I don't think you should feel like your personal projects need to be vetted by an armchair peanut gallery. It's actually kind of offensive how so many people show up in a thread like this and demand that what sparked joy for you be formally subjected to a gauntlet of moving goalpost validation markers.

Quite simply, I don't think that they are asking or arguing in good faith.

It's important to point out that you're the one working hard to define AI critics as a camp/group/class when a stronger argument can be made that we're all in the same camp/group/class. I use agentic LLMs for coding every day and I think that it's incredibly important to maintain a critical lens and be open to changing our minds.

However, history suggests that creating artificial divisions is the first step towards all of the the bad things we claim not to like in this world.

Tech adoption generally moves like Time's Arrow. People who use LLMs aren't geeks who changed; we're just geeks. If you want to get off the train, that's your call. But don't make it an us vs them.

It's incredibly frustrating arguing these same points, over and over, every time that this comes up. You're asking people who are experienced developers absolutely chewing through checklists and peeking at HN while compiling/procrastinating/eating a sandwich/waiting for a prompt to finish to not just explain but quantify what is plainly obvious to those people, every day. You want us to bring paper receipts, like we have some incentive to lie to you.

From our perspective, the gains are so obvious that it really does feel like you must just be doing something fundamentally wrong not to see the same wins.

So when someone says "I can't make it do the magic that you're seeing" it makes me wonder why you don't have a long list of projects that you've never gotten around to because life gets in the way.

Because... if you don't have that list, to us that translates as painfully incurious. It's inconceivable that you don't have such a list because just being a geek in this moment should be enough that you constantly notice things that you'd like to try. If you don't have that, it's like when someone tells you that they don't have an inner monologue. You don't love them any less, but it's very hard not to look at them a bit differently.

> You want us to bring paper receipts, like we have some incentive to lie to you

Of course you might be heavily financially invested in AI companies so you might indeed have an incentive to hype up the tech

Or you might be relying on your hype to drive traffic to your blog

I don't have an investment portfolio, and I don't have a blog. But I appreciate that you're actually thinking about what I said, so thanks for that.

That said, if I did have a blog, the amount of negative attention that AI gets these days is not going to have the desired effect.

>It's incredibly frustrating arguing these same points, over and over,

quite frankly there seems to be something incredibly frustrating in your life going on, but I'm not sure that the underlying cause of whatever is weighing on your mind at the moment is that I asked "how do you know that what you are feeling is actually true, in comparison to what studies show should be true?" (rephrased, as not reasonable to quote whole post)

>From our perspective, the gains are so obvious that it really does feel like you must just be doing something fundamentally wrong not to see the same wins.

From my perspective, when I think i am experiencing something that data from multiple sources tell me is not what is actually happening I try to figure out how I can prove what I am experiencing, I reflect upon myself, have I somehow deluded myself? No? Then how do I prove it when analysis of many similar situations to my own show a different result?

You seem to think what I mean is people saying "Claude didn't help me, it wasn't worth it", no, just to clarify although I thought it was really clear, I am talking about numerous studies always being posted on HN so I'm sure you must have seen them where productivity gains from coding agents do not seem to actually show up in the work of those who use it. Studies conducted by third parties observing the work, not claims made by people performing the work.

I'm not going to go through the rest of your post, I get the urge to be insulting, especially as a stress release if you have a particularly bad time recently. But frankly, statistically speaking, my life is almost certainly significantly worse than yours, and for that reason, but not that reason alone, I will also quite confidently state without hardly any knowledge of you specifically but just my knowledge of my life and comparison of having met people throughout it, that my list dwarfs yours.

To lay it out, Im pretty firmly pro-AI.

Putting it succinctly, these kind of conversations feel weird because it's like asking whether carpenters are faster using power tools or hand tools. If you've used power tools it's obvious they make work a lot faster. Maybe there were some studies around the time power tools were introduced looking at the productivity of carpenters, if those studies had results saying the productivity gains weren't obvious in the data that means you have a problem with your study and the data you have collected (which is totally understandable, measuring imprecise things like productivity accurately is really hard). You have to look at the evidence in front of you though, try telling the guy with a chainsaw that he's actually no more productive than he was when he was using an axe and he'll laugh at you.

