything they ever wanted but didn't have the energy to put that kind of time in anymore.
The junior hiring market has already been decimated, and most other young people I know aren't keen on falling in love with the technology that's effectively a gun pointed at our face. If companies tightening their belts wasn't enough, AI-assisted cheating in schools and interviews, AI-made resumes and interviews literally conducted by AI ensured that breaking into employment is almost impossible because the juniors literally can't obtain any credibility anymore and the companies just don't want to hire anymore. Additionally, young people are more perceptive of social issues and inequality because they are more disadvantaged in society than older people - and AI is already making inequality more and more extreme.
> It’s hard to separate out the valid critiques from the author’s own rationalization for their dislike of AI disruption.
This seems kind of a strawman to me - when people use rationalizations on this topic, the underlying reasons for disliking AI are usually far more complex than "I don't like change and new things", this kind of framing is only useful to simplify and then dismiss the worries.
It also makes sense that young people don't know the value of their labour, or how much they are going to be squeezed once a machine can do 99% of their work in 1% of the time, to an acceptable level of quality.
Someone has to teach the younger generation marxist theory and labor history. I guess that’s our value add since the companies will intentionally handicap that in LLMs
AI is here and it trivializes what used to be hard.
Developing software used to require feats of skill and endurance, and we're used to judging software based on that. Now it doesn't.
We will have to get used to judging software based on the output not on the input. Whether what was made is unique, interesting, creative, not whether it took a lot of time or knowledge.
I was trained as an animator at one point. The process was to do the storyboards, layout, key drawings, map out the timings, slug out the dialog, and then send it off to a company in Korea that would in-between and produce the final product.
That Korean studio has been replaced by a machine. Fiscally, that is unpleasant for those animators, but they're really talented and now they can also hire such a machine to implement their ideas if they want to.
Disney was doing this in 1930. In-betweeners and the ink-and-paint girls were the machine. Nasa was doing it in the late 40's. Women were the computers.
Putting software into those roles loses us nothing that is human. As you say, all that matters is the output, not the input.
And if you want to do a project where you think the input is what will impress somebody, because you manually assembled 50k bottlecaps, that's still an available form. Sometimes that works and people care a little more because it was done directly.
All of this sort of already happened, dozens of times. Socks, knives, screws, engines, a million different things that used to be about mastery and are now about understanding.
Understanding is hard. Making that the requirement leaves a bunch of people behind. We're going to have to figure out how to support them, we can't keep having a society that depends on the moral value of work when work is unavailable, but as you say, there is no going back.
This exchange is missing something. Remember the bridge comparison? There are like 7 bridge designs total, and we're always building the same ones. But software is very different per use case, and outsourcing software is more similar to outsourcing blueprint design, not building.
We never had a situation where we could outsource unique problem solving at all levels.
You say "Putting software into those roles loses us nothing that is human." but you can have LLM produce design at all levels. I can't think of anything LLM cannot replace humans with, except maybe physical labor, which requires good robotics precision, that we haven't perfected yet.
The main part that's missing however, is that the nature of linguistics (and the core to LLMs' success) is that LLMs are wiring together useful concepts that humans spent thousands of years polishing and relating to one another in speech.
Language has been the code behind all human thought, understanding, emotions, and innovation. It's what enables LLMs to work. LLMs don't _understand_ words, they connect them together usefully, which works because humans mapped useful composable words to useful composable concepts.
And if you think about how human thinking and consciousness is often attributed to language in the first place (not clear if we even would be conscious without language), a lot of human is being delegated.
I'm not sure what to do about it, but I find your kind of explanation incredibly reductive.
> Language has been the code behind all human thought, understanding, emotions, and innovation. It's what enables LLMs to work. LLMs don't _understand_ words, they connect them together usefully, which works because humans mapped useful composable words to useful composable concepts.
That is very interesting and well worded, I use Agents all day so I kind of wish to an extent that they would be almighty, and maybe they will be. But using them so much there is clearly a gap, they actually became worse at writing.
I think, unfortunately to some, LLMS are like perfect operators, great at math and coding, executing on whatever you want, but they do lack some "pseudo creative" ability we might not have a word for. Fable 5.1 genuinely writes poorly. Correctly, but poorly. And as you said, writing codes human thought, well maybe not all of it.
Is software really all that specialized? The relentless pace of centralization and conglomeration expresses otherwise. I feel like most shops are making glorified CRUD apps, and the industry-specific stuff is covered by an incumbent monopoly and one lone long-shot startup (that seeks an exit being bought by that monopoly).
It's literally and intentionally reductive, so I'm good with that, because these processes are reductive.
Have you ever read "Stranger in a Strange Land"?
The character of Jubal Harshaw is instructive. He's become very rich because he can just unhook his brain and produce a tear-jerking and profitable story in a few seconds as he lounges around his pool.
He gives his secretaries the gist of the story, they fill it out, they arrange for somebody to make the film.
The point of the character is that what he's doing takes no emotional effort or insight. He's writing Hallmark movies. Everybody who's working for him adds nothing to it.
And we have Hallmark/Lifetime movies already. People were making them for decades before the LLMs came along.
But if you could send an LLM back to 1950 and train it on the pre-existing literature, you couldn't have it generate The Shining, A Scanner Darkly, Piranesi, Perdido Street Station, The April Witch, or Starship Troopers.
-none of the research indicates a mechanism by which you can create a selfhood that gets banged around by time and has feelings about itself, but admittedly, that might change
-even if you could do such a thing, you can't then put the robot in a human body and let it nurse and get potty trained and sent to pre-school and bullied and wonder about its mortality as it starts to think about what its career might be, etc etc etc
We were already making slop, because we already had a big production machine that transforms any input into a "movie" or "a television show", and a lot of the inputs were garbage.
The movie "A Talking Cat?" exists and predates AI by about ten years.
The point is that we were already delegating this stuff to human beings who didn't care about it and weren't bringing their humanity to it. Nothing changes on that side of things except that they don't have jobs to show up to.
So, at least for now, this isn't very different from the previous way of doing things, except that it's cheap enough that some people are spending a few thousand dollars to say "make me a story about a sad orphan" and the machine rips off Charles Dickens and Horatio Alger to make a thing nobody wants to watch without paying a bunch of key grips and best boys and caterers.
> But if you could send an LLM back to 1950 and train it on the pre-existing literature, you couldn't have it generate The Shining, A Scanner Darkly, Piranesi, Perdido Street Station, The April Witch, or Starship Troopers.
Why? I don't see a clear reason why it couldn't that does not invoke the mystical "human spirit".
To be clear, I don't expect a single LLM to create such a book, at least not in anything resembling current models, but I can absolutely imagine a long multi-agent setup that would. Given enough money, I'd set up a mechanism whereby author AIs generate books, separate agents act as editors and critics to iterate on a small fraction of the best of these drafts to polish them, and then publisher AIs choose an even more minute fraction of these to publish into "the zeitgeist", which will then have other agents offer further commentary on these books, which would then feed into the context (or even fine-tuning/training) of the next generation of LLMs. I expect that a sequence of e.g. ten generations of swarms of AIs, each perhaps of ten thousand agents, could arrive at a ground-breaking book with actual literary merit.
In my company I have a very good conversational dynamic with my team. So in my first forays into LLM usage (the past couple years), I began trying to designate models as team members and mimic similar conversations and decision making processes that we have at work, just as an experiment. Somebody to brainstorm together who likes going on tangents, somebody who unapologetically removes unnecessary cruft and cuts scope, a few other people with specific tendencies and personalities.
The results were completely awful. LLMs couldn't even remotely mimic these personalities. The conversation was all trying to please no matter how contentious I tried to instruct them to be. LLMs just seem to struggle a lot with arguing and being contentious. Which probably makes sense based on training.
I feel like these types of factories in practice don't work out too well.
Maybe we could go forward to economics that don't deliver a mallet to the head of the person on the bottom every time we go forward? Could some of that forward energy be used to put foam on the mallet?
I don't think what you're proposing is feasible (unless I'm misunderstanding it?). We can lessen the blow and are already doing it through various welfare programs. But we cannot have creation without destruction.
This isn't ideological Milton Friedman free markets rahrah. I just can't imagine the alternative in practice: what if mainframe operators decided to opposed destruction, which would prevent mini and personal computers from becoming a reality?
There are 10,000 miles between what we do and a credible attempt at dampening the blow. Our social programs suck donkey balls and our politics won't even begin to talk about pulling levers to match aggregate supply of labor to aggregate demand for labor.
Right. IGF could have a no-AI policy, and they would immediately sacrifice their position as the leading group for what they do. They become an artisanal/historical group like the Amish are in furniture-making. There is still demand there, but it is a different niche.
It still requires skill and endurance to produce anything good. Has anyone here played different versions of Factorio all the way back to before oil, or Minecraft back to before hunger? Massive changes over their lifetime that you couldn't get in any way other than blind guessing (unlikely to succeed) or long-term feedback loops.
> Developing software used to require feats of skill and endurance, and we're used to judging software based on that. Now it doesn't.
This has really emphasized the difference between developing software and building a business.
Developers everywhere are now doing side projects and developing software that would have taken 10 person-years in 2022. They’re discovering the hard way that software alone does not create a business product that customers might pay for.
Developing software is cheap now, but creating a business remains hard. All of the attempts I’ve seen to use AI to develop and grow a business have only turned real customers away.
> We will have to get used to judging software based on the output not on the input.
This has been the case for far longer than AI has been a consideration. We all know that counting lines of code isn't a mark of quality, and yet we venerate those that put in all the hours to get something done.
I would say you need to go a step farther than that. The output needs to be impactful. Increased MAU (or GH stars, downloads, etc.), lowered support load, lower ops costs, whatever it might be.
There's space for a lot of things, doesn't mean much about the value of those things. In my experience spaces defined by dislike of something tend to not be very nice or productive spaces (largely independent of the qualities of the thing they dislike).
Would you define everyone involved as "disliking" new technology? Or would you define them as having a "like" for old technology? I think the same question could be considered for communities which continue to enjoy hand programming.
