An Overwhelmingly Negative and Demoralizing Force (opens in new tab)

I’ve always been the kind of developer that aims to have more red lines than green ones in my diffs. I like writing libraries so we can create hundreds of integration tests declaratively. I’m the kind of developer that disappears for two days and comes back with a 10x speedup because I found two loop variables that should be switched.

There is no place for me in this environment. I’d not that I couldn’t use the tools to make so much code, it’s that AI use makes the metric for success speed-to-production. The solution to bad code is more code. AI will never produce a deletion. Publish or perish has come for us and it’s sad. It makes me feel old just like my Python programming made the mainframe people feel old. I wonder what will make the AI developers feel old…

Had a funny conversation with a friend of mine recently who told me about how he's in the middle of his yearly review cycle, and management is strongly encouraging him and his team to make greater use of AI tools. He works in biomedical lab research and has absolutely no use for LLMs, but everyone on his team had a great time using the corporate language model to help write amusing resignation letters as various personalities, pirate resignation, dinosaur resignation etc. I dont think anyone actually quit, but what a great way to absolutely nuke team moral!

I teach compilers, systems, etc. at a university. Innumerable times I have seen AI lead a poor student down a completely incorrect but plausible path that will still compile.

I'm adding `.noai` files to all the project going forward:

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/disable-ai-assistant.htm...

AI may be somewhat useful for experienced devs but it is a catastrophe for inexperienced developers.

"That's OK, we only hire experienced developers."

Yes, and where do you suppose experienced developers come from?

Again and again in this AI arc I'm reminded of the magicians apprentice scene from fantasia.

I really like AI. It allows me to complete my $JOB tasks faster, so I have more time for my passion projects, that I craft lovingly and without crappy AI.

My favorite part about this (and all GenAI) comments section is where one person says, "This is my personal experience using AI" and then a chorus of people chime in "Well, you're using it wrong!"

Why so much hand-wringing? If you are an anti-AI developer and you are able to develop better code faster than someone using AI, good for you. If AI-using developers will end up ruining their codebase in months like many here are saying, then things will take care of themselves.

Companies need to be aware of the long-term affects of relying on AI. It causes atrophy and, when it introduces a bug, it takes more time to understand and fix than if you had written it yourself.

I just spent a week fixing a concurrency bug in generated code. Yes, there were tests; I uncovered the bug when I realized the test was incorrect...

My strong advice, is to digest every line of generated code; don't let it run ahead of you.

This article is an example of why the gender-neutral use of pronouns makes things a pain to read. If you're already changing the interviewees' names then IDK why you couldn't just pick an arbitrary he/she pronoun to stick to for one character.

> Francis says their understanding of the AI-pusher’s outlook is that they see the entire game-making process as a problem, one that AI tech companies alone think they can solve. This is a sentiment they do not agree with.

There is a small, hopeful flipside to this. While people using AI to produce art (such as concept art) have flooded the market, real skills now command a higher price than before.

To pull this out of the games industry for just a moment, imagine this: you are a business and need a logo produced. Would you hire someone at the market price who uses AI to generate something... sort of on-brand they most definitely cannot provide indemnity cover for (considering how many of these dubiously owned works they produce), or would you pay above the market price to have an artist make a logo for you that is guaranteed to be their own work? The answer is clear - you'd cough up the premium. This is now happening on platforms like UpWork and Fiverr. The prices for real human work have not decreased; they have shot up significantly.

It's also happening slowly in games. The concept artists who are skilled command a higher salary than those who rely on AI. If you depend on image-generating AI to do your work, I don't think many game industry companies would hire you. Only the start-ups that lack experience in game production, perhaps. But that part of the industry has always existed - the one made of dreamy projects with no prospect of being produced. It's not worth paying much attention to, except if you're an investor. In which case, obviously it's a bad investment.

Besides, just as machine-translated game localization isn't accepted by any serious publisher (because it is awful and can cause real reputational damage), I doubt any evident AI art would be allowed into the final game. Every single piece of that will need to be produced by humans for the foreseeable future.

If AI truly can produce games or many of their components, these games will form the baseline quality of cheap game groups on the marketplaces, just like in the logo example above. The buyer will pay a premium for a quality, human product. Well, at least until AI can meaningfully surpass humans in creativity - the models we have now can only mimic and there isn't a clear way to make them surpass.