This takes the cake for one of the strangest replies I've ever received on here.

I'm not sure how or indeed why you draw lines from what I said to my life situation... which is relevant how?

What I apparently did not do a good enough job of conveying is that those "data from multiple sources" get cited and then people immediately reply with "those are old studies". It's circular in the same way that arguing with anti-vax people is circular.

The difference is that unlike vaccines, it's very easy for someone to see how productive they are when using LLMs properly. It's not a subtle difference.

Hence the frustration with people who keep insisting that we're imagining our own productivity. It's not a good faith inquiry.

OK, glad to hear I was mistaken, but it certainly seemed like about halfway through your first response you went off the rails and decided to take my question as some sort of personal affront. It was not the strangest response I've had on HN, but one of the strangest. I could go through with a full analysis of why I thought "this guy is having problems", but that would take a long time and as you say you aren't I guess it isn't particularly useful.

I guess we aren't going to get anything meaningful between us on this subject, because you seem to think it is like arguing with an anti-vaxxer, which funny enough I thought the same thing,

So fine, you experience a gain, you just do, and it is so clear and evident you don't need to guard yourself against being deluded despite studies suggesting that gain is not there. That seems crazy to me, I would doubt and want to verify my gain if I read a study suggesting the gain was illusory. No meaningful convergence seems possible between needing verification and not needing verification.

I like remus' comment to your previous message; you're telling a guy with a chainsaw who is busy chopping down trees at lightning speed that he should stop and defend his daily experience against some studies that suggest tree chopping speeds are not what they seem.

At some point you just have to shrug and get back to work chopping down 3-5x more trees than you did last year.

Writing software is not chopping trees, though.

For instance, there is a lot of evidence (and intuition, frankly) to the argument that while LLM increase superficial, short-term productivity, they also cause an extreme accumulation in technical debt that may more than wipe out any initial, fast progress down the line.

If you aren't reviewing the changes its proposing, you deserve what's coming to you.

> It's incredibly frustrating arguing these same points, over and over, every time that this comes up. You're asking people who are experienced developers absolutely chewing through checklists and peeking at HN while compiling/procrastinating/eating a sandwich/waiting for a prompt to finish to not just explain but quantify what is plainly obvious to those people, every day. You want us to bring paper receipts, like we have some incentive to lie to you.

This puts what I have been feeling in the recent months into words pretty concisely!

To me, it really is a force multiplier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271883

Of course, I still have to pay attention to what AI is doing, and figure out ways how to automate more code checks, but the gradual trend in my own life is more AI, not less: https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/i-blew-through-24-million-token... (though letting it run unconstrained/unsupervised is a mess, I generally like to make Claude Code create a plan and iterate on it with Opus 4.6, then fire off a review, since getting the Max subscription I don't really need Cerebras or other providers, though I still appreciate them)

At the same time I've seen people get really bad results with AI, often on smaller models, or just expecting to give it vague instructions and get good results, with no automated linters or prebuild checks in place, or just copying snippets with no further context in some random chat session.

Who knows, maybe there's a learning curve and a certain mindset that you need to have to get a benefit from the technology, to where like 80% of developers will see marginal gains or even detriment, which will show up in most of the current studies. A bit like how for a while architecturally microservices and serverless were all the rage and most people did an absolutely shit job at implementing them, before (hopefully) enough collective wisdom was gained of HOW to use the technology and when.

Totally! Though I maintain that the only good aspect to microservices is that krazam video. You know the one.

I do get frustrated when I see people not using Plan steps, copy/pasting from web front-ends or expecting to one-shot their entire codebase from a single dense prompt. It's problematic because it's not immediately obvious whether someone is still arguing like it's late 2024, you know what I mean?