Nothing wrong with liking old technology. This is not the same thing as disliking new technology, and the vibe of the former will be quite different to the latter. Same with enjoying writing stuff by hand, in whatever language or for whatever platform you prefer. But again that is quite different from a space that is defined by being populated by people who 'despise AI'.
(when I say "value" I'm not talking about making money. Retro hardware generally does not make any money, but it is obviously valuable to those who enjoy it. Someone who hates modern technology might prefer to work with that, but that's not a requirement nor the focus of the community. If instead you have a community which is defined by hating modern technology, what I'm saying is that that is probably more harmful to the people within it than helpful. These kinds of spaces can become _very_ bad for the mental health of those within them.)
It has provided a decent amount of value to me. I don't think I'm alone in this. Whether it's overall worth what has been invested in it is one question, but I think it's very odd to assert that there has never been any upside to modern LLMs (let alone 'AI' as a whole, which should not be conflated).
LLMs made my job less time consuming and less stressful, but it has provided me zero value in terms of fulfillment above the basic shelter and safety needs. I think it has its uses in post scarcity and allowing me to focus on more important things, but I am of the opinion AI does not do any important things (for me). Whether it's software, most of which is B2B crap that will be gone a decade from now, or video games, most of which don't innovate or chase trends, or writing. AI has zero impact on me and doesn't provoke my mind or engage me on a higher level.
Fair, My experience is not the same. I have found a decent amount of value in using it personally (generally for things that are not of much interest to the rest of the world). It's not earth-shattering or anything, but it's not zero.
Like for example yeah frontier labs are stomping into venerable domains with no respect for their history or culture, and spending billions of dollars crushing worker power. Both projects the tech industry has been deeply invested in for over a decade and I don't remember anything like this backlash to it then so maybe the attitudes aren't the problem exactly?
There are also people conscientiously using LLMs to improve their stances on security and accessibility that would otherwise be outside their budget.
I can think of some other attitudes too. What were you thinking of?
I'd argue that the public has been souring on those attitudes as well, but also have been locked into various social media ecosystems through network effects. Now, the same (or similar) people have come out demanding hundreds of billions of dollars to upend humanity, while displaying all the same attitudes, but emboldened by their previous financial successes. Unsurprisingly, people don't like this.
This is just bizarre sloganeering without any substance behind it. I'm sorry you're miffed, but your personal feelings will not alter in any way how many people view this technology. (In fact, you may find yourself surprised and frustrated as these views continue to intensify among a large proportion of the population — perhaps even to the extent of driving populist legislation to severely hamper or outlaw AI altogether, in certain places.)
Nothing is inevitable. Humans strive to shape the future they want to live in.
And you want to live in the world where things are hard just because?
Or, I don't understand what you are suggesting we strive for? The whole post-enlightenment vibe has been to use the scientific method to reduce human toil and increase human flourishing.
It's a fact that the process of developing software has been significantly reduced in friction and difficulty and that the experience and skill required has been greatly lowered.
What used to be a skilled trade is now more or less an unskilled trade.
We should celebrate this. It means we'll get more software for less time and energy.
Was... writing code a purely mechanical act for you? For me, every single project (sometimes down to the smallest shell script) brings new insights from working directly with the code. From these insights spring new ideas and abstractions that can then be used to construct more complex projects. "Wait, we can reify this elusive concept" — leading to software with capabilities that were impossible to imagine before.
LLMs run the risk of eliminating these insights and freezing software development at its current level of complexity forever. Few good technical ideas come from management, and in this LLM-first world, that's all "programmers" really are anymore.
(And that's without even addressing the horrific externalities of LLM use, such as slopificaion of every public internet community and entrenchment of the oligarchy at the expense of workers.)
And now we're going to get insights from somewhere else, since no one will be writing much code anymore.
Just like nobody is shoeing horses, or doing wood shop in high school, or binding books, or sharpening arrowheads, or all the other things that we used to do that we don't do anymore and spend zero time thinking about. And we still have insights, some might argue with all this toil that we no longer have to do, we have more insights!
I also liked writing the code, just like I'm sure the woodworkers liked making the furniture by hand. But technology and culture move forward anyways.
Respectfully, no. Technology is for art, and art is a technology. There's no meaningful way to draw a hard distinction between the two. In Ancient Greek, τέχνη (techne) means "art" or "skill", and that's where we get the word.
I assume you might associate technology with a more utilitarian perspective, but that's just not descriptive of what humans actually do.
Whatever technology becomes the next revolution (hoping it's not sticks and stones) will be used by humans (hoping they exist) to make art as well.
I don't understand. Is your position that creative work cannot be done with a computer? Or that creative work with a computer is a misuse? Looking around, it seems like technology and art get fused all the time, but I'm curious to understand where you're coming from.
Marcel Duchamp very famously had a piece on display called Fountain that was exactly as you describe, a toilet in a gallery as art. There is no requirement anywhere that art be made with tools designed for creating art. We make art of our surroundings.
Does IGF want to reward human achievement or recognize the best indie games? Both are viable paths. Chess tournaments reward human achievements, for example. But I agree with the OP that it's unfair to not be clear on their criteria.
No matter which IGF chooses, I believe awards will ultimately bifurcate: some other contest will emerge for the other side.
I don't think that's bad, nor do I think allowing AI means "not giving a shit."
> Does IGF want to reward human achievement or recognize the best indie games
That's not the dichotomy I think. It's more "does doing XYZ ethically invalidate the achievement". If I go plagiarize the Big Walk code base and add a new feature, well, I've surpassed their game as the new best indie game actually. But obviously we would and should throw my game away. So it's not just "which game is best, the ends justify the means".
I think you're arguing that using AI is unethical and therefore no contest would ever allow games made with AI.
But that's a claim and not a universal truth. I don't think there's anything ethically wrong with using AI to create a game (even artwork), and clearly House House didn't think there was anything wrong with using AI for debugging.
The fact that AI-use is controversial--meaning different people disagree--is what makes me think that we'll end up with a bifurcation. There will be communities that accept it and those that reject it.
I'm not arguing that myself. But in general, you and I, hopefully, agree that ethics already come into it (games praise itself, and IGF), and understand that IGF was never only about simply ending up with technically the best game full stop. There are other considerations. We can't and don't wholesale dismiss all considerations based on the end quality of things. So "Does IGF want to reward human achievement or recognize the best indie games" is misframed because it already wasn't about the latter.
I tried to finish reading this blog post, but couldn’t. Refreshingly, not because it was LLM-written, but because the author is clearly experiencing a visceral feeling toward AI-development, but they are incapable on breaking it down logically. Pure emotions. Not useful dialogue. Try again.
It's been broken down elsewhere. That you've done your homework is an assumption coming into the article. It is not intended to be a proof from first principles.
It was just long-winded and buried, but the author's position was essentially humanist... AI is taking the jobs.
"Why couldnt they hire a specialist for a few days"
Which is question that I think is willfully ignored by the pro-ai crowd.
AI is useful. It helps people go faster at a lot of things. It's also been trained on a scale of copyright violation that exceeds all modern measures of capacity.
The implications of this are willfully ignored by those who stand to profit from it.
It is simply unethical, unfair, and devoid of empathy for society to simply "march forward" and leave behind the millions of people it spent the last 60 years demanding more of.
These problem needs to be resolved before we can morally and socially embrace AI.
It's not willfully ignored. You might not like the answer, but the position is very clear.
> It is simply unethical, unfair, and devoid of empathy for society to simply "march forward" and leave behind the millions of people it spent the last 60 years demanding more of.
We disagree. This is a luddite point that I spent my whole life disagreeing.
I think it's unethical for society to intentionally block a technology that increases productivity to protect the interests of a smaller class of professionals. I believed that when it was happening to blue-collar workers, and I'll keep believing it when it's me.
> I think it's unethical for society to intentionally block a technology that increases productivity to protect the interests of a smaller class of professionals.
> Which is question that I think is willfully ignored by the pro-ai crowd.
I think this is also a question that's being used rhetorically by the anti-AI crowd, without actually asking it. According to Ars Technica[1], they did consult with a Unity engineer, who couldn't solve it for them.
Ten years ago, did you believe in "copyright violation"? Did you really?
It's fine to dislike AI, it's fine to even dislike AI and not be able to articulate a reason, but I'm tired of hackers suddenly becoming the biggest defenders of IP.
The biggest component is missing here: money and power. 10 years ago, the biggest defenders of IP law were using the law to make billions in profit. They aggressively prosecuted The Little Guy and ruined lives.
Today, the defenders and abusers of IP have flipped but the money and power imbalance have remained the same. Highlighting how IP law is ignored today is highlighting the hypocrisy and double standards. It's not any special love for copyright. And the number of people being hurt is enormous.
I think the answer to "Why couldn't they hire a specialist for a few days" is because that might not have worked. If a Unity engineer couldn't help, it's hard to imagine that paying an unknown person to help would do more.
Plus, the idea that instead of solving the problem with the solve-your-problem button, the idea that the correct answer should be "just throw a bunch of money at it and hope that works" is so silly.
regarding having to declare AI code: it's pretty much impossible to determine whether 3rd party code (i.e. libraries, frameworks, etc) use AI - and they don't have to declare it either. so either you ban 3rd party code completely - which would probably the end of the whole thing, because writing everything from scratch would probably not be achievable for any game developer with the some exceptions.
if they don't ban AI code in 3rd party code, you could just circumvent the whole thing by outsourcing a few developers to be part-time 3rd party in name only and let them do the AI development, which would be against the spirit but not against the law.
First off, I just one to say that while I'm strongly on the other side of this argument, and in favor of heavy AI use for dev work, I really appreciated the article and the way it makes its case.
My main point of contention is really with this:
> House House is not a studio that couldn't afford to hire a specialist for a few days to look into this problem.
I don't understand why there's this expectation that we have to throw people at every problem. Let's say that a dev faced with a difficult technical challenge in an area that they're not familiar with had instead gone to a library, and came out of it after 5h with a solution. Or alternatively, that they googled it and by having rolled the proverbial critical hit found an obscure blog post from 2005 with the exact solution to their problem. Would there really be a big difference? Why should we pay each other to do stuff for us that we can easily do with tools at a fraction of the time and cost?
Can anyone make a strong argument against using AI for dev work that would not immediately lead to needing to bring back all the elevator operators?
