[rob74]

After I read the title, I fully expected this to be about writing games using AI. But no, actually there is no mention of AI to be found in the text, not even in the "Miscellaneous Thoughts" section, which seems to be mostly answers to "why don't you use X?" questions. Refreshing...

[oneeyedpigeon]

The author is Noel Berry, creator of Celeste. They don't shout about it, but with that pedigree, I'm confident they'll be staying well away from AI.

[MasterScrat]

Why would a game development pedigree correlate with rejecting AI? As Carmack said:

> AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics.

[jsheard]

Carmack isn't exactly a neutral observer here, his main gig since quitting VR has been as the founder of a VC-backed AI startup. He has a clear financial interest in joining the chorus of AI boosters.

[indy]

A less cynical interpretation of his actions would be that he's never shown to be motivated by money and is working on technology that interests him and that he can make an important contribution to

[mock-possum]

Because Celeste is left-aligned, and deriding AI as planet-destroying slop stolen from poor artist is a left position to take.

[Vespasian]

Or they'll take a look at what, if anything at all,they can use in their workflow as a useful tool not a magic solution.

No need to brag about that.

[tumdum_]

They don’t seem to enthusiastic: https://bsky.app/profile/noelfb.bsky.social/post/3maa3m5x4vs...

[dwroberts]

> can use in their workflow as a useful tool not a magic solution.

Like what? If you can already program your game and create art for it, what is it going to be doing?

People are so obsessed with using AI stuff for the sake of it, it’s nuts

[rhdunn]

I don't use AI for the sake of it, I use it where and when it is useful. For example:

1. advanced autocomplete -- if you have or paste the structure of a JSON or other format, or a class fields, it is good at autocompleting things like serialization, case statements, or other repetitive/boilerplate code;

2. questions -- it can often be difficult to find an answer on Google/etc. (esp. if you don't know exactly what you are looking for, or if Google decides to ignore a key term such as the programming language), but can be better via an AI.

Like all tools, you need to read, check, and verify its output.

[bandrami]

Genuine question re #1: does your text editor not already do that?

[socalgal2]

Without ai my text editor auto completes letters into existing identifiers or adds a closing brace

With ai it add several lines of code at once as soon as it thinks it recognizes a common pattern.

It’s not perfect and it can get in the way but it’s amazing when it guesses right and spits out the next 3-4 lines I would have typed

[rhdunn]

Text editors/IDEs have simple autocomplete and the ability to do some expansion, e.g. a for loop with placeholders to fill in. Those work and are still useful.

JetBrains also has local line-based LLM models for various languages.

With the LLM-based autocomplete it a) generally autocompletes more code at once, and b) will often pick up on patterns in the existing code. E.g. if you have a similar method, list of print/string buffer write statements, or other repetitive code in the file it will often use that as a model for the generated code.

[segh]

I can do long division manually but I still reach for a calculator.

[dwroberts]

Do you also spend a lot of time maximising calculator utilisation in other places? Maybe trying to write letters with it or composing music with it?

[hjkl0]

Won’t you get much better results trying to maximize utilization of some sort of LLM? For many people, you’d get faster and better results trying to optimize for LLMs than for any standard word processor or music composition tool.

[_zagj]

> but I still reach for a calculator

Does the calculator give you a slightly different answer each time, even with the same inputs?

[Cthulhu_]

Speaking for myself (who can program and all that), AI solves some of the tedium in my day job (building UI components). Most of that work nowadays is boilerplate.

But at the moment it's also helping me solve more complex issues with building applications - it's JS, so you can imagine how complex it can be.

I yearn for a simpler workflow to be honest, I don't want to rely on SO or LLMs to solve build issues. I want to work in Go but there's only a handful of companies using it in my country, plus my CV basically says I mainly did front-end in the past ~15 years.

[truetraveller]

"People are so obsessed with using AI stuff for the sake of it, it’s nuts".

This is a GREAT observation. Thank you!