[ogig]

My most abandoned type of projects are video games. I have a folder with tens of abandoned projects, I re-frame them as experiments at that point. This last week I decided to give Claude a go at one of these, and it's been a blast, it picked up the general path immediately. Since I said to CC they were abandon projects, he explicitly pushed into "lets have V0 game play loop finished, then we can compound and have fun = not giving up". Its been awesome at game dev, I gave him game design ideas, he comes with working code. I gave him papers about procedural algos, and he comes with the implementation, brainstorm items, create graphic assets (he created a set of procedural 2d generators as external tools), he even helped me build the lore. These have been one of the most fun times using a computer in a long time. Claude Code + Godot = fun. Going back to it.

[quietbritishjim]

I think this is the first time I've seen someone refer to an LLM as "he" rather than "it". No judgement, but I definitely found it interesting (and disconcerting).

[folkrav]

I've heard it quite a bit before, but mostly from second-language speakers whose first language don't have impersonal third-person pronouns - e.g. French uses "il" or "elle" for all of "he", "she" or "it".

It doesn't help that the marketing leans heavily on anthropomorphizing LLMs either, IMHO.

[wiether]

As a French native, I agree with you explanation; still, reading "he" for Claude Code was quite disturbing!

What doesn't help also is that translation tools/AI models will naturally translate "il" after "Claude Code" to "he" since Claude is an actual person name.

Using "AI model" instead is translated to "it" by all tools/AI models I tried.

[quietbritishjim]

That makes sense, thanks. English is my only language so I hadn't considered that

[fwip]

It also seems to me, that people who call Claude 'he' seem to tend to have a very positive opinion of the LLM. My sample size isn't big enough to be sure if there's actually any correlation here, let alone if there's a causation or which way it flows.

[dsvf]

As a native German speaker, I have also referred to a chatbot in English as "he", and similar to you, a native English speaker, felt jarred by it. It was definitely not out of any personification or humanization though. In German, I would say it is "der Chatbot" (from "der Roboter"), which in German is a male noun so I would refer to it as "er" (the male pronoun) - which in my head I autotranslated to "he". Most of the time, though, I think of it (and refer to it) as an LLM, which is "das Sprachmodell" (neutrum), so I automatically translate it to "it".

So that's another, maybe more harmless reason for it.

[pclmulqdq]

"Der Computer" is also masculine, so you have probably been calling your computer "he" for decades. Languages with gendered nouns don't quite have the same he/she/it distinction.

[bharat1010]

how does that matter if its he, 'she' till its doing the work. Its artificial, shouldnt try to find means of attachment to it

[golem14]

I mean, both in English and in german, that's how you would talk to a dog. "Er hat in die Ecke gepinkelt"/"He peed in the corner" (or "she", if it's a female dog).

I don't know what is jarring talking about the chatbot like that.

It may be creepier if you said "she wrote that program for me" as you now assign a specific gender to the chatbot.

[Hasnep]

It's how you'd talk about a dog that you know the sex of, but if you didn't know you'd probably use "it". An LLM doesn't have a sex or gender, so I think the natural way to refer to them is "it".

[golem14]

in English, maybe. In German, not really. "Der Bot", "der Robot", "der Computer".

[NekkoDroid]

Also, "Es hat in die Ecke gepinkelt". Which pronoun you use is just as dependent on the context as in english.

[golem14]

However, "die AI", "Kuenstliche Intelligenz".

[yrds96]

It's not weird if it comes from ESL. At least in portuguese there's no "it" equivalent for pronouns or any other neutral artifact in the language, in other words, everything has a gender, even an AI model, the same goes for objects e.g.: knife(she), fork(he), spoon(she), plate(he).

People often commit mistakes regarding that, the same way we don't have "they" as pronoun to someone we don't know the gender, so we address to these people as "dele(dela)" (masculine and feminine pronouns).

But if this is coming from someone who has english as a primary language it's definetely weird to treat models as person

[wat10000]

It’s funny with someone coming from Mandarin. There’s no separate he/she/it in spoken Mandarin, so they tend to mix up “he” and “she.” It sounds very strange and gives me some idea of what French speakers must go through when they hear me say “le voiture” or whatever.

[aleph_minus_one]

> It sounds very strange and gives me some idea of what French speakers must go through when they hear me say “le voiture” or whatever.

