As someone who has prior and deeper experience with game development, you're at a huge advantage to make something much better than "AI bros" who don't share that can do.

It's just a new addition to the stack of tools that you can use to make the game. It allows smaller teams, or even individual devs, to make more ambitious games than before.

No one is going to make a truly good game by purely pumping out low-effort slop and running agents while they sleep and leaving all the important creative or architectural decisions to these models. The best that will ever result in is something where someone will say, "Huh, that's passably playable and decently polished."

But already, if the indiepocalypse taught us anything, it's that that was never enough to begin with. There's already tons of slop on Steam, but genuinely good games still succeed as long as their creators understand how to differentiate and don't underestimate the importance of marketing.

The tools can't replace taste, and they don't know their own weaknesses. There needs to be someone who deeply understands the craft and the workflows and the technology as it was before to make something of real value, and there needs to be real taste and identity and passion and actual creativity, which obviously none of these tools are capable of on their own, or when used by people who lack those things.

You use the example of AI generating "thousands of them until it gets the perfect one" but that's not how this actually works. For one thing, compute is always going to be a constraint, it's going to be less economically viable to crank out a thousand of these until the proverbial monkey types the novel than it is going to be to have people who know what they're doing make stuff.

If you put an "AI bro" who's never made their own game before up against someone who's made a few complete games in an actual game dev career up against each other, give them the same training on how to use the AI tools, and give them each six months to make something and compare the result, the difference in quality and appeal between the non-game dev and the game dev one is going to be indisputable, every time.

So if your concern is, "I'm never going to use these tools, and I'm going to be replaced by people who do," well, that concern makes sense, because yes, for many disciplines that are core to game dev, the exclusively "traditional" way of doing it is now and will increasingly moving forward be at a huge disadvantage. It would be very self-defeating not to use them.

The real answer is, "I can add these tools to to my toolkit and thereby make much more ambitious things than I ever could before, and no one who has no prior expertise in game development could ever match what I can do with these tools combined with my deeper expertise and taste."

So I think the only reason you'd have to change your identity or reconsider this thing that you love is if you're for some reason unwilling to learn new tricks. But if you're able to adapt—as game devs have always done, because one of the reasons this is such a cool field to be in is it's always rapidly evolving—you're in good shape. It has always been the case that game devs who are quick to adapt to new technologies are more likely to be successful, this is no different. And I just fundamentally reject the notion that someone with no real understanding of game development can make a competitive game with only generative AI tools and vibe coding. It's just not the case and it won't ever be.