Comment by sarchertech
1 month ago
Sure but why haven’t you seen a drastic increase in single person startups.
Why are there fewer games launched in steam this January than last?
1 month ago
Sure but why haven’t you seen a drastic increase in single person startups.
Why are there fewer games launched in steam this January than last?
Because very few knows how to use AI. I teach AI courses on the side. I've done auditing supervised fine tuning and RLHF projects for a major provider. From seeing real prompts, many specifically from people who work with agents every day, people do not yet have the faintest clue how to productively prompt AI. A lot of people prompt them in ways that are barely coherent.
Even if models stopped improving today, it'd take years before we see the full effects of people slowly gaining the skills needed to leverage them.
Sure there are people holding it wrong.
But there are thousands of people on social media claiming huge productivity gains. Surely at least 5% of devs are holding it right.
If a 10x boost is possible, we’d notice that. There are only 20k games a year released on steam.
If my hypothesis is true and the real final output boost is somewhere near 20%, we’re seeing exactly what you’d expect.
I'd love to look at what you consider to be good prompts if you could provide a link.
You'd be surprised how low the bar is. What I'm seeing is down to the level of people not writing complete sentences.
There doesn't need to be any "magic" there. Just clearly state your requirements. And start by asking the model to plan out the changes and write a markdown file with a plan first (I prefer this over e.g. Claude Code's plan mode, because I like to keep that artefact), including planning out tests.
If a colleague of yours not intimately familiar with the project could get the plan without needing to ask followup questions (but able to spend time digging through the code), you've done pretty well.
You can go over-board with agents to assist in reviewing the code, running tests etc. as well, but that's the second 90%. The first 90% is just to write a coherent request for a plan, read the plan, ask for revisions until it makes sense, and tell it to implement it.
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Because ai doesnt work like this “make me money” or “make stardew valley in space”. The hard part is the painful exploration and necessary taste to produce something useful. The number of these kind of people did not increase with ai.
Eg, ai is a big multiplier but that doesnt mean it will translate to “more” in the way people think.
It doesn’t need to be useful or a good game to launch on steam. Surely if it was a “big multiplier” 5-10x, it would be noticeably impacting steam launches.
Now if it’s something closer to 20%, we’re seeing exactly what you’d expect.
It comes down back to that whole discussion around intelligence becoming cheaper and more accessible but motivation and agency remaining stable.
I’ve worked with a few folks who have been given AI tools (like a designer who never coded in his life, a or video/content creator) who have absolutely taken off with creating web apps and various little tools and process improvements for themselves thanks by just vibecoding what they wanted. The key with both these individuals is high agency, curiosity, and motivation. That was innate, the AI tooling just gave them the external means to realise what they wanted to do with more ease.
These kinds of folks are not the majority, and we’re still early into this technological revolution imo (models are improving on a regular basis).
In summary, we’ve given the masses to “intelligence” but creativity and motivation stay the same.
Yeah but if it’s 100x easier to do something, it takes much less motivation to push through and finish it.
If you look at every game dev forum in existence, or you’ve ever talked to people about why they got into CS there are probably 1000x more people who want to publish a game than have done it.
If there was a a tool that provided a 10x-100x speed boost it would push enough of those people over the edge and make a significant impact on number of games released.
That’s to say nothing of boosting existing game devs.
My guess is that the true impact of this will be difficult to measure for a while. Most "single-person start-ups" will probably not be high-visibility VC-backed, YC affairs, and rather solopreneurs with a handful of niche moonlighted apps each making 3-4 digit monthly revenue.
Those would still be launching on places like product hunt though.
Haven't you? I have! In another reply, I noted the avalanche of WisprFlow competitors, as just one example.
95% of all new startups have the word AI in the description, so of course there are lots of new API wrappers and people trying to build off of existing models.
There aren’t noticeably more total startups or projects though.
Huh? Less games launched on steam? First time I hear that. Any source?
But my guess would be: games are closed sourced and need physics. Which AI is bad at.
Just google “games released on steam by year”.
Many games don’t need physics, and there are a billion hobby projects on GitHub.
https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/
Does not look like less games.
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