I am required to maximise my use of AI at work and so I do. It's good enough at simple, common stuff. Throw up a web page, write some python, munge some data in C++, all great as long as the scale is small. If I'm working on anything cutting edge or niche (which I usually am) then it makes a huge mess and wastes my time. If you have a really big code base in the ~50million loc range then it makes a huge mess.
I really liked writing code, so this is all a big negative for me. I genuinely think we have built a really bad thing, that will take away jobs that people love and leave nothing but mediocrity. This thing is going to make the human race dumber and it's going to hold us back.
I work at a company that maintains one of the largest Rails codebases in the world (their claim, but believable). My experience has been the opposite - Claude and Cursor have done a wonderful job of helping me understand the implement new features in this gigantic codebase. I actually found out through AI that while I enjoy writing code, I enjoy building great software better, the coding was just a means to the end.
if you open up the pdf it actually says written with AI...and author's 2 decades of experience with creative coding. i feel like it's a pretty fair disclaimer
I used AI to do a lot of stress testing and to see what patterns fall out of the setting rule I wrote. Helped a lot with grammar checking and general editing. Brainstorming too.
When you write enough materials, the AI generated output started becoming less generic and actually interesting. Really cool. Still wouldn't use the generated output. The ideas, yes, but not the words.
I write every single word. It's not a shortcut by any means. Just means that your work can be narratively and technically more rigorous. Using AI to generate stories for you defeat the purpose.
If it didn't take you at least an hour to create something worthwhile, it's likely that you generated slop.
In the author's defense, I just read a chapter, and it doesn't feel like AI slop. I think they were just being brutally transparent with disclaimers. The author has "two decades of experience teaching creative coding".
Also the book is beautifully designed. Clearly a lot of effort and taste was put into it (as you'd expect from a Creative Coding book).
I'm not the target audience, but if this work was only possible because of AI, I'd say this is a win for the world.
Full disclaimer from the pdf:
> AI ASSISTANCE
> This book was created through an extended collaboration between the author, Claude (Anthropic), and ChatGPT (OpenAI). The structure, pedagogical framework, and frustrations catalog emerged from the author’s two decades of teaching creative coding. AI served as writing partner, generating draft content based on detailed prompts while the author provided direction, critique, iteration, and editorial control. AI was also used to generate specific images. All teaching insights, personal anecdotes, and educational philosophy originate from the author’s experience.
If an AI can license-wash open source software like this then the licenses become meaningless. Which is fascinating. Commercial software cloning that is simple enough for an average person to drive is next and the ultimate form of piracy, see an app for $10? Don’t fancy paying? Just ask ChatGPT for a clone. Future is going to be wild.
I take your point, but if the re-implementation looks the same, I would say it’s a form of copying. (Which I don’t think is a problem, I don’t think you should be able to own sequences of numbers.)
I don’t think there is much short term danger from the cookies. It’s more the principle of the thing. I hate the bullshit language of how we and our 1500 partners respect your privacy choices. They don’t respect anything and would sell their own grandmothers for a dollar.
Similar. I want to see games made by humans who have put in the effort and taken the time to build something good. I don’t want to see the market flooded with low effort AI slop.
Call it whatever you want, the game wouldn't exist without them doing something about it. And because they did something about achieving their vision other people get to play the game.
How about we just call these people the game Producers instead. Thats what a producer does anyway right? They make decisions of how the game is built, what goes into it, ect, ect, ect.
What if you get someone else to program it? By this logic, Edmund McMillen (Super Meat Boy, Binding of Isaac, Mew-Genics) isn't a game developer, because he doesn't code.
Edmund McMillen isn't a game developer per se. As listed in his Wikipedia profile, he's a game designer and artist. He still did that work, though, and human beings still wrote that code. The end result is still an expression in part of his unique talent and creative process.
He could still be called a game developer in a general sense because "game development" doesn't have to explicitly refer to programming, as the game development process is multidisciplinary and multifaceted. But of course the dichotomy here isn't between "did this person or that person write the code" but rather "does a human who uses a machine to generate content deserve the same credit as a human who puts in skill and effort and does the work?"
Arguments equating the use of AI to using a compiler or photoshop or other tools fall flat because if those were equivalent no one would be using AI, the tools allow greater control and are less expensive. The entire use case of AI is that it replicates the creative process, not that it acts as a tool to facilitate that process for a human. AI can create assets and code that a person doesn't understand, and wouldn't be capable of replicating themselves, which wouldn't be the case using mere tools.