Also, speaking for myself I can't recommend that anyone use anything but Opus 4.5 right now. 4.6 has a larger context window, but it's crazy expensive when that context window gets actually used even while most agree that these models get dumber when they have a super-large context. 4.5 actually scores slightly better than 4.6 on agentic development, too! But using less powerful models is literally using tools that are much more likely to produce the sorts of results that skeptics think apply across the board.

Haven't looked into 4.5 vs 4.6 in depth (since the latter seems good for my needs), but

> but it's crazy expensive

was something I struggled with until just going for the Max subscription and cancelling my other ones.

I'm not sure what Anthropic is doing, but they're either making truckloads of money from those paying per-token (especially since you're not supposed to use subscriptions for server use cases --> devs can use Claude Code, but not code review bots etc.), or heavily subsidizing subscriptions.

100 USD is worth it for me, I've only hit the 5 hour limits a few times, and haven't hit 100% of the weekly limits once. I fear to think how much comparable usage with any of the Opus models would have been, if I were to pay per token - even Sonnet could get similarly expensive.

I don't get/like/want Claude Code. I do everything in Cursor, and I am very happy. I recommend it! And there's no time-based limits. You get deeply discounted API calls included in your monthly subscription, and then overage is billed at the same discounted rate. It's essentially committing to an "at least" amount per month in exchange for a preferred rate.

I have a USD$200/month Cursor plan, and I do hundreds of hours worth of Opus 4.5 prompting with it every month. I tend to pay $250-300 a month after overages, and I consider myself a heavy user. During Opus 4.1 days, one month I paid $700. 4.5 got substantially cheaper and smarter, and I consider that the real moment agentic coding got real.

I don't know your financial situation and I recognize that $300/month is more than much of the world makes in a month. I am just saying that for me, what I'm working on is important enough that I am absolutely willing to pay a premium for access to the best tooling available, because every dollar I spend represents literally an hour of my time. Maybe more? It's so incredibly cheap compared to hiring an unreliable human who needs to sleep.

You can't pay someone $3600/year to lick stamps, much less pair program application development.

That's pretty cool! I haven't really been a heavy user of Cursor, but found Cline/RooCode/KiloCode in VSC to be pretty good, while letting me preserve my existing setup and also easily switch between multiple providers, sometimes in the middle of some work, to let another model check the output of the first one!

I think most I ever spent per month was 300 USD, but I had to cut down on that and Anthropic's subscription being way more affordable than paying per token (alongside GitHub Copilot, which also has multiple model support and pretty generous limits alongside unlimited autocomplete), since I'm also helping a friend with expenses during their chemo and some other friends with some meds and stuff, even though policemen and teachers and others have way worse financial circumstances than software devs in Latvia, the economy here doesn't give that much breathing room for that kind of thing.

Oh for a while I was also using Cerebras Code which gives you really generous token limits (like 24M per day on the 50 USD per month tier), though the GLM 4.7 model I tried out still made me go back and work on fixing its output more often than I'd like. Eventually I kinda settled on SOTA.

That said, I do remember a post here on HN where some founders were thinking whether they should throw something like over 1000 USD at Anthropic (the API variety) per month and they realized that for them that amount of money was totally reasonable, compared to getting some junior devs or whatever.

I read that same post, and for me it wasn't just something I remember; it had a profound impact on how I came to be typing at you casually about how I have spent up to $700 a month on Opus tokens in Cursor (which absolutely lets you switch between providers... I just really like Opus 4.5!)

To me, all of the switching between dev environments + all of the time spent undoing errors causes by less powerful models has a huge time cost; not to be cliche that means it's very expensive to use error prone models and obsess over trying all of the new half-baked things (I've never even heard of most of the stuff you mentioned, lol). Like, if I spend an hour of my time mucking around with some tool, that's a good chunk of the $200/month I commit to Cursor.

Anyhow, at the real risk of sounding like an unpaid Cursor salesman, IMO it's worth every penny. For me, the jury is still out on whether people find Opus 4.6's 5x context to be valuable enough to pay significantly more for it over 4.5, which again is rated as being slightly better at agentic coding than 4.6. Since agentic coding is what I do....

I commend you for being willing to share.

