[sph]

Good move, and a good reminder of how much of an echo chamber Hacker News is on AI matters.

In here, and big tech at large, it's touted like the unavoidable future that either you adapt or you die. LLMs are always a few months away from the (u|dys)topia of never having to write code ever again. Elsewhere, especially in fields where craft and artistry are valued (i.e. game development), AI is synonym of wanting to cut corners, poor quality, and to put it simply, slop. Sure, we're now inundated from people with a Claude subscription and a dream hoping to create the next Minecraft, but no one is taking them seriously. They're not making the game forum front pages, that's for sure.

Personally, I have made my existential worries a little better by pivoting away from big tech where the only metric is line of code committed per day, and moving towards those fields where human craftsmanship is still king.

[fnimick]

And who knows how much of that "unavoidable future" "adapt or die" rhetoric is driven by motivated actors using LLM tools to shape the conversation?

[duskdozer]

The incentives are clearly that way. Otherwise, why would random people care if other developers fell hopelessly behind? It would only increase the high status of the AI experts.

[LLMCodeAuditor]

FWIW I do think most of it is "grassroots," ordinary rank-and-file STEM workers adopting zero-sum industrialist mindsets. And speaking personally, the psychology works the same way for both sides of the AI debate:

- I have refused to use LLMs since 2023, when I caught ChatGPT stealing 200 lines of my own 2019-era F#. So in 2026 I have some anxiety that I need to practice AI-assisted development or else Be Left Behind. This makes me especially cross and uncharitable when speaking with AI boosters.

- Instead of LLMs I have tripled-down on improving my own code quality and CS fundamentals. I imagine a lot of AI boosters are somewhat anxious that LLM skills will become dime-a-dozen in a few years, and people whose organic brains actually understand computers will be highly in-demand. So they probably have the same thing going on as me - "nuh uh you're wrong and stupid."

I hope it's clear I'm trying to be charitable!

[tkel]

Curious , what have you pivoted towards? A different field?

[sph]

Game development, and writing small tools in the game dev space. This week I've been working on an image editing app, mostly to play with dithering algorithms and palettes, using Odin and SDL.

I mean, it's either that or I quit software development completely; it would be a shame to throw away two decades of experience in the field.

[ryandvm]

I don't know. For as long as I can remember, game dev has had the reputation of being the most sweat-shoppish of all the software engineering disciplines. I have a hard time believing that game devs aren't also going to find themselves being crushed under the CTO imperative to "use AI or else" like the rest of us.

[sph]

Ok I should’ve said indie/solo game dev

[em-bee]

does that pay?

you could have chosen indy/solo dev in general. solo game dev in my understanding is very hard to make a living in.

[quikoa]

I'm interested in tools (or blog posts about this) for image editing apps. Would you mind sharing what you've build?

[sph]

Nothing ready to ship just yet; I was thinking of building an image editing app that simply focuses on transformations — imagine Photoshop, without the editing part. Instead of having layers, you have a series of transformation you can tweak visually and then export to be reused and applied in batch later.

The itch I want to scratch is that I'm on Linux, and our native image editing apps are very clunky, or you have to spend a weekend every time reacquainting yourself with ImageMagick.

The other project in the back of my head is a font repository, manager and downloader for Linux. It's an unserved niche, and there is no popular central repository of fonts, despite a large majority of them are released with permissive licenses. I just want to be able to do `font-app install Inter Iosevka "IBM Plex"` and they appear under ~/.local/share/fonts

[quikoa]

Alright, if you do build something I hope you share it here. I'm always looking forward to any image editing/processing apps or techniques.

[PeterStuer]

"AI is synonym of wanting to cut corners, poor quality, and to put it simply, slop"

A craftsman knows how to use his tools. You can with AI produce very complete, polished, maintainable and tested, secure, performant high quality code.

It does take planning and lots of work on your part, but there is a high payoff.

So many people just dump a one paragraph brainfart into a prompt and then label the AI "slop".

Slop in , slop out. Play silly games, win stupid prizes. Don't blame your tools. Sometimes, you are 'holding it wrong'.

[em-bee]

It does take planning and lots of work on your part, but there is a high payoff.

less hard work than writing code myself? a higher payoff than the satisfaction of having written code myself?

i want to be a coder, not a prompt manager. (not sure i want to call that engineer)

[qsera]

>people just dump a one paragraph

So how much is enough?

[palmotea]

> Good move, and a good reminder of how much of an echo chamber Hacker News is on AI matters. In here, and big tech at large, it's touted like the unavoidable future that either you adapt or you die.

When you look across all software development, I think this kind of AI contribution ban is probably the exception. Because open source maintainers can have standards and have the ability to decide to enforce them.

Corporate America is enraptured by an even dumber and less thoughtful version of the HN echo chamber.

> Elsewhere, especially in fields where craft and artistry are valued (i.e. game development), AI is synonym of wanting to cut corners, poor quality, and to put it simply, slop. Sure, we're now inundated from people with a Claude subscription and a dream hoping to create the next Minecraft, but no one is taking them seriously. They're not making the game forum front pages, that's for sure.

Are you talking about indie games? Because I could see that having a similar dynamic to open source. I would think a big studio would be similar to any other corporate America office.

[JKCalhoun]

I'm not sure.

I think it likely that a typical HN'er [1] has actually used an LLM in coding and if they sound like they are proposing that LLMs in coding are inevitable ("the unavoidable future") it may well be from an informed, personal experience.

(Of course there's no reason not to believe that those pushing back against LLM-Assisted-Coding are also doing so from personal experience. Me, I am on "Team-LLMAC".)

[1] Never used that term before, not sure I like it.