And yet AI people come up with these strained metaphors and false equivalences because they don't want to face up to the nature of what AI is, that it isn't liberating them from "gatekeepers" or freeing their creativity, it's commoditizing them and using them to generate content and putting them in a prison of their own device.
Oh please, just stop being silly. Being a game dev means you're building games which means you're thinking about the mechanics of the game and what makes something fun to play. The programming is not "game dev" and offloading it to an AI agent doesn't make someone any less of a game dev.
Totally! I'm sick of not being able to see what tools they use. In fact, I feel that we should also start tagging devs that use an IDE instead of properly coding games in notepad.
It's quite hard to tell what is satirical AI Ads and what is this 99helpers.com site, which is also really covered in pushy messages and trying hard to sell me something.
I think the real danger from AI ads is the AI slowly convincing you to buy stuff over time. It's going to be super effective with the less technically adept.
> the real danger from AI (ads) is the AI slowly convincing you to ${GOAL:-buy stuff} over time.
(man bash: ${X:-abcde} means use value of X else abcde by default )
where GOAL can be anything one may be persuaded into. Choosing $15 burger over $7, brand X over brand Y, notion of X wholesale (to EV or not to EV), Elections, climate-this-or-that, ...
People are massively using it as search engine. So it does not need to lie, just can "spare"/not-show some results that do not match the GOAL..
extra: like 25th frame in 24frame video.. like, last word at each sentence is part of another 5-word goal-sentence.. repeated across 20 sentences..
IMO the "text exegesis" (i.e. what particular text actually means) may need resurrecting as discipline, and not only in higher-education / academia but down into school.
scraping all history every time may or may not be possible..
should one have like 5 accounts and share them with 10 people? across the globe?
Advertisers don't have time for subtle influence campaigns. They need $x sales, this quarter, with this budget for ad spend. Put a big red banner somewhere and make it happen.
It also ruins the ability to use AI to help decide between products. Right now I can use AI chat to decide which two products best meet my specific needs. Once ads are present in all of them I'll be haunted by any queries made about specific products.
I'm curious how often you find factual inaccuracies in the LLM responses when doing that.
I've found that more often than not, it gets at least one key feature/option/etc. outright wrong whenever I've tried that, making it effectively useless for me. Since I need to verify the exact information myself anyways, I'm 90% the easy to just having the different items in comparing up in side-by-side browser tabs, anyways.
I usually use it for sub $10 things (mostly groceries) and I'm actively grocery shopping when I do it. So say I'm standing in the store trying to decide between 8 different yogurts all of which have different sales going on and different servings sizes, so instead of having to flip over and read all the 8 brands and do math to equalize everything myself I take a photo of the shelf and ask Gemini which one has the most protein per dollar. It usually gets it pretty accurate, I'm doing the math to check in my head but it's just a time saver to not have to fuss every single time there's a sale. But it's not just yogurt it's lots of things, like debating chicken vs beef meatballs or which of the breakfast cereal is closest to the current favorite because I don't want to have to go to an extra store because this one doesn't have it. When I first got Claude I was determined to save $200 having spent the $200 on Claude and I would say it did manage to assist in grocery shopping sufficiently to make it worthwhile. It also helps keep a running memory for me about prices of certain things, did you know the prices for Bonne Maman chocolate hazelnut spread have been fluctuating by $4 it goes from $4.50 to $8.50. I take photos of the eggs section and ask what's the best hen care to price this week. Probably the biggest oops I've had doing this was asking it how to replace my bicycle freewheel, and it told me to watch a video, order the part, only to discover I'm not strong enough by far and the real solution was to pay the guy at the bike shop 10 dollars to do it with his giant vise grip + special freewheel tool. I did have to pay bike shop guy an extra 10 dollars too for him to fix my own attempt that almost ruined the whole wheel.
> It's quite hard to tell what is satirical AI Ads and what is this 99helpers.com site, which is also really covered in pushy messages and trying hard to sell me something.
The interesting thing about this website is that it’s for a product that uses AI chat bots for customer support. This is something that Hacker News traditionally hates. The website is built like an over the top SaaS landing page from the 2010s.
Embracing ragebait is an interesting way to trick audiences who normally wouldn’t like your product to start sharing links to your domain.
I really liked writing code, so this is all a big negative for me. I genuinely think we have built a really bad thing, that will take away jobs that people love and leave nothing but mediocrity. This thing is going to make the human race dumber and it's going to hold us back.
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