The "able to make the X" thing is something haters love to ignore.

Best of luck with your beta!

I don't think it's hate; the games market was oversaturated before AI, and it's even more saturated with it. Players have limited time and patience that usually doesn't work out in-favor of indies.

What you are describing is a completely different set of problems.

They are both real and coexist, often at the same time.

> They are both real and coexist, often at the same time.

Are they though because I don't see the discourse of indie or single game developers being ostracized in some public shaming trend.

I see it only in the double/triple `A` scene.

> I don't see the discourse of indie or single game developers being ostracized in some public shaming trend

Not specifically “game” developers, but I do see attempts at that ostracization on the OSDev subreddit; at least one participant there has posted progress updates on a vibe-coded hobby OS, and each of those updates ends up deluged with people complaining specifically about the AI use.

> and each of those updates ends up deluged with people complaining specifically about the AI use

I would genuinely like to see this thread, because if the comments are legitimate and backed up by examples, ie : "This is XSS vulnerable" etc.. then even with the prefix of "AI Slop" I'm fine with..

I think it's fair people don't get too comfortable with just trusting vibe coded agents, when in my own experience, the bugs they leave around are often harder to identify from a simple review than a simple architeture misalignment.

It would elevate the conversation significantly if people didn't use "vibe coding" and AI use interchangeably.

I don't use Reddit, but you don't have to look for a specific thread. It often feels like there's a mob of people just waiting for fresh meat to wander into their camp. Literally any thread referencing AI on this site is full of people who appear to have nothing but venom and contempt for people who use these tools.

It's not everyone, but loud minorities are still loud.

I'll try to only use the term AI as VibeCoding is more a derivative. There definitely are some people who are just doomers about AI entirely and I think it's always the case with any new technology. That said, you can't deny there is just an unholy amount of useless applications for the AI tooling that are really not providing anything useful other than generating 'slop'.

Using AI tools for protein folding or medical breakthroughs for example will impact the world in a positive way. People will champion that. Using them to automate your creativity hasn't been in demand by anyone except shareholders or people looking to milk a quick ad revenue for little to no effort. So of course, there's a negative sentiment.

I strongly disagree. Let me try and change your mind.

Let's say that you have been building your passion project; it could be a game, it could be a synth, it could be a mobile app. You were a year into development already when LLMs blew up, and you very quickly realized that you could leverage them to move much, much faster. This allowed you to tackle a long list of features that realistically would have never left the daydreaming to-do list because in reality, it'd have been a minor miracle to just get to v1.0 much less do all of the cool stuff you thought of along the way. This is the real power of the agentic workflow: in experienced hands, it's an incredible force multiplier.

And yet, even while your churning out features and knocking out bugs that you never would have found on your own without users being upset, the world gets progressively more and more pissy about this moment's Scarlet Letter. Suddenly mentioning that actually, you're getting amazing results from LLMs makes a significant percentage of people irrationally angry, leaving comments that would otherwise be appropriate to shame deviants and cheaters.

Suddenly, you're faced with a really awful realization: you'd love to loudly and proudly show the world how your LLM-assisted dev workflow has allowed you to produce something you honestly might not have ever finished in 2023, but if you do then people are going to write off what you've done as slop before even looking at it, and since you were actually thinking that maybe what you were building might have some legitimate commercial viability, you can't actually advocate for sanity and transparency without taking a serious hit to your product's success. By extension, this means that it might cause real damage to you and your family.

What I am describing is a chilling effect, and it is real. All of the billions in VC have literally nothing to offer someone who just wants to build cool shit and can suddenly do so faster and often better.

At the very least, consider that there is a tangible cost to telling the world that the thing you created exists at least in part because of AI but there is no such thing as people being more likely to pay for something simply because AI was involved. There is only downside. That is the chill.

It's not about victimhood. It is about not fighting battles that can only lose you ground.

Steam has an AI disclaimer now and many games with the disclaimer still sell well. So yeah it's totally victim mentality. The evidence is just right on Steam, but instead of actually looking at the largest market in the gaming world some AI bros chose to fight an imaginary enemy in their minds.

https://www.totallyhuman.io/blog/games-with-ai-disclosures-h...