I can see why some fields would have an overwhelmingly negative reaction to AI but I simply can't grasp why some software devs are. The entire point of the field is to get computers to do stuff for you. I've been doing this s*it for 10 years, there's too many little details and commands to remember and too much brutally dull work to not automate it.

I also have come to realize that in software development, coding is secondary to logical thinking. Logical thinking is the primary medium of every program, the language is just a means to express it. I may have not memorized as many languages as AI, but I can think better than it logically. It helps me execute my tasks better.

Also, I've been able to do all kinds of crazy and fun experiments thanks to genAI. Knowing myself I know realistically I will never learn LISP, and will always retain just an academic interest in it. But with AI I can explore these languages and other areas of programming beyond my expertise and experience much more effectively than ever before. Something about the interactive chat interface keeps my attention and allows me to go way deeper than textbooks or other static resources.

I do think in many ways it's a skill issue. People conceptualize genAI as a negation of skills, an offloading of skill to the AI, but in actuality grokking these things and learning how to work with them is its own skill. Of course managers just forcing it on people will elicit a bad reaction.

A.i. is a blatant case of darwinism.

There are those who adapt, those who will keep moaning about it and finally those who believe it can do everything.

First one will succeed, second one will be replaced, third one is going to get hurt.

I believe this article and the people it mentions are mostly from the second category. Yet no one with all his mind can deny that ai makes writing code faster, not necessarily better but faster, and games at the end are mostly codes.

Of course ai is going to get pushed hard by your ceo, he knows that if he doesn't, another competitor who use it will be able to produce more games, faster and less expensive.

AI is the latest "overwhelmingly negative" games industry fad, affecting game developers. It's one of many. Most are because nine out of ten companies make games for the wrong reason. They don't make them as interactive art, as something the developers would like to play, or to perfect the craft. They make them to make publishers and businessmen rich.

That business model hasn't been going so well in recent years[0], and it's already been proclaimed dead in some corners of the industry[1]. Many industry legends have started their own studios (H. Kojima, J. Solomon, R. Colantonio, ...), producing games for the right reasons. When these games are inevitably mainstream hits, that will be the inflection point where the old industry will significantly decline. Or that's what I think, anwyay.

[0] https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tJdLsQzfWg

I would hope that people with strong opinions about the uses and abuses of AI would start their own firms and hire people who are unwilling to use AI for whatever reasons. The competition should go a long way to proving the naysayer's points or disproving them. Personally, I think there is no evading the AI juggernaut and that artistic metrics or excellence metrics are going to take a back seat to pure shipping garbage faster metrics. The garbage will be come the new baseline of excellence and the former measures of excellence will be cottage industry artisanship with small and dedicated audiences.

As a small data point, I don't think AI can make movies worse than they currently are. And they are as bad as they are for commercial but non-AI reasons. But if the means to make movies using AI or scene-making tools build with a combo of AI and maybe game engine platforms puts the ability to make movies into the hands of more artistic people, the result may be more technologically uninteresting but nonetheless more artistically interesting because of narrative/character/storytelling vectors. Better quality for niche audiences. It's a low bar, but it's one possible silver lining.

It would be an understatement to call this a skewed perspective. In most of the anecdotes they seem to try really hard to trivialize the productive benefits of AI, which is difficult to take seriously. The case that LLMs create flawed outputs or are limited in what they can do is not controversial at all, but by and large, reports by experienced developers is that it has improved their productivity, and it's now part of their workflow. Whether businesses and hire-ups try to use it in absurd ways is neither here nor there. That, and culture issues, were a problem before AI.

Obviously some workers have a strong incentive to oppose adoption, because it may jeopardize their careers. Even if the capabilities are over-stated it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy as higher-ups choices may go. Union shops will try to stall it, but it's here to stay. You're in a globally competitive market.

I don't have much sympathy for this. This country has long expected millions and millions of blue collar workers to accept and embrace change or lose their careers and retirements. When those people resisted, they were left to rot. Now I'm reading a sob story about someone throwing a fit because they refuse to learn to use ChatGPT and Claude and the CEO had to sit them down and hold their hand in a way. Out of all the skillset transitions that history has required or imposed, this is one of the easiest ever.