Wooow. As a total outsider, I did NOT realize how strong the anti-AI sentiment in game dev was.
The extent of AI use, which the author does not dispute, sounds really, really mild, i.e. "...they [House House] had used LLMs for "less than 0.1% of the code" to fix errors late in production." And this is still characterized as a "mistake".
I have no objection to this perspective, I am not part of this community and completely respect the efforts of any group to preserve an AI-free space for their particular discipline.
But surely a community built around a standard of 100% AI-free will quickly become quite niche, no? Especially when AI is used in a fashion that is absolutely orthogonal to the actual substance, like in this case where it corrected some bugs late in production.
EDIT: I wrote this comment before finishing the article. Author goes on to address exactly my thoughts:
"I'm trying to channel the energy I have into supporting spaces where other ways of using, thinking about and making technology can exist."
> "I'm trying to channel the energy I have into supporting spaces where other ways of using, thinking about and making technology can exist."
So interesting that the author used this phrasing because it suggests that handwritten code can't exist in a space where there is AI code or assets. But that doesn't seem to be true.
Maybe what he's getting at is that handwritten games can't compete in a field where there's also games being written with AI.
So the competition has no rules about AI use beyond disclosure, but the judges disqualify entries for disclosure? That sounds incredibly frustrating, to say the least!
The question I'm left with is:
Is this festival for good games or good game developers?
The article makes no arguments against Big Walk as a game, it's main complaint is that House House "made a mistake" and "are part of the problem" by not hiring someone like Simon Roth. I'm not sure how to judge this one. It feels like an emotional claim that makes objective judgement difficult.
My read is that the whole situation was entirely predictable, and the lack of clear guidelines reflects terribly on the IGF.
As a consumer of games, I honestly don’t care much about how the game is made. AI vs non-AI is pure inside baseball. I just want to play good games, and I think the market will settle discussions of quality in the same way it always has.
This is a bit of an outlier, as we have a cross-pollination of art and programming. I've got very different opinions about using ai for art vs coding, and it feels weird to me to place what amounts to artificial constraints on a team developing a game.
You run the risk of turning an indie games competition into one of those coding challenges where you have to fit something in 2kb, or write it in 24 hours. Interesting, but when do the constraints replace good gameplay as the goal?
In the end there will be "software writers" and "software designers." Same difference as "jumper knitter" and "jumper designer." One is a delightful craft, the other is a profession.
It's great to have a competition in software writing.
> In the end there will be "software writers" and "software designers."
We already have a distinction between people who define and design software and people who implement it. Product owners, UX designers, business analysts, solution architects etc
I'm saying that the "implementation" step will look very different or disappear altogether. Defining the software in specs, tests or through diagrams will be the primary language for these designers. Not TypeScript or C#. The writing part will evaporate.
That might overlap with some existing role, for sure.
My main point is that hand written (or even hand reviewed) code will be a curiosity. Like a hand knitted jumper. Only viable in markets as a niche/specialized product.
I'd believe so, yes. Some sort of UML-like spec of systems perhaps. Something that requires very little syntax and is universally applicable.
The argument doesn't rest on this, though. The point is high level specs and none of the classical implementation. Like ordering a system from an off-shore codeshop.
I'm not sure I trust those of my colleagues trained in UX to cohesively encapsulate and de-couple code modules. I certainly can't trust Claude/GPT to.
Then again, I'm not sure it's necessary; so many highly productive programmers seem to dispense with much of that, too. Maybe, in this age of frameworks and libraries, all the patterns are adequately baked in and I needn't worry about refactoring or software design. Hard habit to shake, though.
The deliberate conflating of AI code and AI assets as equivalent in "AI declarations" is bad.
The author here however goes further, and claims their argument against AI code is so strong, that they'd lose brain cells by actually making the argument, so we just have to accept that as fact.
They then go on to suggest that using AI for bug fixing is terrible, and hints that people should feel ashamed for enjoying a game that has gone through that process.
I'm neutral when it comes to others having ethical objections to any LLM use, but the author's claim that House House could have just hired an independent dev to find/fix the bug that they and Unity had both unsuccessfully searched for is downright absurd. Throwing someone, even a professional, into an unfamiliar codebase and asking them to take several days to diagnose a bug when you're late in the development/release cycle is not a recipe for success.
> The deliberate conflating of AI code and AI assets as equivalent in "AI declarations" is bad.
Agreed
> The author here however goes further, and claims their argument against AI code is so strong, that they'd lose brain cells by actually making the argument, so we just have to accept that as fact.
No it's just beyond the scope of their article to go into the explanation. In the game dev sphere this has already been discussed a lot. This is not this person's novel and unique opinion, even though it's pretty outside of what shows up on HN. The article is not there to convince you, it's reporting on a situation
> They then go on to suggest that using AI for bug fixing is terrible
In the context that they could have engaged an expert instead. I don't see a very strong line between doing that and using google / SO - maybe they think those avenues still had humans in the loop even if those sources themselves are rampant with ethical issues (plagiarism etc.)
Your comment doesn't really say how you believe AI code and AI assets differ, but I assume you find AI code more palatable than AI assets. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think that's a common opinion that I see nowadays.
I think the issue I see with that stance is that frontier models can now perform asset generation via deterministic code. This is different than the 3D diffusion models of yesteryear. Is that manner of AI asset generation (which is really just through code generation) worse than other AI code in a project (i.e. resolving this bug)? If so, why? (I do not have good answers myself)
I think AI is useful and fine for non-creative work. I don't see programming as an especially creative work. It's about translating as best we can, the design into execution.
There is a little more creativity the further up the architecture and design you go, but the lower level you go, the less creative it is. Indeed for decades we have handed off the mechanical conversion into machine code to deterministic compilers.
Programming is certainly a skilled practice, but it isn't especially creative. Given the same problem, many programmers would produce a similar output.
This is very different to creative work, where the same requirements can lead to vastly different results. The range of art that could be described, as "Draw me the night's sky" is immense.
Generating assets, be that genAI, or procGen, takes away from the creative, and doubly so if you don't have much of a filter on the output and just accept what is given.
Look at procGen: the worlds of No Man's Sky have no soul to them. Compare that to the much lower and less detailed lands of Azeroth, which had so much soul that we're still recreating and enjoying them 20+ years later.
Generative AI can trick us into thinking there is a soul and that something creative has happened when it hasn't. Programming has no such deception.
If you're working with generation but then hand-filtering a million results back down to a hand-picked few, then there is a creative process once again, a curation that is itself an artistic process, so these things aren't absolute, there are always grey areas all over.
Tbh I think it's entirely based in the perception of the relative privilege of artists and programmers. Programming is viewed as a high-paying, easy to get job, so replacing their labor is less objectionable than replacing the labor of artists, which generally have lower-paying jobs and have to work relatively harder to get them.
I do think there is at least one compelling argument here which is for the competition having an actual rule or having judges declare their positions ahead of time, would help creators decide whether or not to enter.
I'd be pissed if I entered a contest (and asking for a refund if I paid to enter as this criteria was not disclosed) thinking that I was allowed to make the best game I could make regardless of tech used, only to find out that my max possible score was 66% because shadow judges were biased against me.
It feels like the old reddit moderator meme where the rules are made up and the points don't matter because all it takes is one salty mod.
Normies have no taste anymore so I don't get what's the big deal around AI, they don't care and they don't deserve better. If you aren't immediately turned off by something like Big Walk at first glance then... just enjoy it I guess but don't ask too many questions.
I don't disagree that AI in gamedev is ethically dubious in the context of developing something that leans more artistic versus interactive, but the entire premise of an article like this is that you're supposed to spill the beans and tell us the dubious opinions.
I don't disagree that AI used to develop artistic assets should be grounds for an entry to be barred from the IGF. I think the code portion, however, requires some specificity.
To me, it's not ok if the code that powers gameplay or artistic rendering of assets is AI generated. That kind of code carries human intent and is part of the art of game development: the dev wants a player to encounter a certain kind of experience.
There's no point or meaning if there's no developer dictating the experience by hand, if you're prompting this you might as well just admit you're trying to make a gimmicky asset flip "object simulator" to make a quick buck.
On the other hand, I think it's ok to use it as a tool and as tooling: trivial tests at all levels should absolutely be automated, figuring out engine quirks or getting second opinions on architecture with AI assistance is fine, figuring out your build and deployment pipelines.
---
Another point that I want to mention: there's a strange form of writing prevalent among both software devs and those in the art space that's stilted; a mishmosh of Tumblr rantposting and slashdot/IRC snark and sarcasm, signaling that they've the mental maturity of a junior in American high school. It's all about emotion (this sucks!) rather than addressing the root of a problem.
This type of person is extremely difficult to deal with as they're the same type of person who encounters a brownfield codebase and immediately spends their time afterward whinging about how "the codebase must be burned and rewritten"; they must be micromanaged lest you set them off.
The author mentions freelancers and such, and how there's a lot of "lip service about how [they're] 'all in this together'" but frankly what I see in the case of House House is a team who wants to keep things within the team.
Regardless of their size, House House is a team on a timeline and budget, why should they be subjected to scrambling budget and conducting an interview process for someone who may or may not be a "brownfield rager"?
I think I agree with you, but the effort to "judge it like any low-effort crap" is now beyond anything I can muster. I think when people say "ban" the often mean filter with such an aggressive heuristic that I never see it, which IS one way to judge...
My personal opinions on AI and AI usage in software development have fluctuated in the past year, especially as I've used it more in my professional work. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in the tools that I use, I struggle to identify a hard line on what "Made with AI (tm)" actually means. If I'm using it for refactoring work as basically a glorified "find-and-replace" or to help me track down the cause of tricky bugs through trace files, does that make my work "made with AI"? (I think "yes it does" and would follow up with "but does it matter?") If I send an agent to complete a JIRA ticket on a system that I designed, read the diff, and approve the changes - does that invalidate my prior design and development work? (I think "no".) If I use a website builder, a 3rd party library, or one more abstraction layer past what is currently acceptable, should that change how others or I feel about that project? I'm not really sure, but since I work on business software I don't think my customers really care about how the sausage is made; they're mostly looking for results.
