My bet is working through an abstraction layer (LLMs) will make crafting a fun game more difficult. The art of designing a (great) game is in the details. English is not sufficient to communicate the individual strokes of a brush on canvas.
Also, thank you for sharing your experience. I recently joined that subreddit just to see what people are creating and I too have been unimpressed.
For months, I've been thinking of how to express or name this idea that people misname the way other people use coding agents and make bad assumptions about what sorts of tasks they could be used for, seemingly all in the service of demonstrating how derivative the end results must be. So thank you for whatever you've done to help dislodge the blocker for me.
I think there is a model in a lot of people's minds that AI coding is exclusively handing off the thought processes and ideation processes to the agent, which seems to foreclose on the possibility that it offers the least friction of any other available method to translate the users thoughts into useful artifacts, some of which are the working software that is the primary goal of development. The model says something like "I don't know what it needs to consist of, but make me this thing I'll know when I see.". But there are also plenty of people who have spent the time learning these skills before AI came along, and remain capable of performing those feats without the ai, but realize they are even more capable to do those same things with AI, in volumes that would have been previously prohibitively tedious. And now that they have the tedium wrangled, they are freed from all of these arguments that start: we can't do that because it would take forever.
> And now that they have the tedium wrangled, they are freed from all of these arguments that start: we can't do that because it would take forever.
I'm strongly skeptical of this argument, as there's only a few things you can not build a rough version and get something to ideate upon. Even with 3d games you can do design with blocks and buy models to have something to pinpoint the design.
This is still an incomplete model, in my opinion. You're still holding up what is possible as a non ai assisted developer as equal to the assisted one in the abstract, before adding in real world things like tedium, boredom, distraction, the ephemeral nature of novelty, frustration, and everything else that has derailed human software development, but inference engines are perfectly impervious to.
I can give you a concrete example: this week at work, it occurred to me that the 16 channels of expected and measured binary on or off test data I need to collect could benefit from a visualization because matching expectations will have visual properties that failures will not. So I had my AI agent create a script that encodes 16 channels of expected and measured binary wave forms over time, as a 32 channel 1Hz sampling frequency wav file, which I can view with audacity, which also has the necessary controls to measure time between transitions in the waveformms.
From hindsight, one could argue that since all of that solution consisted of rudiments of perfectly normal software that didnt need AI to be written or integrated, it was equally possible to create without AI. But knowing that could do it with the greatest of ease, for the total price of naming it, converted this from a project that required the motivation to figure out all of the necessary steps to one that just needed a good description.
I do get your point about speeds and ease of producing working code. This kind of quick win can be a good example of AI assisted tooling. But I don't generate scripts that way as I prefer to have composable blocks that I can reuse later. AI is not great at reusable code.
Another things I noticed with AI assisted programming is the one track thinking. Someone has an idea, generate a working sample and then it becomes like a sunk-cost fallacy where they don't envision any other implementation choice or design. It's about adding more feature without taking a step back and assessing the overall goal of the project and if that feature is really needed.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry has said it best:
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
This kind of cohesiveness is often missed in projects that are AI assisted because there's no refinement step. The product and the efforts are not tempered by real world usage.
But what about compositions of your reusable blocks an order of magnitude larger than you were ordinarily willing to manually compose? A lot of this misnaming Im circling around comes down to demanding that the ai user must be giving up their agency. Whatever you can name as a good practice you don't think an AI agent is a capable of employing on its own, I can retort that a human can demand the agent employ it, along with all of its other capabilities that outstrip the human typist.
Theoretically they can. There are people that use Paint to draw masterpieces. But your argument is only true if they’re willing to do so. AI is a slop enabler, having the discipline to funnel the slop into something concise and useful is not a given.
You have to have the models the create tools for you to paint.
I have a side project which is an experiment to build an interesting quick UI for local AI. As part of it I want a very very specific, interesting look involving shaders, animations, and so on.