They weren't fired; they weren't laid off; they weren't reassigned or demoted; they got attention and assistance from the CEO and guidance on what they needed to do to change and adapt while keeping their job and paycheck at the same time, with otherwise no disruption to their life at all for now.

Prosperity and wealth do not come for free. You are not owed anything. The world is not going to give you special treatment or handle you with care because you view yourself as an artisan. Those are rewards for people who keep up, not for those who resist change. It's always been that way. Just because you've so far been on the receiving end of prosperity doesn't mean you're owed that kind of easy life forever. Nobody else gets that kind of guarantee -- why should you?

The bottom line is the people in this article will be learning new skills one way or another. The only question is whether those are skills that adapt their existing career for an evolving world or whether those are skills that enable them to transition completely out of development and into a different sector entirely.

This story just makes me sad for the developers. I think especially for games you need a level of creativity that AI won't give you, especially once you get past the "basic engine boilerplate". That's not to say it can't help you, but this "all in" method just looks forced and painful. Some of the best games I've played were far more "this is the game I wanted to play" with a lot of vision, execution, polish, and careful craftspersonship.

I can only hope endeavors (experiments?) like this extreme fail fast and we learn from it.

I think the software industry will look just like the material goods space post-industrialization after the dust settles:

Large corporations will use AI to deliver low-quality software at high speed and high scale.

"Artisan" developers will continue to exist, but in much smaller numbers and they will mostly make a living by producing refined, high-quality custom software at a premium or on creative marketplaces. Think Etsy for software.

That's the world we are heading for, unless/until companies decide LLMs are ultimately not cost beneficial or overzealous use of them leads to a real hallucination induced catastrophe.

>“I am yet to have a team or gamerunner push back on me once I actually explain how these AI art generators work and how they don't contribute in a helpful way to a project, but I have a sense of dread that it is only a matter of time until that changes, especially given that I've gone the majority of my career with no mention of them to every second conversation having it mentioned.”

I recently played through a game and after finishing it, read over the reviews.

There was a brief period after launch where the game was heavily criticised for its use of AI assets. They removed some, but apparently not all (or more likely, people considered the game tainted and started claiming everything was AI)

The (I believe) 4 person dev team used AI tools to keep up with the vast quantity of art they needed to produce for what was a very art heavy game.

I can understand people with an existing method not wanting to change. And AI may not actually be a good fit for a lot of this stuff. But I feel like the real winners are going to be the people who do a lot more with a lot less out of sheer necessity to meet outrageous goals.

I've disabled AI in my IDE after trying Jetbrains' AI Assistant for a couple of months. I don't like it and I think relying on LLMs to get my job done is dangerous.

Why? I feel less competent at my job. I feel my brain becoming lazy. I enjoy programming a lot, why do I want to hand it off to some machine? My reasoning is that if I spend time practicing and getting really good at software engineering, my work is much faster, more accurate and more reliable and maintainable than an AI agent's.

In the long run, using LLMs for producing source code will make things a lot slower, because the people using these machines will lose the human intuition that an AI doesn't have. Be careful.

I find introspecting about how I formulate the question and what works better or worse for me personally fascinating.

I am content to use the AI to perform "menial" tasks: I had a textfile in something parsable by field with some minor quirks (like right justified text) and was able to specify the field SEMANTICS in a way that made for a prompt to an ICS file calendar which just imported fine as-is. Getting a years forward planning from a texttual note in some structure into calendar -> import -> from-file was sweet. Do I need to train an AI to use a token/API key to do this directly? No. But thinking about how I say efficiently what fields are, and what the boundaries are, helps me understand my data.

BTW while I have looked at a ICS file and can see it is type:value, I have no idea of the types, or what specific GMT/Z format it wants for date/time, or the distinctions of meaning for confirmed/pending or the like. These are higher level constructs which seem to have made useful distinct behaviours in the calendar and the AI description of what it had done, and what I should expect lined up. I did not e.g. stipulate the mappings from semantic field to ICS type. I did say "this is a calendar date" and it did the rest.

I used AI to write a DJANGO web to do some trivial booking stuff. I did not expect the code to run as-is, but it did. Again, could I live with this product? Yes, but the extensibility worries me. Adding features, I am very conscious one wrong prompt and it can turn this into .. drek. It's fragile.