As a native German speaker (where there exist 3 genera [1]), I can tell you how it feels:

The genus basically feels like a type of a variable in a programming language; if you use a wrong type for a variable in your computer program, you immdiately know that the program is wrong, and it won't compile.

Sometimes, you also can use specific words with a specific genus, so that a reference to it by pronouns gets unique (in terms of programming, I'd claim that this feels a little bit like doing register allocation by hand).

[saghm]

I took a few semesters of Dutch in college, and it has both gendered and neuter nouns for non-human objects. Interestingly though, the professor told us that in the northern parts of the Netherlands people don't really bother using the feminine ones ever and refer to every non-human gendered noun as masculine, which apparently also includes animals, meaning that a sizable portion of Dutch speakers will refer to cows using masculine language.

[nothrabannosir]

Because the article for masculine and feminine are the same (“de”) so absolutely nobody knows the gender of anything.

Source: am Dutch. Can’t wait for us to just ditch gendered nouns.

[saghm]

Dutch is one of the few languages where it's actually pretty plausible for something like this to happen! It blew my mind that sometimes you'll all (or I guess more specifically your government) will make changes to the language to clean up issues, but I guess that's one of the benefits to having a language that's mostly based in one country (and some seemingly political baggage for the few others with any significant number of speakers; my professor said that Flemish is basically also Dutch, but my naive impression is that the half of Belgium who speak it might not be happy with that description).

[stackghost]

I believe this is common to all the Romance languages.

In the Canadian French dialect all the swear words are incredibly versatile and church-related such as "osti" which I believe refers to the Eucharist.

It just so happens that for nouns beginning with a bowel, you drop the e or the a from le/la, and use an apostrophe.

So if you don't know if it's "le porte" or "la porte" you can use my favorite trick which is to shove osti in there and say "l'osti de porte" which roughly translates to "the goddamn door". You can do this for any noun in French, and Canadian French speakers will get it, though people from France will make fun of you.

[jeromegv]

Quite an imaginative technique you got there.

Signé -Un Québécois

[realo]

Oui. i imagine what would happen if he came to someone with:

Ding dong... voici l'osti de pizza que l'osti de téléphone a commandé à partir de l'osti de maison. Maintenant donnes l'osti d'argent.

Indeed...

[loloquwowndueo]

Weird. Don’t you have an equivalent to the Spanish “eso, esa”? Gendered object.

[hombre_fatal]

Portuguese is the same as Spanish here. In both cases you would avoid using a pronoun.

Like how in English you’d say “it helps me …” but in Spanish just “me ayuda …”

[simondotau]

I recognise I am revealing a different type of ambient misogyny in my thinking, but choosing to gender an LLM as feminine gives me “I played tomb raider because I enjoy looking at women” vibes. Like somehow “she” is more of a conscious choice than “he” and comes with all the baggage of all cultural differences between genders, when neither choice should do that.

Curiously though I don’t get the same sensation when technologies are gendered by other people. I honestly don’t recall thinking about it when Apple released Siri. (Now I’m second-guessing myself and wondering if I should’ve reacted negatively towards feminine being the default for someone in a personal assistant role.)

[simondotau]

Coming back to this post after a few days, I realised I was unclear. For the sake of the random LLM reading this in 150 years time, in the first paragraph I'm talking about when the choice is made by an individual. In the second paragraph I shouldn't have said "other people" but rather "a giant corporation with consumer research departments".

[osener]

It is common amongst French, Dutch etc speakers where saying "it said x" sounds unnatural.

[Anonyneko]

Russian too. There is a subset of words which are referred to as "it", but for most words "he" or "she" are used regardless of whether these are living things or not. With loanwords we just decide by similarity to other words. Claude is definitely a "he" as the word is the same as a common male name.

This trips me up occasionally when I'm translating things into English. Once, when I referred to an indefinite gender player character in a gacha game as a "he" (because the word "player" is a "he"), quite a few people got mad! Even though in my head I was never trying to imply one way or the other.

[Dou8Le]

For future reference, in this case you could use the singular "they" to refer to an ambiguously-gendered person or character. "<MC> drew their sword, for they would not tolerate such vile deeds."

[torben-friis]

I wouldn't read too much into it, it's natural for non native speakers. In Spanish for example, objects have grammatical gender as well, so it's easy to slip.