I was trying to just get a prototype in place by prompting and it was going nowhere, just constant yo-yo'ing and never really getting what I wanted. This also was quite de-motivating and I found myself "yelling" at the model.
So I told Codex:
- Make this API first-class in our framework, with easy parameters (it had been sort of a hacked low-level thing)
- Add hot reloading to our system so I can edit it without any state loss or refresh
- Give me more knobs (X, Y, Z) so I can tune everything here as I need
- Add a HUD that lets me also drag sliders to tweak the same things
And I got my desired look within a few seconds.
The principles of good design and products have always been this btw, you need your feedback loop to be as tight as possible. Good design has always come from the ability to iterate incredibly fast, your brush needs to move precisely with your hands, and can't have delay from the time you put it down to the time the stroke shows up.
> It reminds me of the campaign in the 90s against video game manufacturers for "corrupting the youth".
The government did intervene though. They threatened to regulate the industry if the industry didn't regulate itself. So some/all the big industry players got together and created their own independent age rating agency that they all agreed to use.
It probably would not pass scrutiny. The FCC can only even enforce broadcast regulations because the EM spectrum is a scarce resource; they don't for cable or Internet media.
Politicians in general have a bad habit of threatening and passing speech laws that judges torch on sight.
Discord subscriptions seem to be working. People like to customize their profile (ie express themselves), even though profiles are not something frequently interacted with (that's the surprising part!)
I have a server (for my game) with about 1000 people. Out of the 300 people logged in, 50 of them have custom profiles.
> Out of the 300 people logged in, 50 of them have custom profiles.
That's why I'd count Discord subs as a specific case targeting specific kind of a terminally online user who doesn't mind paying for such customization to show own digital identity, that for the rest means nothing. Discord had a brilliant idea here while at the same time allows to use their service without all these bells and whistles. Tho, I expect they'll start limiting it for those who refuse to subscribe in the nearest future.
The main problem is that premium subscriptions don’t generate that much revenue when compared to ads alone. The users who pay are the most valuable users to advertisers and the users who don’t pay are the least valuable. Discord generates about $1 in revenue per user compared to Facebook at closer to $100. For Discord at $1 per user, any subscription that’s a few dollars or more is probably paying for the lost advertising revenue, but it wouldn’t translate for Meta so they aren’t including ad free which drastically reduces the value.
I’ll be surprised if Meta’s subscriptions are as popular as Discord’s without being advertising free. Cosmetics are liked amongst Discord’s audience of nerds, but not Meta’s audience of normal people.
Very interested to see how this works out for Meta. Since they’re not excluding ads, it’s basically free money, so they may as well offer these subscriptions.
I wish these companies didn't need to make billions in revenue. There's no reason why a small company couldn't manage a site like Discord, make enough to pay their developers, and be successful. But instead every company needs to become a unicorn and pay investors billions.
> The users who pay are the most valuable users to advertisers and the users who don’t pay are the least valuable.
But also, definitionally, the users who are willing to pay the most are the ones who the see ads as the biggest anti-value (i.e. cost) to themselves - so they'll be the ones most likely to not use the service if they're not given an ad-free option - cutting down the average user value anyway.
You can get free profile decorations these days from watching ads (discord “orbs”). It would be interesting to know how many of those users have the nitro subscription badge next to their name
i too noticed the similarities in approach between the two. with the chat portability and other eu-linked changes they have to play along with, meta would have a complicated future ahead with subsidising chat for everyone.
if this prevents them from adding privacy-harming things to whatsapp, the more power to them. but it certainly does not guarantee this behaviour.
Forgive me for not wanting to write up the history of the game's development. It boils down to product market fit, innovation, and fantasy fulfillment/fun.
Some people, if not most, will at some point look back (and forward) in their life and wonder if they made anything out of it. And what they are really asking is "how much of an impact on others have I made?"