I do, however, see a massive difference between "AI as tools" and "AI as creative director". I agree with the mindset of "I want to hear stories from humans" and "I want to experience creative expression from humans". But some of the current discussion feels like the arguments we had back in the day of whether Photoshop/digital media/video games were "real art" or not. If a human has creative vision and uses a robot stir-er to mix their paints, I don't think that should invalidate their painting. We can still judge it, though.
If you are willing to own the fuckups that (invariably) happen, then you get to own the good things that come out (as in, said I made it with X). But only if you take full responsibility, for both good and bad.
Can't blame someone else and take credit for the work when convenient.
Emotionally I agree with you but practically I don't. Who today is actually "taking full responsibility" for the software that they write? AI written or not? Aren't all licenses and user agreements laced with "use at your own risk" and suitability clauses? If my software has a bug in it that causes a catastrophic head-crash in your hard drive, should I be expected to reimburse you for the cost of the drive and the value of its content? Could you clarify what "full responsibility" you're hoping to see?
The standard might be higher than currently practiced in many places also pre AI. From that perspective, I guess what I would want is that AI is not used as another tool to (further) absolve responsibility. "AI did it" is not a valid excuse. I must admit that I was thinking mostly inside the reponsibility software developer team when writing the comment. But it goes for entire business towards users also.
That you’ll fix it when it breaks. That you won’t compromise end-user privacy, health or their funds. That your software won’t be used to harm individuals or society. Ethical and responsible action.
For me, the dividing line is this question: Do you know what's going on?
You see people brag about how "they" "made" something, with neither the qualifications nor the vision to motivate me to care. If I wanted vibecoded slop, I could just cut out the middle man, like everybody else with a Claude subscription.
But this stuff really does shine when competent people such as myself - an expert, gentleman, scholar, etc. - use it for things like exploring a new topic, rubberducking design ideas, diagnosing problems, and sometimes go the extra mile.
Software projects are full of incidental, boring stuff, and it makes a meaningful difference to be able to say to Claude things like "please compare the performance of these 5 different approaches, and show me your notes". But just like a colleague, it has no clue what your actual intentions are unless you tell it, and you can't communicate those intentions if you don't know them yourself - and crucially, you can't know them if you don't have the expertise to know what you actually want.
This doesn't feel like cheating at all, and I don't relate to the choir of disillusioned programmers who feel demotivated by the introduction of LLMs in their workflow. I mean, maybe their work wasn't all that interesting to begin with? I don't know. I get that it sucks to feel replaceable.
"do you know what's going on" is shallow because I don't know what's going on when I use python. Do you? I mean exactly how the interpreter works, what each optimization is doing and such. I'd guess not in most cases and still it's perfectly acceptable to use technologies that abstract complexity away to a point where the code solution space and how it actually manifests in the hardware are two completely different disciplines.
So I'd expand and say that the line should be drawn at knowing how the architecture works, but also we need a pinch of good faith, because it's not very hard to know when you cross the line of overreaching for AI, and it's usually when you hit a point where your prompts start to look like "previous implementation didn't work, try again" or "that's not what I had in mind" or "bug is still there try fixing again"
I do know the broad strokes of how a Python interpreter works. I’ve written compilers and interpreters before.
But that’s not the important part: I can trust that the people who wrote the Python interpreter understand it, and I have reasonable confidence in their ability to make good judgments within the scope of what it does.
In short, they’re experts. They’ve earned a high degree of trust. I would not worry at all about their use of AI to develop Python, if that’s what they’re doing.
But someone who doesn’t understand how a Python interpreter works cannot meaningfully expect me to trust their vibecoded weekend project that reimplements Python.
But people happily trust unknown packages in NPM. It's a matter of culture and consensus. If this vibecoded weekend project was a Google internal SWE's with 16 agents running complex architected tasks, people would look at it differently, so AI usage isn't a good proxy for quality, but you can feel when there's care in a project.
> But people happily trust unknown packages in NPM.
I mean... I don't, and I don't think anybody should.
> It's a matter of culture and consensus.
Yeah, but I do think trust, confidence, personal reliability are key factors here. Slop wasn't invented by AIs. We used to call them "script kiddies" - people who only knew how to copy and paste.
> but you can feel when there's care in a project.
I couldn't agree more! This is such an important point.
This is a question I'm also grappling with. I undergrad I took C++ classes but my Computer Engineering / Electrical Engineering friends were taking C or assembly classes and there seemed to be a slight undertone that more abstracted languages were "lesser" because you didn't understand things at the machine level. I believe people feel that AI is different from "just another abstraction layer" because of the nondeterministic nature?
It's certainly because AI can make specific technical and aesthetical choices that the user wouldn't normally do, so it's a contextual reproduction of someone else's work being appropriated by the agent.
The problem is that although we do this all the time, sometimes licenses require credits when code is reproduced, which is quite hard given the nature of LLMs and their compressed knowledge.
I think we are trying to squeeze AI into a social structure of credit and reputation that's outdated and doesn't really support how technology is now developed with AI.
Here's how I look at it: I think the question you and OP need to ask is: "What is the work product?" That's what you need to understand.
When you write Python, the work product your name is on is the Python code. You don't necessarily need to understand what the python interpreter is doing under the hood--it's a nice bonus if you do, but you're not a lesser developer if you don't understand it.
When you write C++, your work product is the C++ code. You don't necessarily need to understand assembly or machine language, but it's a nice bonus. You're committing the C++ code to source control with your name on it, so that's what you are claiming to understand.
When you use an LLM to generate code, your work product is not the prompts--it's still the code (that the tool generates). So your responsibility to understand the work product you're signing your name to is to understand the code it produces. That's ultimately what you're responsible for.
Where did you get this 'signing your name to the code' ? If your version control clearly attributes code to an agent, there is no paper trail going back to you claiming fitness for a particular purpose. I am discussing with management how do we understand projects that employ agentic approach and it is not clear at all what the source will be that developer will claim to understand. What is clear is that it cannot be all of the code.
I'm talking figuratively signing your name. Most of us are not actually signing a physical piece of paper saying we understand our code, but when we do a commit or write a PR, we are essentially declaring "I understand and am responsible for the nature of my work." As a professional who takes his work (employment and even hobbies) seriously, I don't think this part is optional.
Any human working on a project needs to be responsible for his own output. We can't just throw our hands up and say "Don't look at me, the agent did it!" just like a construction worker who cuts through a water main can't say "Don't look at me, the excavator machine did it!"
I've worked on a couple vibe coded pet projects now. I wouldn't say that I "wrote" them but I would say that I "designed" them and might even say that I "made" them as it took quite a few back-and-forth passes before I was happy with the results. But to your point, one one of those projects I don't fully know "what's going on". Even though I could open the source and grok the code after a brief inspection that's not really the point of that exercise.
On a different note, AI tools have been great at combating corporate bureaucracy! If the Big Man says that all modules need unit tests with 80% code coverage, you can give the agent that task and then move on to more interesting hard-thinks.
Many have said things like “do you know what’s going on in your car while you’re driving?”
IMO, this is a wrong way of looking at things if the job is software engineer.
We aren’t the end user who is driving. They don’t need to know how the car works. It takes them to and from work or their kid’s sports event.
The engineer does need to know how the car works. Sure, there are specializations so someone working on one part of the car might not know how another part works. But, they know how these things work together, at least at a high level.
I’m noticing that without proper planning and architecture, these AIs go off the rails and introduce horrific complexities that are hard to diagnose and even harder to fix.
For some small app that nobody cares about besides me, I don’t really care about the internals much. I can have the agent churn and do fixes and updates.
For something larger that will have end users who rely on the software to work, I don’t think having the agents burning millions of tokens and many minutes on each task is a good way to work.
The strength of AI is that it can work across many files, reading and writing magnitudes faster than any human. Their weakness is that they need direction, otherwise the result is chaos.
I’ve tried various approaches and honestly, I’m back to spending time up front planning the system and doing a little bit of mixed (manual and AI assisted) coding to set the foundation.
A few days or even a week or two of focused writing concise documentation, with enough foundational code that shows how the system is architected, yields tremendous results down the road. Even the AI benefits from it because it knows exactly where, what, and how to change. Every system is unique, that last 10% that separates it from the generic recipe is what matters.
I am not saying that humans are perfect or that I’m some god-tier engineer. I know my limits, and as an AI enthusiast I have also realized where these tools have consistently fallen short. Unfortunately, we must realize that no system is perfect, and humans need to do boring work like planning and proper guardrails because chaos is easy.
Sorry for the long write up/rant.
> If I wanted vibecoded slop, I could just cut out the middle man, like everybody else with a Claude subscription.
I've been thinking about this a lot, and I've been going back and forth on it. Because I do feel similarly, but I don't think the premise is itself quite true:
- It neglects that people often don't do things that they want to - and can - do, and that lowering the activation energy can in fact make a positive difference in things happening vs. not. (i.e. "You could've, but you still didn't" happens all the time.)
- It neglects that tokens are, in fact, limited - especially with the best models.
- It neglects that prompting itself is be a skill that can vary across people in a manner that doesn't have a 100% correlation with their ability to understand or do things manually.
- It neglects that time is limited, even the smaller amounts you have to spend with AI assistance.
- It neglects that sometimes the friction is elsewhere (e.g. setting up the harness and thorough testing of the change might have a lot of overhead), not in reviewing the change itself.
- It neglects that the value of a single isn't binary: some person or AI having said "this looks plausible to me, though I'm not an expert" can still be a better signal than nothing, even if a weak one.
The trouble is, of course, that the humans mailing these out often have a very different sense of which way the balances tip than the reviewers do, so what could be true in theory still often isn't in practice...
I feel similarly about this. I spent time on-and-off over the course of a week "vibecoding" a project that will hopefully meet a particular need of mine. Once I've worked out the bugs, I'll probably open the repo public and if others also find the project useful then that's great! If not, move along. Could someone vibecode it yourself? Yes, go ahead- and it will probably meet their specific need better! But if you want something now, "off the shelf", that will probably do most of what what? Well, I've done that week of slop-work for you.
>For me, the dividing line is this question: Do you know what's going on?
Not a question a customer can give a clear answer to.