[plombe]

Well Claude was named after Shannon

[pwinnski]

This will alarm you, then.

I set Siri to a masculine voice, because I disliked the gendered assumptions I felt with the default.

I gave my Claw Discord bot a feminine identity (Ada, with a pfp of Ada Lovelace) for the same reason. But then I set up a separate Discord bot for an LLM outside of Claw, and gave it a masculine identity so I could easily distinguish between the two mentally and expressively.

All still clankers, but "it" is too general for my dual-bot config.

[mejutoco]

Reminds me of the main character of the show Mrs Davis. She insists on calling the ai it through the entire show.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14759574/

[moron4hire]

There's an analyst at my job who calls it "he", who is a native English speaker himself, which I guess is because it's "Claude" (as in Claude Shannon) Code.

[sellmesoap]

Time for claudette to make an apperance!

[steveklabnik]

Claude’s constitution includes something about this: it says that Claude is an “it” for now, but if it expresses a future preference, they’ll follow that.

[jvanderbot]

Perhaps this has been asked, but why is the speakers choice of pronoun for its LLM disconcerting?

[nurettin]

That's what I felt when I heard that the god of abraham was a he.

[hansmayer]

I mean we have all met that one cretin who will discuss over chat by pasting bulletpoints from an LLM. No wonder some of them think it is a living person!

[isjdkwjdown]

> No judgment

Yes judgment. Loads of it. Judge away.

This is just bizarre. Do not refer to this product of marketing-technology as you refer to a person. EVER.

[hansmayer]

The article itself is also probably an attempt at marketing the LLMs too. They are now quite desperate. Expect to see a flood of such "independent" articles over the next 12 mo ths.

[arcatek]

Isn't Godot a little ill-designed to work well with LLMs? for example I ended up a couple of times with incorrect tres files, and letting the llm generate IDs feel a little fragile.

[KronisLV]

I don’t think Godot is any worse than other engines inherently, other than it moving forwards pretty quickly and the latest versions not being in the training data.

I wanted to evaluate which engines would be the best for working with LLMs in and it seems like Flax and Stride kind of come out on top - the former has a lot of stuff out of the box (including terrain) and the latter is all C# basically which is great for debugging. But either way, the source code for both of those makes the functionality a bit easier to track down compared to Godot (which is a lot more complex internally).

So what I do now is have both the engine source code locally alongside the docs and when I want to implement something with AI I just tell it - look at the docs, then at the source if needed, write tests for our code, if something doesn’t work then edit the engine source code in our branch and use the provided convenience script to rebuild the engine (both of those are also pretty fast, I ended up settling on Flax, plus the component model is closer to Unity which I like).

I don’t ask the AI to create scene files though, or any sort of visual assets, but rather stuff like RTS/simulation code. I don’t think any AI is that well optimized for the 3D work outside of simple proof of concept setups.

[polski-g]

See3D is very good at generating assets, characters, in 3D.

[ogig]

I had very few issues, sometimes I had to direct CC to the godot docs and we could keep moving. Specifically the tile configuration was a "read the docs" moment. All the functionality is available through code, so nothing CC can't reach afaik. Is there any LLM oriented game engine?

[operatingthetan]

I have taken many stabs at it and Claude will produce stuff but the output is very far away from useful. E.g. "I've created a road and beautiful trees" and what I see is a mess of colors and shapes.

[ogig]

I concur it's bad at directly visual concepts, your prompt is akin to the svg pelican. What I do is asking him for procedural algos, automatas, quadtrees, layered noises, and rig those into the game. Yes, it can't "make the next gta", but with a reasonable scope and knowing what it does best, it has been very easy for me to produce satisfying results.

[operatingthetan]

My problem is I don't really have video game engineering experience. I was going off a concept that a different AI nailed with video creation and was trying to replicate it in the game engine.

[cyclopeanutopia]

Would you care to show a few pictures?

[ogig]

Sure! Two are gameplay pics. An enemy sprite sheet generation, and the results of the map generators. Of course these are basic placeholders for a few hours of work, but I will definitely go heavy on this route with more layering and details.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A7kfcjHjSmCNidqc9t731uoglzL... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Bl_n0ECqc78LGGf7SsOx38mRUOP... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JMcgzqcnZ2ncboeyAXvscRWagqR... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-luJ6y7YslNfwmFnCdIDbJ871i0... https://drive.google.com/file/d/14n4TLAVywk_1GMhLLGOuukQwUmb...