I wish our company forced AI on us. Our security is so tight, it's pretty much impossible to use any good LLMs.

I would think that, if AI-generated content is inferior, these games will fail in the marketplace.

So, where are the games with AI-generated content? Where are the reviews that praise or pan them?

(Remember, AI is a tool. Tools take time to learn, and sometimes, the tool isn't worth using.)

Can't wait to hear the inevitable slurs people will create to refer to heavy AI users and staunch AI avoiders.

When LLMs came out I suppressed my inner curmudgeon and dove in, since the technology was interesting to me and seemed much more likely than crypto to be useful beyond crime. Thus, I have used LLMs extensively for many years now and I have found that despite the hype and amazing progress, they still basically only excel first drafts and simple refactorings (where they are, I have to say, incredibly useful for eliminating busy work). But I have yet to use a model, reasoning or otherwise, that could solve a problem that required genuine thought, usually in the form of constructing the right abstraction, bottom up style. LLMs write code like super-human dummies, with a tendency to put too much code in a given function and with very little ability to invent a domain in which the solution is simple and clearly expressed, probably because they don't care about that kind of readability and its not much in their data set.

I'm deeply influenced by languages like Forth and Lisp, where that kind of bottom up code is the cultural standard and and I prefer it, probably because I don't have the kind of linear intelligence and huge memory of an LLM.

For me the hardest part of using LLMs is knowing when to stop and think about the problem in earnest, before the AI generated code gets out of my human brain's capacity to encompass. If you think a bit about how AI still is limited to text as its white board and local memory, text which it generates linearly from top to bottom, even reasoning, it sort of becomes clear why it would struggle with genuine abstraction over problems. I'm no longer so naive as to say it won't happen one day, even soon, but so far its not there.

There are many, many reasons to be skeptical of AI. There are also excellent tasks it can efficiently help with.

I wrote a project where I'd initially hardcoded a menu hierarchy into its Rust. I wanted to pull that out into a config file so it could be altered, localized, etc without users having it and recompile the source. I opened a “menu.yaml” file, typed the name of the top-level menu, paused for a moment to sip coffee, and Zed popped up a suggested completion of the file which was syntactically correct and perfect for use as-is.

I honestly expected I’d spend an hour mechanically translating Rust to YAML and debugging the mistakes. It actually took about 10 seconds.

It’s also been freaking brilliant for writing docstrings explaining what the code I just manually wrote does.

I don't want to use AI to write my code, any more than I'd want it to solve my crossword. I sure like having it help with the repetitive gruntwork and boilerplate.

Management: "devs aren't paid to play with shiny new tech, they should be shipping features!"

Also management: "I need you to play with AI and try to find a use for it"

I always assumed game development would be one of the most impacted by AI hype, for better or worse. With game development there’s a much higher threshold for subjectivity and “incorrectness”.

I’m in a Fortune 500 software company and we are also being pushed AI down our throats, even though so far it has only been useful for small development tasks. However our tolerance for incorrectness is much, much lower—and many skip levels are already realizing this.

I prefer to read source code, articles, watch videos or even join a chat channel to discuss and try things out until they work (or understand why they don't work) than fall and consume trash from HypeAI. Heck even if I don't get a solution I prefer to be stuck thinking with paper and pencil.

The only time I did it try it for the very first time was an evening that I was so bored that decided to compare my 3 line Python snippet (of which one of those was the "def" statement) that generates an alternating pulse clock against the output of an "ai" prompt.

The output code I saw kept me thinking about all those poor souls relying on HypeAI to create anything useful.

Not long ago there was a thread about someone proud of a 35k LoC cooking web app entirely made from a prompt. What it kept ringing from that thread was that the author was proud of the total LoC as maybe thought that the more the better. Who knows?

I've been wrestling with this tension between embracing AI tools and preserving human expertise in my work. On one hand, I have experienced real genuine productivity gains with LLMs - they help me code, organize thoughts and offer useful perspectives I hadn't even considered. On the other, I realize managers often don't understand the nature of creative work which is trivialized by all the content generation tools.

Creativity emerges through a messy exploration and human experience -- but it seems no one has time for that these days. Managers have found a shiny new tool to do more with less. Also, AI companies are deliberately targeting executives with promises of cost-cutting and efficiency. Someone has to pay for all the R&D.