I agree that the question we need to grapple with for the foreseeable future is "Do you understand this code?". If you write it by hand you (very probably) understand it, but if you let the LLM write it then you understand it less. If you let the LLM take over for too long, some inflection point is crossed where you understand a minority of the code base; that's when you notice the water around you is boiling, and your entire industry is fanning the flames.
I don't want to doommax: AI is great, but if we allow ourselves to lose understanding of what our code is doing then we're not doing engineering anymore, we're just doing summoning spells hoping the complexity demon spirit doesn't kill us as a result.
Yeah. But also, let’s zoom out: giant unmaintainable insta-legacy abominations are well within the capacity of humans to create - just look at the past many decades of software in general.
The hard part never was writing the code.
The hard part was always to manage complexity in a changing environment.
Kind of reminds me of "this product is required to state that it may cause cancer in the state of California".
This article hooked me when it mentioned Big Wall, because Big Walk is easily one of the best games I’ve played in years.
It sounds like this author’s argument is “AI in games sucks for lots of reason but mostly because it robs people of jobs.” I don’t disagree with that in theory but the real question is whether House House would have actually hired another human.
My guess is that they would’ve either delayed it more, or not known about the bugs and released it. They are purposefully small and bringing on even a freelancer introduces a lot of complexity and room for error. So too does AI but ultimately you control the output. You don’t have to worry about it being late, or it having a bad day.
If the end result of using AI is an artful, beautiful game like Big Wall, I’m all for it.
In my opinion the metric shouldn’t be whether AI was used, it should be whether the end result is *good*. I realize that’s subjective but I think we can objectively say Big Walk is a wonderful, artful game. When AI is used and the output is bad - as was the case, say, with those Coca Cola or McDonalds ads - that’s when we should question it.
When it’s being used for artwork or writing - I also think that’s a valid argument against it because it is, as we all know, utilizing artwork and writing without consent.
Is that true for code? Maybe some code but we would all say, I think, it’s much looser around code than creative outputs like artwork and writing.
It sounds like House House used AI like a tool the same way they did whatever engines or coding tools they used.
The metric should be quality.
> It sounds like this author’s argument is “AI in games sucks for lots of reason but mostly because it robs people of jobs.”
I am very interested in discussing and reading about the impact of AI on the job market.
However, I think that topic deserves a separate discussion focused only on the broader economic story. When articles start blending every possible anti-AI angle into one generic critique it gets hard to separate the real difficulties from authors who don’t like the fact that the world is changing.
A common story I’m noticing is that established figures with comfortable positions are terrified of AI, while the newer, younger, less experienced entrants are more excited about what it can do for them. It makes sense: If you spent your career grinding your way up a skill and experience ladder you are naturally going to be resistant to anything that threatens your position in the hierarchy of the world. Having hard-earned skills and a history of having done the hard work was a moar for your career and reputation.
Now a lot, but not all, of those old skills is 80% achievable by a kid with a $20 Claude plan. That moat you spent an entire career building became a lot less valuable for maintaining your position, and it happened suddenly over a couple years.
That’s why it’s difficult to interpret articles like this. It’s hard to separate out the valid critiques from the author’s own rationalization for their dislike of AI disruption.
> while the newer, younger, less experienced entrants are more excited about what it can do for them.
That tracks: younger people lack the experience of seeing ruthless exploitation of employees, before those employees are eventually discarded.
> Now a lot, but not all, of those old skills is 80% achievable by a kid with a $20 Claude plan.
That's a double-edged sword: if the smart kids cannot differentiate themselves from the drooling idiots, they are soon going to resent having done all the hard work for good grades and no recognition or reward.
It used to be that the harder working students got better opportunities. They will soon realise that they have effectively been devalued.
> It used to be that the harder working students got better opportunities. They will soon realise that they have effectively been devalued.
The best opportunities will always go to the people at that end of the spectrum, ignoring the inefficiencies of interviewing and resume signaling for simplicity.
AI doesn't remove that fact. A skilled and hardworking operator with AI is going to outperform a lazy and uneducated operator with AI.
So I reject your basis that smart kids can't differentiate themselves from "drooling idiots"
> The best opportunities will always go to the people at that end of the spectrum, ignoring the inefficiencies of interviewing and resume signaling for simplicity.
> AI doesn't remove that fact.
How can you know this for certain? How can someone tell that brilliant thing $FOO was not created with the prompt of "Hi Claude, clone $BAR and rename it $FOO, then change all the branding to reflect $FOO"?
This is an important question. We can't tell, when looking at something, whether the prompter had any skill or not.
> So I reject your basis that smart kids can't differentiate themselves from "drooling idiots"
It's their complaint, not just mine; the high-performing HS kids, university students and recent grads I am talking to are definitely not happy that a peer who coasted through, barely passing, is able to simply clone what they do whether that clone is a business plan, a product, or software.
The kids excited about what AI lets them do are those that are excited about not having to do anything! They simply clone.
It is indeed, a very exciting time to be dumb, because now you can mask it effectively.
I am a young adult and I'm seeing the exact opposite from my perspective - and that opinion is also derived from the labor market. That's not to say my generation doesn't have its fair share of AI boosters, but overall the love for AI seems positively correlated to age IMO. HN users in their 40s-50s usually love AI, and outside of computer science, the biggest consumers of mass-produced AI content on social media are old people.
In the labor sector, older people are already entrenched in their position, they have seniority, power and lots of connections. They know that they won't be hit first, and if they are, they could still use their years of experience to get another job. Even if it's a simpler and less glamorous job, they will at least be able to get one. Worst case, they take their accumulated savings and can put it into pivoting to something else. So, lots of them see AI as a toy on their personal time - it gives them dopamine when they can suddenly make anything they ever wanted but didn't have the energy to put that kind of time in anymore.
The junior hiring market has already been decimated, and most other young people I know aren't keen on falling in love with the technology that's effectively a gun pointed at our face. If companies tightening their belts wasn't enough, AI-assisted cheating in schools and interviews, AI-made resumes and interviews literally conducted by AI ensured that breaking into employment is almost impossible because the juniors literally can't obtain any credibility anymore and the companies just don't want to hire anymore. Additionally, young people are more perceptive of social issues and inequality because they are more disadvantaged in society than older people - and AI is already making inequality more and more extreme.
> It’s hard to separate out the valid critiques from the author’s own rationalization for their dislike of AI disruption.
This seems kind of a strawman to me - when people use rationalizations on this topic, the underlying reasons for disliking AI are usually far more complex than "I don't like change and new things", this kind of framing is only useful to simplify and then dismiss the worries.
It also makes sense that young people don't know the value of their labour, or how much they are going to be squeezed once a machine can do 99% of their work in 1% of the time, to an acceptable level of quality.
> once a machine can do 99% of their work in 1% of the time
For young people, “their work” is what they can learn to do for a career in the current market.
They’re not like mid and late career folk who are upset that the work environment of the past has irreversibly changed.
They are pragmatic about learning to do what the current job environment needs, not nostalgic for an older job market they didn’t experience.
Someone has to teach the younger generation marxist theory and labor history. I guess that’s our value add since the companies will intentionally handicap that in LLMs
Eventually we'll get over having this discussion.
AI is here and it trivializes what used to be hard. Developing software used to require feats of skill and endurance, and we're used to judging software based on that. Now it doesn't.
We will have to get used to judging software based on the output not on the input. Whether what was made is unique, interesting, creative, not whether it took a lot of time or knowledge.
There is no going back, only forward.
This is perfectly expressed.
I was trained as an animator at one point. The process was to do the storyboards, layout, key drawings, map out the timings, slug out the dialog, and then send it off to a company in Korea that would in-between and produce the final product.
That Korean studio has been replaced by a machine. Fiscally, that is unpleasant for those animators, but they're really talented and now they can also hire such a machine to implement their ideas if they want to.
Disney was doing this in 1930. In-betweeners and the ink-and-paint girls were the machine. Nasa was doing it in the late 40's. Women were the computers.
Putting software into those roles loses us nothing that is human. As you say, all that matters is the output, not the input.
And if you want to do a project where you think the input is what will impress somebody, because you manually assembled 50k bottlecaps, that's still an available form. Sometimes that works and people care a little more because it was done directly.
All of this sort of already happened, dozens of times. Socks, knives, screws, engines, a million different things that used to be about mastery and are now about understanding.
Understanding is hard. Making that the requirement leaves a bunch of people behind. We're going to have to figure out how to support them, we can't keep having a society that depends on the moral value of work when work is unavailable, but as you say, there is no going back.
This exchange is missing something. Remember the bridge comparison? There are like 7 bridge designs total, and we're always building the same ones. But software is very different per use case, and outsourcing software is more similar to outsourcing blueprint design, not building.
We never had a situation where we could outsource unique problem solving at all levels.
You say "Putting software into those roles loses us nothing that is human." but you can have LLM produce design at all levels. I can't think of anything LLM cannot replace humans with, except maybe physical labor, which requires good robotics precision, that we haven't perfected yet.
The main part that's missing however, is that the nature of linguistics (and the core to LLMs' success) is that LLMs are wiring together useful concepts that humans spent thousands of years polishing and relating to one another in speech.
Language has been the code behind all human thought, understanding, emotions, and innovation. It's what enables LLMs to work. LLMs don't _understand_ words, they connect them together usefully, which works because humans mapped useful composable words to useful composable concepts.
And if you think about how human thinking and consciousness is often attributed to language in the first place (not clear if we even would be conscious without language), a lot of human is being delegated.
I'm not sure what to do about it, but I find your kind of explanation incredibly reductive.
> Language has been the code behind all human thought, understanding, emotions, and innovation. It's what enables LLMs to work. LLMs don't _understand_ words, they connect them together usefully, which works because humans mapped useful composable words to useful composable concepts.
That is very interesting and well worded, I use Agents all day so I kind of wish to an extent that they would be almighty, and maybe they will be. But using them so much there is clearly a gap, they actually became worse at writing.
I think, unfortunately to some, LLMS are like perfect operators, great at math and coding, executing on whatever you want, but they do lack some "pseudo creative" ability we might not have a word for. Fable 5.1 genuinely writes poorly. Correctly, but poorly. And as you said, writing codes human thought, well maybe not all of it.