Per your link, only 6% of those games made more than $10k.

Also, the AI disclaimer covers the very broad category of “AI has touched some part of this project at some point, no matter how minor, and no matter if it was eventually replaced with non-AI assets”. The original article seems to be more about the narrower category of “AI is a significant part of this project”, which would exclude nearly all of the top-12-grossing games that your link covers.

Here's a social experiment for you to try: create or switch to a different profile, put on your debate club hat and post some comments in this thread that are supportive of pro-AI positions. Speak eloquently and be polite. Say things that are defensibly reasonable if you were arguing the opposite position.

Then watch the silent downvoting begin. Perhaps y'all aren't aware that this is happening, or the degree to which it doesn't matter how coherent or fair your point may be.

If you speak out in favour of considered, responsible use of agentic LLM usage, there's a mob of socketpuppets that are eager to punish you because you're not on their team.

> post some comments in this thread that are supportive of pro-AI positions

> Then watch the silent downvoting begin

I express my pro-AI positions on HN all the time.

Also, top 3 comments in this very thread are all pro-AI right now. That's how deeply your victim mentality rooted. You chose to ignore all the positive parts and cling to the downvotes. That's a choice you made and I won't bother to convince you otherwise anymore.

I've had my own rollercoaster relationship with Unity over the past decade, but telling people to roll their own game engine so that they can finally make a game is almost universally terrible advice.

People who want to build game engines should build game engines; people who want to build games should absolutely use Unity, Unreal or Godot in no particular order.

It's no different than needing to build a web framework so that you can make a website. The people who do it are often not even aware that they are procrastinating.

People who are making a simple 2D web game don't need an engine, with rare exceptions. Chrome's 30 million lines is plenty of bloat to build on ;)

Besides, in this context you're already outsourcing all the code to Claude or Codex or whatever. i.e. a "programmer" who has no problem handling the engine side of things.

That being said, most enginedev is creative procrastination. Randy's recent video on this is very illuminating — "I thought if I made a really good engine, making the game would be the easy part!" So he avoided actually making a game for like ten years...

Most 2D games don't even need an engine: you can just make the game "directly", on top of SDL or Canvas or what have you. (That being said, noob friendly stuff like Processing and Kaboom is great and highly recommended!)

--

Source: made lots of 2D games and a few engines. The engines were a complete waste of time. (Even ready made engines often did more harm than good!)

If I was making 3D games, then I would probably need an engine (but js13k begs to differ!), and it would probably not be a great to roll your own (unless you're going for something 90s themed :)

--

Edit: Most of my games are very "programmer art", or very retro. If I were an artist or working with artists, then an engine would be useful for that, for the visual side of things. Flash was probably unmatched in that regard

That being said, it's not that hard to roll your own level editor, so... ;) even that argument is questionable.

Edit 2: Also the web APIs are unfortunately kind of ass, so using a library (or engine) has the advantage of letting you avoid dealing with them directly for the most part.

Problems I've had with unity in my last 3 installs. All LTS default installations on windows. (I have delivered professional projects in Unity in the past):

1. Inspector for lists/arrays works once, crashes editor, must be restarted each time.

2. Race conditions in the basic animator functionality making animation events useless, killed a project because we couldn't edit the underlying code, didn't have time to redo animator-based functionality which should have worked in theory.

3. Segfaults in compiler -> 6 hours of debugging, gave up, still can't build reliably.

Each of these killed the workflow and therefore the ability to deliver the project dead, and were completely out of my control.

Vibe code your engine, at least you'll die on your own terms.

Unity is also just a fundamentally hostile organization waiting to pull the rug, as evidenced by their past behaviour.

Do not build your castle on someone else's land.

I have multiple years of extremely dense, technical design and planning conversations locked in the ChatGPT web interface.

Hearing that starting from a blank slate yields the best outcomes is sort of like hearing extremely wealthy people talk about how money doesn't make you happier.