Very weird indeed. People must not realize that you can completely change the response you get back from an LLM by how you ask questions. Any bias can implicitly be implanted in the question you ask and drastically modify the response. This is what I got Gemini to say about the article:
The author’s tone in this piece can be described as brutally candid, deeply relieved, and unapologetically sarcastic.
very different from "The overall tone is deeply personal, cathartic, biting, and polemical, with flashes of humor and a deliberate attempt to soften the ending."
Well paid expats wearing a hijab, who definitely aren't refugees, will not be treated nicely in Germany. Lived and worked in Germany and saw it a lot. It's a low bar indeed to treat skilled labor coming to your country nicely that sadly Germany can't even pass.
In case anyone's curious I recommend the podcast episode with Zach Barth on the Draknek and Friends podcast to hear where he's at now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLrh8wcBy8I
Happy to hear that he's continuing developing games and we can expect more to come!
But at some point you really have to accept ignorance. Like, there are countless stories that anyone could read and be outraged about. I think it makes sense to determine the areas that you can make a difference and be informed regarding those to the extend that it helps you making informed decisions.
Yeah, the game "Baseball" on the NES is a good example. I get though that an 8-bit aesthetic would be very tricky to get things like the player portrait details looking right. Cool project by the way!
I'm not sure if this is just me but the mismatch in pixel sizes and inconsistent palette is very jarring. This would be more impressive if this actually matched the 8-bit aesthetic of like the NES.
Yeah, I get all forms of media are avoiding the appearance of using AI like the plague. I still think that what they're saying can still be taken at face value. Like if the game has a 3D sequel I don't immagine the time to release or quality would be outside the distribution of how long similar games take pre-AI.
Here's an example of this regarding the recent indie hit "Mina the Hollower." They were recently interviewed and asked the question "What is Yacht Club's stance on AI and has AI been used in the production of Mina the Hollower at all?" to which their reply was "We all got caught up in AI fever like the rest of the world, but we didn't find it was very effective for what we're doing. Maybe our work just isn't that generic! We've found some ways it can help... like Google or a thesaurus, but it hasn't affected what's in our game." [1]
It's hard to immagine that even the best AI model would result in anything better than a marginal reduction in release timeline. Like maybe for such projects one could spend $X00,000 worth of tokens for maybe like a %single-digit-percent reduction in time to release. Marginally good, maybe even project saving, but not any larger a paradigm shift than Unity was.
I've been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit and testing out the demos people have been sharing, as this would be the place where people most enthusiastic about vibe-coding games post and everything I've seen has been immensely underwhelming. The problem with these games fall into the following categories:
- An utter lack of animation. So many games feature mostly static images.
- AI assets make the game's art style feel horribly incohesive. I played a TCG game where there were high fantasy art, chibi 2d art, anime art, seemingly used haphazardly.
- Bad UX. For example, in the same TCG game, all of the cards had very fancy artwork generated, but the game board itself was far away enough that the made the cards look like blobs on the board.
- Buggy mechanics: There was this guy why shared a platformer generated by fable where you move a lamp to create a shadow path. The character had very awkward movement, would constantly get stuck/unstuck, and would be hard to control.
- Broken mechanics: A lot of games featured exploits that just rendered the game boring to play
- Poor balancing
- Lack of ovararching game structure: no story, no meta-progression, no world-map. These AI games tend to be isolated experiences.
I don't see the masses creating quality, sellable games anytime in the near future. There are so many aesthetic qualities to a game that have direct human bottlenecks. AI can even make games significantly worse as you can seemingly implement many bad mechanics without validating them. Good game devs seem to be relentlessly pruning out the things that down work.
I kind of feel like I'm going crazy when I read comments like this. The era of "little flash games" has never left and there have always been countless number of such games developed. The only thing AI is doing is putting AI developed games in front of Hacker News readers.
Same thoughts exactly. I personally started looking into indie game dev and I've just started to realize how naive I was and how hard just game design can be, and that I'll probably never be good at it, and that most of my ideas are pretty garbage (or incomplete at best).
Even with the perfect AI to write, one would need to iterate through many different ideas, play testing constantly, getting people to play test and analyze what they found fun and where they got stuck. And to get the best ideas you'll need to be playing lots of different kinds of games.
> I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling.
I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and have come to the conclusion that game design is a very difficult art to learn, and something LLMs really can't help with that much. My guess is that these games are "fun" just like toddler paintings are "beautiful." And there are so many quality indie games you could get for the 25+ dollars you'd spend generating the code. Anyways, I guess that's another discussion for another blog post.
Such a fix would have only required basic CSS knowledge and taken max 5 minutes with the HTML inspector. Paying $12 to save 5 minutes ($144/hour) is a decision that a lot of people wouldn't be comfortable making.
Any suggestion on how I should calibrate my cynicism towards this?
I can immagine Anthropic running this experiment multiple times and picking the most impressive one. Or I could immagine like this entire run costing like $1000+ of tokens for this particular run. Or maybe they tried a bunch of Pokemon games and it couldn't even finish some of them. Or is it just able to do this because it has an immense amount of FireRed training data, and if you were to give it an "original" Pokemon game, where it actually had to navigate novel circumstances it would fail.
I had a thought about this coming from the book "Seeing Like a State."
Productivity in large organizations has never been and can never be purely of the legible work which is written in Jira tickets, documented, expressed clearly, but is sustained by an illegible network of relationships between the workers and unwritten knowledge/practices. AI can only consume the work which is legible, but as more work gets pushed into this realm, the illegible relationships and expertise becomes fragmented and atrophies, which puts backpressure on the system's productivity as a whole. And reading said book, my guess that attempting to impose perfect legibility for the sake of AI tooling will ultimately prove disastrous.
There could be a whole spectrum of types of repositories where these tools exceed and fail. I can immagine a large repository, poorly documented, with confusing inconsistent usages/patterns, in a dynamic language, with poor tests will almost always lead to failure.
I honestly think that size and age alone are sufficient to lead these tools into failure cases.
I try to avoid LLMs as much as I can in my role as SWE. I'm not ideologically opposed to switching, I just don't have any pressing need.
There are people I work with who are deep in the AI ecosystem and it's obvious what tools they're using It would not be uncharitable in any way to characterize their work as pure slop that doesn't work, buggy, untested adequately, etc.
The moment I start to feel behind I'll gladly start adopting agentic AI tools, but as things stand now, I'm not seeing any pressing need.
Comments like these make me feel like I'm being gaslit.
> I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing.
It might be just me but this reads as very tone deaf. From my perspective, CEOs are seething at the mouth to make as many developers redundant as possible, not being shy about this desire. (I don't see this at all as inevitable, but tech leaders have made their position clear)
Like, imagine the smugness of some 18th century "CEO" telling an artisan, despite the fact that he'l be resigned to working in horrific conditions at a factory, to not worry and think of all the mass produced consumer goods he may enjoy one day.
It's not at all a stretch of the imagination that current tech workers may be in a very precarious situation. All the slopware in the world wouldn't console them.
very different from "The overall tone is deeply personal, cathartic, biting, and polemical, with flashes of humor and a deliberate attempt to soften the ending."