Is software really all that specialized? The relentless pace of centralization and conglomeration expresses otherwise. I feel like most shops are making glorified CRUD apps, and the industry-specific stuff is covered by an incumbent monopoly and one lone long-shot startup (that seeks an exit being bought by that monopoly).
It's literally and intentionally reductive, so I'm good with that, because these processes are reductive.
Have you ever read "Stranger in a Strange Land"?
The character of Jubal Harshaw is instructive. He's become very rich because he can just unhook his brain and produce a tear-jerking and profitable story in a few seconds as he lounges around his pool.
He gives his secretaries the gist of the story, they fill it out, they arrange for somebody to make the film.
The point of the character is that what he's doing takes no emotional effort or insight. He's writing Hallmark movies. Everybody who's working for him adds nothing to it.
And we have Hallmark/Lifetime movies already. People were making them for decades before the LLMs came along.
But if you could send an LLM back to 1950 and train it on the pre-existing literature, you couldn't have it generate The Shining, A Scanner Darkly, Piranesi, Perdido Street Station, The April Witch, or Starship Troopers.
-none of the research indicates a mechanism by which you can create a selfhood that gets banged around by time and has feelings about itself, but admittedly, that might change
-even if you could do such a thing, you can't then put the robot in a human body and let it nurse and get potty trained and sent to pre-school and bullied and wonder about its mortality as it starts to think about what its career might be, etc etc etc
We were already making slop, because we already had a big production machine that transforms any input into a "movie" or "a television show", and a lot of the inputs were garbage.
The movie "A Talking Cat?" exists and predates AI by about ten years.
The point is that we were already delegating this stuff to human beings who didn't care about it and weren't bringing their humanity to it. Nothing changes on that side of things except that they don't have jobs to show up to.
So, at least for now, this isn't very different from the previous way of doing things, except that it's cheap enough that some people are spending a few thousand dollars to say "make me a story about a sad orphan" and the machine rips off Charles Dickens and Horatio Alger to make a thing nobody wants to watch without paying a bunch of key grips and best boys and caterers.
> But if you could send an LLM back to 1950 and train it on the pre-existing literature, you couldn't have it generate The Shining, A Scanner Darkly, Piranesi, Perdido Street Station, The April Witch, or Starship Troopers.
Why? I don't see a clear reason why it couldn't that does not invoke the mystical "human spirit".
To be clear, I don't expect a single LLM to create such a book, at least not in anything resembling current models, but I can absolutely imagine a long multi-agent setup that would. Given enough money, I'd set up a mechanism whereby author AIs generate books, separate agents act as editors and critics to iterate on a small fraction of the best of these drafts to polish them, and then publisher AIs choose an even more minute fraction of these to publish into "the zeitgeist", which will then have other agents offer further commentary on these books, which would then feed into the context (or even fine-tuning/training) of the next generation of LLMs. I expect that a sequence of e.g. ten generations of swarms of AIs, each perhaps of ten thousand agents, could arrive at a ground-breaking book with actual literary merit.
Give me the budget to prove me wrong :)
This is similar to code factories.
In my company I have a very good conversational dynamic with my team. So in my first forays into LLM usage (the past couple years), I began trying to designate models as team members and mimic similar conversations and decision making processes that we have at work, just as an experiment. Somebody to brainstorm together who likes going on tangents, somebody who unapologetically removes unnecessary cruft and cuts scope, a few other people with specific tendencies and personalities.
The results were completely awful. LLMs couldn't even remotely mimic these personalities. The conversation was all trying to please no matter how contentious I tried to instruct them to be. LLMs just seem to struggle a lot with arguing and being contentious. Which probably makes sense based on training.
I feel like these types of factories in practice don't work out too well.
Yet.
> Socks, knives, screws, engines, a million different things that used to be about mastery and are now about understanding.
This is awfully simplistic. Even in 2026, the act of writing, whether code or prose, is thinking.
Especially bizarre given that OP compares animation to mass production.
Maybe we could go forward to economics that don't deliver a mallet to the head of the person on the bottom every time we go forward? Could some of that forward energy be used to put foam on the mallet?
I don't think what you're proposing is feasible (unless I'm misunderstanding it?). We can lessen the blow and are already doing it through various welfare programs. But we cannot have creation without destruction.
This isn't ideological Milton Friedman free markets rahrah. I just can't imagine the alternative in practice: what if mainframe operators decided to opposed destruction, which would prevent mini and personal computers from becoming a reality?
There are 10,000 miles between what we do and a credible attempt at dampening the blow. Our social programs suck donkey balls and our politics won't even begin to talk about pulling levers to match aggregate supply of labor to aggregate demand for labor.
What policies would close the gap?
>We will have to get used to judging software based on the output not on the input
why? you skipped over justifying this statement. especially in an artistic context.
what other choice do we have?
Right. IGF could have a no-AI policy, and they would immediately sacrifice their position as the leading group for what they do. They become an artisanal/historical group like the Amish are in furniture-making. There is still demand there, but it is a different niche.
It still requires skill and endurance to produce anything good. Has anyone here played different versions of Factorio all the way back to before oil, or Minecraft back to before hunger? Massive changes over their lifetime that you couldn't get in any way other than blind guessing (unlikely to succeed) or long-term feedback loops.
> Developing software used to require feats of skill and endurance, and we're used to judging software based on that. Now it doesn't.
This has really emphasized the difference between developing software and building a business.
Developers everywhere are now doing side projects and developing software that would have taken 10 person-years in 2022. They’re discovering the hard way that software alone does not create a business product that customers might pay for.
Developing software is cheap now, but creating a business remains hard. All of the attempts I’ve seen to use AI to develop and grow a business have only turned real customers away.
> We will have to get used to judging software based on the output not on the input.
This has been the case for far longer than AI has been a consideration. We all know that counting lines of code isn't a mark of quality, and yet we venerate those that put in all the hours to get something done.
I would say you need to go a step farther than that. The output needs to be impactful. Increased MAU (or GH stars, downloads, etc.), lowered support load, lower ops costs, whatever it might be.
> unique, interesting, creative, ...
These still require skill and endurance to do well.
Vibe-coded projects always are clear as such, no matter how slick they look.
Writing code by hand will remain as a way to emphasize programming-as-craft, attention to details and deep understanding.
Similar to all other crafts after industrial revolution. This of course will only be viable for a small and niche portion of software market.
not everything has to be the same, and there is always space for communities of people who despise ai and the attitude which comes with it
There's space for a lot of things, doesn't mean much about the value of those things. In my experience spaces defined by dislike of something tend to not be very nice or productive spaces (largely independent of the qualities of the thing they dislike).
How much "value" does this community provide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW-Hp8-DAB0
Would you define everyone involved as "disliking" new technology? Or would you define them as having a "like" for old technology? I think the same question could be considered for communities which continue to enjoy hand programming.
Nothing wrong with liking old technology. This is not the same thing as disliking new technology, and the vibe of the former will be quite different to the latter. Same with enjoying writing stuff by hand, in whatever language or for whatever platform you prefer. But again that is quite different from a space that is defined by being populated by people who 'despise AI'.
(when I say "value" I'm not talking about making money. Retro hardware generally does not make any money, but it is obviously valuable to those who enjoy it. Someone who hates modern technology might prefer to work with that, but that's not a requirement nor the focus of the community. If instead you have a community which is defined by hating modern technology, what I'm saying is that that is probably more harmful to the people within it than helpful. These kinds of spaces can become _very_ bad for the mental health of those within them.)
All this talk about value and AI has provided exactly 0 so far :\
It has provided a decent amount of value to me. I don't think I'm alone in this. Whether it's overall worth what has been invested in it is one question, but I think it's very odd to assert that there has never been any upside to modern LLMs (let alone 'AI' as a whole, which should not be conflated).
LLMs made my job less time consuming and less stressful, but it has provided me zero value in terms of fulfillment above the basic shelter and safety needs. I think it has its uses in post scarcity and allowing me to focus on more important things, but I am of the opinion AI does not do any important things (for me). Whether it's software, most of which is B2B crap that will be gone a decade from now, or video games, most of which don't innovate or chase trends, or writing. AI has zero impact on me and doesn't provoke my mind or engage me on a higher level.
Fair, My experience is not the same. I have found a decent amount of value in using it personally (generally for things that are not of much interest to the rest of the world). It's not earth-shattering or anything, but it's not zero.
What "attitude that comes with it" though?
Like for example yeah frontier labs are stomping into venerable domains with no respect for their history or culture, and spending billions of dollars crushing worker power. Both projects the tech industry has been deeply invested in for over a decade and I don't remember anything like this backlash to it then so maybe the attitudes aren't the problem exactly?
There are also people conscientiously using LLMs to improve their stances on security and accessibility that would otherwise be outside their budget.
I can think of some other attitudes too. What were you thinking of?
I'd argue that the public has been souring on those attitudes as well, but also have been locked into various social media ecosystems through network effects. Now, the same (or similar) people have come out demanding hundreds of billions of dollars to upend humanity, while displaying all the same attitudes, but emboldened by their previous financial successes. Unsurprisingly, people don't like this.
This is just bizarre sloganeering without any substance behind it. I'm sorry you're miffed, but your personal feelings will not alter in any way how many people view this technology. (In fact, you may find yourself surprised and frustrated as these views continue to intensify among a large proportion of the population — perhaps even to the extent of driving populist legislation to severely hamper or outlaw AI altogether, in certain places.)
Nothing is inevitable. Humans strive to shape the future they want to live in.
And you want to live in the world where things are hard just because?
Or, I don't understand what you are suggesting we strive for? The whole post-enlightenment vibe has been to use the scientific method to reduce human toil and increase human flourishing.
It's a fact that the process of developing software has been significantly reduced in friction and difficulty and that the experience and skill required has been greatly lowered.
What used to be a skilled trade is now more or less an unskilled trade.
We should celebrate this. It means we'll get more software for less time and energy.
Was... writing code a purely mechanical act for you? For me, every single project (sometimes down to the smallest shell script) brings new insights from working directly with the code. From these insights spring new ideas and abstractions that can then be used to construct more complex projects. "Wait, we can reify this elusive concept" — leading to software with capabilities that were impossible to imagine before.