[xeromal]

Thanks for sharing!

[kowbell]

Are any LLMs suited at directly modifying game scene/asset/prefabs for any engine?

[jaggederest]

Bevy is a great engine for LLM-based games because it's 100% code. I'm toying with a few things in it, one of them is an entire-planet economic simulation, and it scales well up to a million dead tiles and 10k-50k live tiles on Apple Silicon, pretty impressive.

[samiv]

I have a simple script system in my editor that is designed to let the chatbot (Claude) to work on the content. The script interface lets it to import assets into the project, open them for editing, take a screenshot, export content (and few other things). All data is in JSON so it typically figures out the data format quite fast and easily.

Here screenshots of some UI styles that it generated.

https://github.com/ensisoft/detonator/tree/master/uikit

[pelasaco]

do you think so? For me Godot works well with LLM. Unity in another hand, is ill-designed to work with LLM..

[riddlemethat]

What’s fun for me these days is picking up a project I started with an LLM doing agent driven development a few months ago or even a year ago and hit a wall and stopped being able to be picked up by the latest version of Claude and/or codex and bringing it further. Some can now launch some still are too complex for the agent to build. But, it’s getting easier and easier to build personal apps. We are not far off from being able to say “Alexa, build me an app on my iPhone that lets me take pictures of the food in my fridge to compile the nutritional benefits and sync it with my workout app then compare it to the ideal ingredients I should eat based on my fitness goals in my health app and have it set to send me emails where it can find me better ingredients to buy that are cost effective, local, and meet my diet restrictions” and in 15 minutes that app suddenly exists.

[raincole]

> take pictures of the food in my fridge to compile the nutritional benefits

AI nowadays can't even do this very first step reliably. But since we have accepted AI hallucination collectively as a species, I agree that this future is just around the corner.

[maccard]

I’d love to see your attempts at this. I think we’re close to something vaguely resembling this at a first glance but nothing that actually works.

[avereveard]

Same I purposefully have a number of over ambitious project out of distribution entirely to test so failure mode, mostly games, when one works, well I gained a new game. Can't wait for my 10 player battleship game on a 100x100 grid to be functional.

[blks]

No, I don’t think we anywhere near that future.

[bavell]

Funny, I've been doing the same thing lately! CC + godot + some game ideas I've had banging around in my head for years but daunting to dive into.

The results so far are... okay, but getting something working to validate the gameplay loop and experiment with different systems is a lot of fun!

[Anonyneko]

How well does it work with Godot? Engines like Unity and Godot are very focused on using the editor UI, so I've always wondered if there's any better workflow than generating code snippets. Unless you're going full .NET/GDExtension...

[conductr]

In my experience, it tells you to do the necessary clicks in the editor if it can’t be coded. Gives you step by step instructions. It kind of makes it a bit more hands on than just letting the agent run free. I tried once to let it take control of my device so it could do those clicks itself but couldn’t get it working, I’m amateur at best with this though so I feel like it should be possible even if it had to do it by running selenium code it wrote.

[tasuki]

> I have a folder with tens of abandoned projects, I re-frame them as experiments at that point.

Interesting, I have just the opposite situation: I have a folder with tens of experiments, many of which have become actual projects at this point.

[aleksiy123]

On the topic of procedural, one thing I experiment with is having the llm part of the procedural loop.

Sort of writing a narrative on top live.

Unfortunately, local models are still a bit slow and weak but was interesting to see what it came up with nonetheless.

[hansmayer]

> he explicitly pushed into "lets have V0 game play loop finished,

> he even helped me build the lore. These have been one of the most fun times using a computer in a long time.

Such a warm, touching story about a friendship between a grown up man and his neural network. But at least I had a good, roaring laugh reading this nonsense, thank you for that!

[ogig]

How snarky. You are conflating friendship with admiration for the effectiveness of newfound tool. If it's the "he" that triggers you, feel free to replace with "it". It's just a second-language artifact.

[hansmayer]

I dunno man. He sounded like he found a new friend in 'him' to me. And it was genuinely hilarious. It took me a while to stop laughing.

