[sublinear]

The choice to make a golf game with AI seems a bit ironic. Getting a project onto the green seems tantalizingly close, doesn't it?

Making games people actually want to play is hard with or without AI and developer skill has little to do with it. Even the most pro-AI individual has to see the long tail of tedious work left here. At least on mobile, the controls are floaty and imprecise. The camera is at a strange angle making it hard to see what you're doing and made even worse by the HUD in the way. There's only one course: a straight. The course itself looks glitched out. The hole seems out of proportion to the ball. This is just my initial impression after 5 minutes. There's likely a lot more.

What's worse is that to really fix these issues, a human at some point has to comprehend and undo a lot more than they bargained for.

One would hope we're finally done with the dismissive arguments that "AI will only keep getting better" or that these are just nitpicky refinements. The remaining work is the most time consuming, and even when finished the result will just be mediocre. Mediocrity isn't mere incompetence, but being asleep at the wheel when the ideas that are foundational to a project are being made. Any statistical model, such as generative AI, is wholly concerned with broad brush strokes.

I do see some value in using AI to find (rough) examples of code that wouldn't exist otherwise, but I wonder how much this further limits the creativity of people who are already stifled by media overconsumption and already conditioned to overlook details.