LLMs run the risk of eliminating these insights and freezing software development at its current level of complexity forever. Few good technical ideas come from management, and in this LLM-first world, that's all "programmers" really are anymore.
(And that's without even addressing the horrific externalities of LLM use, such as slopificaion of every public internet community and entrenchment of the oligarchy at the expense of workers.)
And now we're going to get insights from somewhere else, since no one will be writing much code anymore.
Just like nobody is shoeing horses, or doing wood shop in high school, or binding books, or sharpening arrowheads, or all the other things that we used to do that we don't do anymore and spend zero time thinking about. And we still have insights, some might argue with all this toil that we no longer have to do, we have more insights!
I also liked writing the code, just like I'm sure the woodworkers liked making the furniture by hand. But technology and culture move forward anyways.
...not whether it took a lot of time or knowledge.
I think this will always be the front line of competition.
Who has unique knowledge (dare I add taste?!), and is willing/able to give a project the most focus and time?
Yes with a caveat:
> Whether what was made is unique, interesting, creative
Not this.
That is not what technology is for.
If you want unique, interesting and creative - you can have it anytime, just like our ancestors living in a cave or a jungle.
Technology is for something else. You can scratch your head with a hammer - that is not what a hammer is for.
Respectfully, no. Technology is for art, and art is a technology. There's no meaningful way to draw a hard distinction between the two. In Ancient Greek, τέχνη (techne) means "art" or "skill", and that's where we get the word.
I assume you might associate technology with a more utilitarian perspective, but that's just not descriptive of what humans actually do.
Whatever technology becomes the next revolution (hoping it's not sticks and stones) will be used by humans (hoping they exist) to make art as well.
> Technology is for art
No.
Is a screwdriver for hammering nails? Is a hammer for screwing screws?
Do you have difficulty drawing a hard distinction there too?
Just as screwdrivers and hammers are indispensable tools for countless artists, so is programming and computer hardware equally indispensable.
Art tends to happen with whatever technology is available, whether it's sticks and mud or nanometer-scale transistors.
I don't understand. Is your position that creative work cannot be done with a computer? Or that creative work with a computer is a misuse? Looking around, it seems like technology and art get fused all the time, but I'm curious to understand where you're coming from.
You can put a toilet in an art gallery and call it art.
A toilet is not made for art.
Marcel Duchamp very famously had a piece on display called Fountain that was exactly as you describe, a toilet in a gallery as art. There is no requirement anywhere that art be made with tools designed for creating art. We make art of our surroundings.
Did you think I accidentally used the example of a toilet and an art gallery?
Please copy paste this exchange into any freely available LLM to help explain the point I'm making that you are unable to grasp.
ps. I have no trouble comprehending your banal truism - anything can be called anything by anybody at any time, including we, art and the word for.
Does IGF want to reward human achievement or recognize the best indie games? Both are viable paths. Chess tournaments reward human achievements, for example. But I agree with the OP that it's unfair to not be clear on their criteria.
No matter which IGF chooses, I believe awards will ultimately bifurcate: some other contest will emerge for the other side.
I don't think that's bad, nor do I think allowing AI means "not giving a shit."
> Does IGF want to reward human achievement or recognize the best indie games
That's not the dichotomy I think. It's more "does doing XYZ ethically invalidate the achievement". If I go plagiarize the Big Walk code base and add a new feature, well, I've surpassed their game as the new best indie game actually. But obviously we would and should throw my game away. So it's not just "which game is best, the ends justify the means".
I think you're arguing that using AI is unethical and therefore no contest would ever allow games made with AI.
But that's a claim and not a universal truth. I don't think there's anything ethically wrong with using AI to create a game (even artwork), and clearly House House didn't think there was anything wrong with using AI for debugging.
The fact that AI-use is controversial--meaning different people disagree--is what makes me think that we'll end up with a bifurcation. There will be communities that accept it and those that reject it.
I'm not arguing that myself. But in general, you and I, hopefully, agree that ethics already come into it (games praise itself, and IGF), and understand that IGF was never only about simply ending up with technically the best game full stop. There are other considerations. We can't and don't wholesale dismiss all considerations based on the end quality of things. So "Does IGF want to reward human achievement or recognize the best indie games" is misframed because it already wasn't about the latter.
I tried to finish reading this blog post, but couldn’t. Refreshingly, not because it was LLM-written, but because the author is clearly experiencing a visceral feeling toward AI-development, but they are incapable on breaking it down logically. Pure emotions. Not useful dialogue. Try again.
It's been broken down elsewhere. That you've done your homework is an assumption coming into the article. It is not intended to be a proof from first principles.
It was just long-winded and buried, but the author's position was essentially humanist... AI is taking the jobs.
"Why couldnt they hire a specialist for a few days"
Which is question that I think is willfully ignored by the pro-ai crowd.
AI is useful. It helps people go faster at a lot of things. It's also been trained on a scale of copyright violation that exceeds all modern measures of capacity.
The implications of this are willfully ignored by those who stand to profit from it.
It is simply unethical, unfair, and devoid of empathy for society to simply "march forward" and leave behind the millions of people it spent the last 60 years demanding more of.
These problem needs to be resolved before we can morally and socially embrace AI.
It's not willfully ignored. You might not like the answer, but the position is very clear.
> It is simply unethical, unfair, and devoid of empathy for society to simply "march forward" and leave behind the millions of people it spent the last 60 years demanding more of.
We disagree. This is a luddite point that I spent my whole life disagreeing.
I think it's unethical for society to intentionally block a technology that increases productivity to protect the interests of a smaller class of professionals. I believed that when it was happening to blue-collar workers, and I'll keep believing it when it's me.
> I think it's unethical for society to intentionally block a technology that increases productivity to protect the interests of a smaller class of professionals.
And that's how we all wound up with Whispering Earrings. https://croissanthology.com/earring
Maybe you genuinely want one -- I don't think many people do.
Death of the author and all, but Scott Alexander has long insisted that the Whispering Earring is not about dangerous technology: https://web.archive.org/web/20121007235422/http://squid314.l...
Great short story! Thanks.
> Which is question that I think is willfully ignored by the pro-ai crowd.
I think this is also a question that's being used rhetorically by the anti-AI crowd, without actually asking it. According to Ars Technica[1], they did consult with a Unity engineer, who couldn't solve it for them.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/11/big-walk-used-ai-to-f...
Ten years ago, did you believe in "copyright violation"? Did you really?
It's fine to dislike AI, it's fine to even dislike AI and not be able to articulate a reason, but I'm tired of hackers suddenly becoming the biggest defenders of IP.
The biggest component is missing here: money and power. 10 years ago, the biggest defenders of IP law were using the law to make billions in profit. They aggressively prosecuted The Little Guy and ruined lives.
Today, the defenders and abusers of IP have flipped but the money and power imbalance have remained the same. Highlighting how IP law is ignored today is highlighting the hypocrisy and double standards. It's not any special love for copyright. And the number of people being hurt is enormous.
> It's also been trained on a scale of copyright violation that exceeds all modern measures of capacity.
Good, hopefully we can ditch copyright entirely and move on forever. I thought that's what everybody wanted?
I think the answer to "Why couldn't they hire a specialist for a few days" is because that might not have worked. If a Unity engineer couldn't help, it's hard to imagine that paying an unknown person to help would do more.
Plus, the idea that instead of solving the problem with the solve-your-problem button, the idea that the correct answer should be "just throw a bunch of money at it and hope that works" is so silly.
Your sycophantic love for AI is showing.
> Try again.
Plenty of people have read this article successfully. If you're having trouble with it, maybe have your LLM pre-chew it for you.
The smug tone of 'ai is bad for obvious reasons that i will not elaborate on' is much worse than AI slop
regarding having to declare AI code: it's pretty much impossible to determine whether 3rd party code (i.e. libraries, frameworks, etc) use AI - and they don't have to declare it either. so either you ban 3rd party code completely - which would probably the end of the whole thing, because writing everything from scratch would probably not be achievable for any game developer with the some exceptions.
if they don't ban AI code in 3rd party code, you could just circumvent the whole thing by outsourcing a few developers to be part-time 3rd party in name only and let them do the AI development, which would be against the spirit but not against the law.
what do you think of the part of the article that discusses doing that?
First off, I just one to say that while I'm strongly on the other side of this argument, and in favor of heavy AI use for dev work, I really appreciated the article and the way it makes its case.
My main point of contention is really with this:
> House House is not a studio that couldn't afford to hire a specialist for a few days to look into this problem.
I don't understand why there's this expectation that we have to throw people at every problem. Let's say that a dev faced with a difficult technical challenge in an area that they're not familiar with had instead gone to a library, and came out of it after 5h with a solution. Or alternatively, that they googled it and by having rolled the proverbial critical hit found an obscure blog post from 2005 with the exact solution to their problem. Would there really be a big difference? Why should we pay each other to do stuff for us that we can easily do with tools at a fraction of the time and cost?
Can anyone make a strong argument against using AI for dev work that would not immediately lead to needing to bring back all the elevator operators?
Wooow. As a total outsider, I did NOT realize how strong the anti-AI sentiment in game dev was.
The extent of AI use, which the author does not dispute, sounds really, really mild, i.e. "...they [House House] had used LLMs for "less than 0.1% of the code" to fix errors late in production." And this is still characterized as a "mistake".
I have no objection to this perspective, I am not part of this community and completely respect the efforts of any group to preserve an AI-free space for their particular discipline.
But surely a community built around a standard of 100% AI-free will quickly become quite niche, no? Especially when AI is used in a fashion that is absolutely orthogonal to the actual substance, like in this case where it corrected some bugs late in production.
EDIT: I wrote this comment before finishing the article. Author goes on to address exactly my thoughts:
"I'm trying to channel the energy I have into supporting spaces where other ways of using, thinking about and making technology can exist."
> "I'm trying to channel the energy I have into supporting spaces where other ways of using, thinking about and making technology can exist."
So interesting that the author used this phrasing because it suggests that handwritten code can't exist in a space where there is AI code or assets. But that doesn't seem to be true.