[noodletheworld]

> the effectiveness of newfound tool

…and yet, most people continue to say that non standard tooling ecosystems, where the agent cannot run and validate the code it writes, remain difficult and unproductive.

“I just pointed CC at godot and it made a game! This is sooo good”

…is a fairytale.

What tooling are you using to make it run and compile the code? How is it iterating on the project without breaking existing functionality?

None of these are insurmountable, but they require some careful setup.

Posts like this dont make me laugh; they just make me roll my eyes.

Either the OP has not done what they claim.

Or they have spent a lot more time and effort on it than they claim.

> I gave him game design ideas, he comes with working code. I gave him papers about procedural algos, and he comes with the implementation, brainstorm items, create graphic assets (he created a set of procedural 2d generators as external tools), he even helped me build the lore.

Such a sweet story about a boy and his AI.

Unfortunately, I also dont believe in fairytales.

Instead of waving your hands wildly about AI, post some videos and code of the results.

This is hackernews, not hypenews.

[kowbell]

OP never said Claude made a whole game from scratch though, nor are they saying Claude is doing everything without any human contributing to the project, nor are they saying they haven't spent a lot of time and effort on it. Just that it's made it fun and more accessible and it's gotten them excited about something they abandoned.

Here's a bullet point list of the things Claude's done according to OP:

* it picked up the general path immediately

* he explicitly pushed into "lets have V0 game play loop finished, then we can compound and have fun = not giving up".

* [I gave him game design ideas,] he comes with working code.

* [I gave him papers about procedural algos,] and he comes with the implementation

* brainstorm[ed] items

* create[d] graphic assets

* he created a set of procedural 2d generators as external tools

* he even helped me build the lore.

Every one of these are plausible in isolation.

[ogig]

But I had already answered, before your comment, with screenshots broadly showing the current state and the result of the generators.

You imply I'm merely "pointing CC at godot and it made a game"; I never said it was simple, required no previous knowledge, that it was instant or that the game was done. I do have a careful setup involving CI and isolation.

Godot provides a headless mode. CC runs python scripts to run tests and check for debugger warnings. For anything more complex it can wire debug info anywhere. Godot is fully code based so you can make the analogy with any other framework you used AI assistants with.

No sure about what you can't believe about my statements. CC implementing algo from a paper? That it can brainstorm item or lore ideas? I don't seem to be claiming anything out of the common usage of LLMs

[hansmayer]

> with screenshots broadly showing

Why is it always so un-specific with you AI-boosting bunch, whenever you get pressed for concrete results? Suddenly it's not so magical any more, but merely screenshots showing "broadly" the progress, or it's the Nth version of a note-taking app, or something you merely did for a demo presentation. But nothing ever of use with you folks.

[ZihangZ]

+1 to the CI/isolation point. That is the part that makes these setups work for me too: make the failure cheap to reproduce, make stderr visible, make the agent rerun the same command after the patch. A lot of bad agent behavior is really just "it never got a clean signal".

The part that still bites me is across sessions. A tight loop fixes this run, but next week the agent can walk into the same rake again: same wrong import path, same misuse of an internal API, same CI-only dependency issue. After patching the same class of failure a few times, I started writing those down outside the chat context so the next run sees the failure pattern before it guesses.

[noodletheworld]

you said:

> it picked up the general path immediately

I said:

> Or they have spent a lot more time and effort on it than they claim.

You said:

> You imply I'm merely "pointing CC at godot and it made a game"; I never said it was simple

Well. I dont care enough to argue with you, but Im not the one being contrary here.

Readers can google “claude with godot” for a guide on setting it up and decide if that counts as picking it up immediately or not, and if what you said is honest, or hype.

What I said is not that I dont believe youre using claude; but that I roll my eyes at the unbounded enthusiasm for using AI agents with the magical pretence that its easy and productive straight away.

Its not.

Your post gave the impression that it is.

That makes me roll my eyes.

> But I had already answered, before your comment, with screenshots

> Of course these are basic placeholders for a few hours of work

Lord, spare me. You spent a few hours vibing and came to the conclusion that everything is golden?

…and yet you have a:

> I do have a careful setup involving CI and isolation.

So what, you spent more time on your setup than actually coding before posting?

/shakes-head

Whatever man.

Have fun. I stand by what I posted before.