We can only hope this insane trend self-immolates before it causes too much collateral damage.

Art team dislikes the technology that replaces them.

Am I the only one that thinks this is kind of a given regardless of the merits of the objection?

A very bad programmer can program some cool stuff with the help of libraries, toolkits, frameworks and engines that they barely understand. I think that's pretty cool and makes things otherwise impossible possible, but it doesn't make the very bad programmer better than they really are.

I believe AI is a variation of this, except a library at least has a license.

One thing jumps out about the person who noticed the AI was wrong on things they were familiar with. It's like when ELon Musk talks about rockets. I don't know about rockets so I take his word for it. When Elon Must talked about software it was obvious he has no idea what he's doing. So when the AI generates something I know nothing about, it looks productive but when it's generating things for which I'm familiar I know its full of shit.

“He doesn't know that the important thing isn't just the end result, it's the journey and the questions you answer along the way”

This is satire right?

AI-generated art just keeps getting better. This looks like a losing battle.

In Norway, there was a recent minor scandal where a county released a report on how they should shut down some schools to save money, and it turned out half the citations were fake. Quite in line with the times. So our Minister of Digitizing Everything says "It's serious. But I want to praise Tromsø Municipality for using artificial intelligence." She's previously said she wants 80% of public sector to be using AI this year and 100% by 5 years. What does that even mean? And why and for what and what should they solve with it? It's so stupid and frustrating I don't even

> In terms of software quality, I would say the code created by the AI was worse than code written by a human–though not drastically so–and was difficult to work with since most of it hadn’t been written by the people whose job it was to oversee it.

This is a key insight. The other insight is that devs spend most of their time reading and debugging code, not writing it. AI speeds up the writing of code but slows down debugging... AI was trained with buggy code because most code out there is buggy.

Also, when the codebase is complex and the AI cannot see all the dependencies, it performs a LOT worse because it just hallucinates the API calls... It has no idea what version of the API it is using.

TBH, I don't think there exists enough non-buggy code out there to train an AI to write good code which doesn't need to be debugged so much.

When AI is trained on normal language, averaging out all the patterns produces good results. This is because most humans are good at writing with that level of precision. Code is much more precise and the average human is not good at it. So AI was trained on low-quality data there.

The good news for skilled developers is that there probably isn't enough high quality code in the public domain to solve that problem... And there is no incentive for skilled developers to open source their code.

A perspective from a friend, who recently gave up trying to get into concept art:

Before AI, there was out-sourcing. With mass-produced cheap works, foreign studios eliminated most junior positions.

Now AI is just taking this trend to its logical extreme: out-sourcing to machines, the ultimate form of out-sourcing. The cost approaches to 0 and the quantity approaches to infinity.

> “I have no idea how he ended up as an art director when he can’t visualise what he wants in his head unless can see some end results”, Bradley says. Rather than beginning with sketches and ideas, then iterating on those to produce a more finalised image or vision, Bradley says his boss will just keep prompting an AI for images until he finds one he likes, and then the art team will have to backwards engineer the whole thing to make it work.

Sounds like an "idea guy" rather than an art director or designer. I would do this exact same thing, but on royalty-free image websites, trying to get the right background or explanatory graphic for my finance powerpoints. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft now has AI "generating" such images for you, but it's much slower than what I could do flipping through those image sites.

Hands up everyone who thinks the mandatory GPT use mentioned in the post drives towards instructing 'Summarize all employee input since last review and score their performance for salary changes. Also recommend whether to fire or retain. Also format all valuable actions taken for use as training data'

Everyone I know uses it to some degree. Simply having a smart debugger does wonders. You don’t have to give up control, it can help you stay in flow state. Or it can constantly irritate you if you fight it.

This just sounds like cases of performative management. Very lazy implementation of what to them is just"productivity-future-tech" of the moment, so they can say "successfully transitioned into AI-driven development" on their CV's. AI is just software and it either fits your strategy or it doesn't. In the same way no company succeeds simply because it started using software, no company is going to succeed simply bcs they started to use AI.

> “When I’m told 'Think of how much time you could be spending instead on making the actual game!', those who have drank the AI Kool-Aid don't understand that all this brainstorming and iteration is making the game, it’s a crucial everyday part of game development (and human interaction) and is not a problem to be solved.”

