Comment by tayo42
20 hours ago
Do people build to impress with an implementation that no one cares about really? Or to share the end product?
I think now you are freed up to make a shooter that people will actually want to play. Or at least attempt it.
We probably need to come to terms with the idea that no one cares about those details. Really, 2 years ago no one would have cared about your hand crafted 3d shooter either I think.
It doesn't matter, neither of those scenarios makes the effort impressive in this case. The vibe coded thing might even be useful - that does not make it impressive though. Effort does.
> The vibe coded thing might even be useful - that does not make it impressive though.
Then "impressive" shouldn't even be the benchmark. If someone gifted me $10K, I'm not going to care if they earned it in a competition or won it in a lottery. Value is value. I'm gratefully accepting it and not being snobby about it. I couldn't care less about how "impressive" anything is if it's useful to me.
But "impressive" is not a benchmark, it's a human reaction. I care about being impressed, as do many people.
This is the myth of the Protestant work ethic; that effort matters, not outcome.
This is what I think a lot of the people who advocate for 'AI generated images being art' don't get. There's no effort or intentionality into what's being created; it has the look and appearance of 'polished art' (that breaks down when you look closer) but behind it is nothing.
It's also why AI generated code is a nightmare to read and deal with, because the intention behind the code does not exist. Code outputting malformed input because it was a requirement two years ago, a developer throwing in a quick hack to fix a problem, these are things you can divine and figure out from everything else.
> I think now you are freed up to make a shooter that people will actually want to play. Or at least attempt it.
Taking this to an extreme, let's say vibe coding becomes real enough, and frictionless enough, that you can prompt a first person shooter into existence in a few minutes or hours.
If/when this becomes true, nobody will want to play your shooter. You'll share your shooter with people and if they care at all about shooters, they'll just go prompt their favorite AI tool and conjure their own into existence.
Admittedly this is a bit extreme, and we aren't there yet. But I've thought about this in relation to art, and how some people now go "well, this empowers people who didn't know how to make a movie/cartoon/painting/game, it's empowering and democratizing". But in my mind, art is a form of communication between humans. Without the exchange between humans, art cannot exist. If all of us are each lost in our own AI-powered projects, and if anything can be easily conjured out of thin air, then why bother with the next person's art project (game or whatever)? I don't care about your game, let me make my own in a few minutes.
I'm thinking about potential counterpoints: ah, yes, but it's about "ideas". While we can both make our ideas reality, my ideas are more inventive, so my AI-powered projects are more appealing. I'm not convinced about this; I think slop will dominate and invade public spaces, but also... why draw the line at ideas? Why is "skill with a pencil" replaceable with AI-slop, but ideas aren't? Ideas are often overrated, what matters is execution, anyway.
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