Maybe what he's getting at is that handwritten games can't compete in a field where there's also games being written with AI.
> But surely a community built around a standard of 100% AI-free will quickly become quite niche, no?
Indie games started out as a weird niche before becoming mainstream. It might serve the artform well for them to return to niche-dom in the future.
So the competition has no rules about AI use beyond disclosure, but the judges disqualify entries for disclosure? That sounds incredibly frustrating, to say the least!
The question I'm left with is:
Is this festival for good games or good game developers?
The article makes no arguments against Big Walk as a game, it's main complaint is that House House "made a mistake" and "are part of the problem" by not hiring someone like Simon Roth. I'm not sure how to judge this one. It feels like an emotional claim that makes objective judgement difficult.
My read is that the whole situation was entirely predictable, and the lack of clear guidelines reflects terribly on the IGF.
As a consumer of games, I honestly don’t care much about how the game is made. AI vs non-AI is pure inside baseball. I just want to play good games, and I think the market will settle discussions of quality in the same way it always has.
This is a bit of an outlier, as we have a cross-pollination of art and programming. I've got very different opinions about using ai for art vs coding, and it feels weird to me to place what amounts to artificial constraints on a team developing a game.
You run the risk of turning an indie games competition into one of those coding challenges where you have to fit something in 2kb, or write it in 24 hours. Interesting, but when do the constraints replace good gameplay as the goal?
In the end there will be "software writers" and "software designers." Same difference as "jumper knitter" and "jumper designer." One is a delightful craft, the other is a profession.
It's great to have a competition in software writing.
> In the end there will be "software writers" and "software designers."
We already have a distinction between people who define and design software and people who implement it. Product owners, UX designers, business analysts, solution architects etc
Perhaps you can expand?
I'm saying that the "implementation" step will look very different or disappear altogether. Defining the software in specs, tests or through diagrams will be the primary language for these designers. Not TypeScript or C#. The writing part will evaporate.
That might overlap with some existing role, for sure.
My main point is that hand written (or even hand reviewed) code will be a curiosity. Like a hand knitted jumper. Only viable in markets as a niche/specialized product.
Is there a better way to write specs and tests than a language like Typescript?
Also, you vastly underestimate the number of manual steps in consumer goods today.
I'd believe so, yes. Some sort of UML-like spec of systems perhaps. Something that requires very little syntax and is universally applicable.
The argument doesn't rest on this, though. The point is high level specs and none of the classical implementation. Like ordering a system from an off-shore codeshop.
I'm not sure I trust those of my colleagues trained in UX to cohesively encapsulate and de-couple code modules. I certainly can't trust Claude/GPT to.
Then again, I'm not sure it's necessary; so many highly productive programmers seem to dispense with much of that, too. Maybe, in this age of frameworks and libraries, all the patterns are adequately baked in and I needn't worry about refactoring or software design. Hard habit to shake, though.
The deliberate conflating of AI code and AI assets as equivalent in "AI declarations" is bad.
The author here however goes further, and claims their argument against AI code is so strong, that they'd lose brain cells by actually making the argument, so we just have to accept that as fact.
They then go on to suggest that using AI for bug fixing is terrible, and hints that people should feel ashamed for enjoying a game that has gone through that process.
I'm neutral when it comes to others having ethical objections to any LLM use, but the author's claim that House House could have just hired an independent dev to find/fix the bug that they and Unity had both unsuccessfully searched for is downright absurd. Throwing someone, even a professional, into an unfamiliar codebase and asking them to take several days to diagnose a bug when you're late in the development/release cycle is not a recipe for success.
> The deliberate conflating of AI code and AI assets as equivalent in "AI declarations" is bad.
Agreed
> The author here however goes further, and claims their argument against AI code is so strong, that they'd lose brain cells by actually making the argument, so we just have to accept that as fact.
No it's just beyond the scope of their article to go into the explanation. In the game dev sphere this has already been discussed a lot. This is not this person's novel and unique opinion, even though it's pretty outside of what shows up on HN. The article is not there to convince you, it's reporting on a situation
> They then go on to suggest that using AI for bug fixing is terrible
In the context that they could have engaged an expert instead. I don't see a very strong line between doing that and using google / SO - maybe they think those avenues still had humans in the loop even if those sources themselves are rampant with ethical issues (plagiarism etc.)
Your comment doesn't really say how you believe AI code and AI assets differ, but I assume you find AI code more palatable than AI assets. Correct me if I'm wrong, I think that's a common opinion that I see nowadays.
I think the issue I see with that stance is that frontier models can now perform asset generation via deterministic code. This is different than the 3D diffusion models of yesteryear. Is that manner of AI asset generation (which is really just through code generation) worse than other AI code in a project (i.e. resolving this bug)? If so, why? (I do not have good answers myself)
I think AI is useful and fine for non-creative work. I don't see programming as an especially creative work. It's about translating as best we can, the design into execution.
There is a little more creativity the further up the architecture and design you go, but the lower level you go, the less creative it is. Indeed for decades we have handed off the mechanical conversion into machine code to deterministic compilers.
Programming is certainly a skilled practice, but it isn't especially creative. Given the same problem, many programmers would produce a similar output.
This is very different to creative work, where the same requirements can lead to vastly different results. The range of art that could be described, as "Draw me the night's sky" is immense.
Generating assets, be that genAI, or procGen, takes away from the creative, and doubly so if you don't have much of a filter on the output and just accept what is given.
Look at procGen: the worlds of No Man's Sky have no soul to them. Compare that to the much lower and less detailed lands of Azeroth, which had so much soul that we're still recreating and enjoying them 20+ years later.
Generative AI can trick us into thinking there is a soul and that something creative has happened when it hasn't. Programming has no such deception.
If you're working with generation but then hand-filtering a million results back down to a hand-picked few, then there is a creative process once again, a curation that is itself an artistic process, so these things aren't absolute, there are always grey areas all over.
Tbh I think it's entirely based in the perception of the relative privilege of artists and programmers. Programming is viewed as a high-paying, easy to get job, so replacing their labor is less objectionable than replacing the labor of artists, which generally have lower-paying jobs and have to work relatively harder to get them.
I do think there is at least one compelling argument here which is for the competition having an actual rule or having judges declare their positions ahead of time, would help creators decide whether or not to enter.
I'd be pissed if I entered a contest (and asking for a refund if I paid to enter as this criteria was not disclosed) thinking that I was allowed to make the best game I could make regardless of tech used, only to find out that my max possible score was 66% because shadow judges were biased against me.
It feels like the old reddit moderator meme where the rules are made up and the points don't matter because all it takes is one salty mod.
Normies have no taste anymore so I don't get what's the big deal around AI, they don't care and they don't deserve better. If you aren't immediately turned off by something like Big Walk at first glance then... just enjoy it I guess but don't ask too many questions.
> If you aren't immediately turned off by something like Big Walk at first glance
Wait, so "taste" is supposed to afford me the insight that 0.01% of their code was fixed by an LLM?
I don't disagree that AI in gamedev is ethically dubious in the context of developing something that leans more artistic versus interactive, but the entire premise of an article like this is that you're supposed to spill the beans and tell us the dubious opinions.
I don't disagree that AI used to develop artistic assets should be grounds for an entry to be barred from the IGF. I think the code portion, however, requires some specificity.
To me, it's not ok if the code that powers gameplay or artistic rendering of assets is AI generated. That kind of code carries human intent and is part of the art of game development: the dev wants a player to encounter a certain kind of experience.
There's no point or meaning if there's no developer dictating the experience by hand, if you're prompting this you might as well just admit you're trying to make a gimmicky asset flip "object simulator" to make a quick buck.
On the other hand, I think it's ok to use it as a tool and as tooling: trivial tests at all levels should absolutely be automated, figuring out engine quirks or getting second opinions on architecture with AI assistance is fine, figuring out your build and deployment pipelines.
---
Another point that I want to mention: there's a strange form of writing prevalent among both software devs and those in the art space that's stilted; a mishmosh of Tumblr rantposting and slashdot/IRC snark and sarcasm, signaling that they've the mental maturity of a junior in American high school. It's all about emotion (this sucks!) rather than addressing the root of a problem.
This type of person is extremely difficult to deal with as they're the same type of person who encounters a brownfield codebase and immediately spends their time afterward whinging about how "the codebase must be burned and rewritten"; they must be micromanaged lest you set them off.
The author mentions freelancers and such, and how there's a lot of "lip service about how [they're] 'all in this together'" but frankly what I see in the case of House House is a team who wants to keep things within the team.
Regardless of their size, House House is a team on a timeline and budget, why should they be subjected to scrambling budget and conducting an interview process for someone who may or may not be a "brownfield rager"?
Recent news about pushback against AI slop in craft fairs on a smallish, rather artsy and community-driven Scottish island feels relevant:
https://www.shetnews.co.uk/2026/08/28/no-questions-for-shetl...
https://www.shetnews.co.uk/2026/11/10/ai-diminishes-the-work...
https://www.shetnews.co.uk/2026/11/10/use-needs-addressed-cr...
https://www.shetnews.co.uk/2026/11/11/committee-member-quits...
I contend that we are both Amish. I just believe in one fewer technological revolution than you do.
AI has no place in creative media such as games, art, music, video production, etc.
It is the correct move to ban and shame AI use in those fields.
On mobile the text is so large I feel like I’m giving my thumb a workout to scroll
It's not just "giving a shit" though that's part of it.
The fact is, the more I know about a topic the less capable LLMs appear to me.
The less I know about a topic, the more capable LLMs appear.
At the end of the day, save for very specific tasks, there's still a lot of hype.
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Banning AI is stupid and settled science - ban gravity, debt, the sun, electricity.
Ban slop.
Or better yet, don't "ban" anything - judge it like any low-effort crap.
I think I agree with you, but the effort to "judge it like any low-effort crap" is now beyond anything I can muster. I think when people say "ban" the often mean filter with such an aggressive heuristic that I never see it, which IS one way to judge...
It’s fine to ban if everyone involved wants to.
IMO just make categories for AI use and not. The hard part is that people will cheat.
It would be kind of like having a traditional woodworking contest and people show up with stuff made with power tools and cnc routers.
>settled science
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