This right here is the key. It's that stench of arrogance of those who think others have a "problem" that needs fixing, and that they are in the best position to "solve" it despite having zero context or experience in that domain. It's like calling the plumber and thinking that you're going to teach them something about their job.

Here's to the next decade of getting paid to clean up after "rockstars."

Each example's endeavor is the production of culture. The least interesting use case for "AI".

Real wealth creation will come from other domains. These new tools (big data, ML, LLMs, etc) unlock the ability to tackle entirely new problems.

But as a fad, "AI" is pretty good for separating investors from their money.

It's also great for further beating down wages.

AI absolutely cannot develop a video game. It is still a high risk creative task and costs for development and artists will not change significantly, even if modern AIs increased their abilities significantly.

Perhaps we would be able to synthesize some text, voice and imaging. Also AI can support coding.

While AI can probably do a snake game (that perhaps runs/compiles) or attempt to more or less recreate well known codebases like that of Quake (which certainly does not compile), it can only help if the developer does the main work, that is disecting problems into smaller ones until some of them can be automated away. That can improve productivity a bit and certainly could improve developer training. If companies were so inclined to invest in their workforce...

The saddest part is watching talented people, who care deeply about the craft, slowly burn out because their judgment is being replaced by a prompt

AI is especially toxic to anyone who truly believes in their work -- who puts a bit of themselves into it. These are the people AI sucks the life force out of while giving it to those without giving their stolen energy to managers-of-managers seemingly devoid of passion, care, love, empathy, creativity, and humanity

Ai excel at mapping an input to an output. Isnt this what management is supposed to do? Why isnt there an AI CFO? CEO? The gains to the bottom line are huge considering their salaries, bonuses and stock options. It will send their share prices sky high.

> The whole game is resting on a prompt ‘what if a game was…’, but with no idea if that would be fun, or how to make it fun. It’s madness”.

lol I will point out that this has been an enormous problem in the game industry for long, long before generative AI existed.

Let me preface this by saying that I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment the article is trying to convey. That said, the “anonymity”, and the almost tropey at this point C*O characters make this read like a fan fiction.

I’ve been doing “vibe coding” since Borland C++. We used to align the mood of the program with ambient ANSI art in the comments. if the compiler crashed, that meant the tone was off.

Shopify CEO: "AI usage is now a baseline expectation"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43613079

Bradley's game is DOA. Is it ARK: Aquatica by any chance?

Software developers are so aware of "enshittification" and yet also bullish about this generation of AI, it's baffling.

It's very clear the "value" of the LLM generation is to churn out low-cost, low-quality garbage. We already outsourced stuff to Fivrr but now we can cut people out altogether. Producing "content" nobody wants.

I like this article. It opens with a statement of its thesis and presents a few profiles of video game workers whose lives have been negatively impacted by AI. Each profile follows a basic template: a paragraph or so about who they are and what they do, a summary of how AI entered their workplace, a bunch of interview quotes about their reaction to it, and a paragraph at the end about what the final outcome was for the person or their company. Succinct, to the point, and easy to read. You don't see a lot of online journalism like this; the clickbait era has been marked by an entire novel about the E! True Hollywood Story of the major player(s) before the fucking point is even mentioned -- or worse still, AI-generated slop as the body text. Props to Aftermath and Luke Plunkett for maintaining a high standard of prose.

Are we going to get a steam label for handcrafted ?

If a manager thinks paying $20 monthly for an AI tool will make a developer or artist 5x more productive, he's delusional.

On the other hand, AI can be useful and can accelerate a bit some work.

Corporations don't need human workers, they need machines, the proverbial cogs that lack their own will and implement the will of the corporation instead. AI will make it happen: human workers will be managed by AI with sub-second precision and kill whatever little creativity and humanity the workers still had.

> “He doesn't know that the important thing isn't just the end result, it's the journey and the questions you answer along the way”. Bradley says that the studio’s management have become so enamoured with the technology that without a reliance on AI-generated imagery for presentations and pitches they would not be at the stage they are now, which is dealing with publishers and investors.

Take out the word AI and replace it with any other tool that's over-hyped or over-used, and the above statement will apply to any organization.