Sure, if all you did was work on a hobby, that wouldn't deliver satisfaction. But a hobby as a part of a life rich with relationships and people depending on you? Seems like a worthwhile pursuit to me.
A molecular biochemist PhD I know was forced to redo her advisor's experiment over and over again because it wasn't getting the results he wanted. She knew she was beating a dead horse over the several years she was directed to work on the experiment, and had no other choice but to continue marching forward.
So, the short of it is that this is a great insightful comment that I can back up with my own experience in making a game from scratch over the last 4+ years.
I've been developing a moderately popular (for an indie) game for over 4 years at this point (full time). C++, SFML, SQLite. Same as you: no coding assistants, no agents, etc. I also don't use git. [1]
One of the largest speedups is from how much of the codebase I can keep in my head. Because I started from an empty C++ file, the engine reflects how I reason and organize concepts (lossless compression). Thus most of the codebase is in my brains RAM.
I don't see how LLM agents are going to improve my productivity in the long run. The less a person understands their code (organized logic), the more abstracted the conversation is going to become when directing an agent. The higher up the abstraction ladder you go, the less distinct your product becomes.
[1] And very, very rarely have I wished I had it for a moment. Not using git simplifies abstracted parts of development. No branches, no ballooning of conceptual tangents, etc. Focus on one thing at a time. Daily backups and a log of what I worked on for the day suffices should I need to revisit/remember earlier changes. I've never been in a situation where I change I made over a week ago interfered with todays work.
I definitely feel like understanding the system is a big part of what makes it relatively easy to maintain/understand.
My game is just in my spare time while I'm looking for work and the scope of the project is small so that I can finish it, release it, and start working on the next one. I'm not trying to build an engine or anything. Just a game. Not even the best game I can make.
I can iterate on it fast because I know the structures. I can refactor it fast because I've built an intuition for a process over time that keeps code amenable to changes over time. I know I'm not going to make the right decisions at the start so I avoid committing to generalizations, etc.
Editing code is pretty fast for me. Again, years working with a particular setup. I still have expandable snippets, multi-cursor editing and a host of macros for common editing motions.
Checking changes... pretty fast. I'm getting to the point where I might invest in using dynamic reloading for my in-development builds. I suspect it will take a few hours to do at most. Not a big deal. For now I have a basic system that just watches for file changes and recompiles/re-runs the program.
In a different context, working on a team in a large multi-million line codebase... I dunno what other people find it's like but I've never found it terribly slow to write/edit code or ship features. I can usually knock most tasks out at a reasonable pace especially when my familiarity with the area of the code I'm working in increases. I usually find my priorities shift with the demands of users, the business, etc. Some times I work on shipping new features quick. Other times it's making sure what we ship the right things and done well so that we don't leak PII.
Either way... actually writing the code isn't the slowest part, in my experience. It's all the other stuff: the meetings, the design, maintenance, documentation, understanding the problem domain, actually shipping the code to production, etc that takes up the most time for me.
Where can I boot up Coke Studios? Enjoyed that game as a kid, including making music (which was so friggen cool! They had tons of samples you could just drag and drop into a timeline).
Edit: fun memory. I figured out how scamming works at some point. IIRC (and I may not) I set up a minigame in my studio, and contestants had to give me their furniture to participate in a game. Since furniture could stack weirdly, people made all sorts of crazy mazes that were actually quite difficult to navigate due to the fixed isometric perspective.
Each stage required handing over a more expensive item than the last. At some point someone handed over a super rare/expensive piece of furniture.
Not gonna erase that. ACTUALLY I think I figured out how to clone items due to a bug. Or mine infinite DBs. Used that as cover to get someone to give me their item. Was a long time ago.
Anyways, a user handed me their super rare item and I then gave them a stern warning on how this is a common scam and I just stole their item(s). Then I handed everything back over to them and they profusely thanked me. lol
Also, thank you for sharing your experience. I recently joined that subreddit just to see what people are creating and I too have been unimpressed.
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