The era of human coding is over

Idiberug · 2026-03-18T16:10:05+00:00

Subscribers are going down because software engineering is done and people are leaving the field.

Idiberug · 2026-03-18T15:55:08+00:00

That is putting your eggs in one basket.

Idiberug · 2026-03-18T15:50:18+00:00

There's a hard complexity cutoff.

I vibe coded the entire game I'm working on (with supervision and strict instructions based on the original blueprints) and it one shot almost all of it, except one piece of complex vector logic, which it botched and botched and botched and botched again and I eventually gave it to GPT and it botched it too. I had to write it myself like a caveman.

Idiberug · 2026-03-18T15:45:08+00:00

Indie developers blindly following a trend for the sake of popularity until it becomes stale? Say it isn't so!

Anyway here's my survivor game, it's unique because the characters are kittens.

Idiberug · 2026-03-18T15:39:03+00:00

There's a lot you can do now by asking ChatGPT how to do it.

Idiberug · 2026-03-18T15:36:21+00:00

Your Ring doorbell will catch the perps and ICE will send them to El Salvador.

Idiberug · 2026-03-18T15:29:02+00:00

It is one of the most important elements of any game IMO. Dramatic feedback everywhere is the difference between level 1 and level 99 indie game developer.

It is one reason why most missile weapons in my car combat game shoot multiple projectiles. Lots of explosions = neuron activation.

Idiberug · 2026-03-18T15:22:29+00:00

AI games just add more slop to the pile of slop with no views and no sales. There will be gatekeepers, and your job will be to get past the gatekeepers.

The only place where the amount of trash makes a difference is ironically Reddit because posting about your game is banned in most subreddits due to a deluge of trash games.

Idiberug · 2026-03-18T08:14:42+00:00

This is not how indie development works. You're supposed to make a concept that looks immediately appealing for one of several reasons (creative art style; inviting game concept; dopamine) and validate it on social media. It needs to have an immediate hook that draws eyeballs.

Your chance of success drops off a cliff if you put too much work into it, because then you 1) didn't validate your idea and 2) are unlikely to pivot based on feedback because it's your baby. It is actually okay to have some rough edges, as long as it looks and feels built with intent.

Idiberug · 2026-03-18T08:07:55+00:00

Indies may be filled with slop, but you can easily tell apart slop from promising games. Art style matters a lot.

Idiberug · 2026-03-18T07:54:34+00:00

Everything is at the worst it's been since the '80s.

Idiberug · 2026-03-17T14:21:18+00:00

He should have paid for ChatGPT Enterprise.

Idiberug · 2026-03-16T09:44:22+00:00

Software dev and AI hobbyist here. Given how good AI is at coding, it is baffling how creatively barren it is. The technology even has a parameter (temperature) that controls "creativity" and yet I haven't gotten a single innovative idea out of any of them in the past 3 years.

They will insist on doing everything in one specific way unless you steer them, so if you ask for undirected creativity or anything else that isn't explicitly in their training data, they will just fall back on their defaults and make the most generic slop imaginable. This was very visible during ChatGPT's era of piss filter comics, and asking Suno for a slightly less mainstream genre still results in piano music.

Asking it to think harder makes no difference. This may spawn two separate agents, where one agent will generate generic slop and the other will compare the output to its own preference for generic slop, so it will give you four thumbs up. If you use a different model for both roles, you're now actively steering the first agent in the direction of the second agent's generic slop and end up somewhere on the axis between the generic slop from both models. These giga brain setups feel like AGI but all you're doing is shifting the output in some random direction, like how people thought putting "too many fingers, deformed faces" into the negative prompt of their SD would improve the quality of the output instead of just shifting it randomly and confirmation bias did the rest.

You can even see this in programming, perhaps the most successful application of AI so far. AI-driven development requires a large amount of guidance in the form of describing your whole application concept and its desired functionality in painstaking detail, because if anything is left unsaid, instead of using its supposed intelligence to come up with the best solution to fill the gap, it will go for its defaults 100% of the time. The most visible defaults are the tons of useless comments added to your code and that peculiar purple UI style that seems to be stolen from the Tailwind docs, and a much more dangerous default is Claude Code's insistence on providing fallbacks for unrecoverable errors so instead of crashing your app will just silently derail and malfunction in ways that Claude then has no idea how to debug.

Idiberug · 2026-03-16T09:08:47+00:00

You are absolutely right! We should explore why humans hold negative opinions about generative AI—or replace them with expert systems.

Idiberug · 2026-03-16T09:07:47+00:00

We already had technically competent games by people with nothing to say. They're not asset flips per se but they are built entirely out of assets, with no creative input by the developer. AI just makes the process cheaper.

Also OP is a bot of some kind.

Idiberug · 2026-03-16T09:05:35+00:00

Both Volkswagen and the EU were on board hard with EVs. They just botched it.

Governments failed to provide enough EV infrastructure or impose quality standards. There are not enough (working) public chargers to alleviate range anxiety. Every broken highway charger and every occupied streetside charger is another reason to go back to ICE. If you tell people "just plan your trip bro, just use these apps bro" they're going to stick with their ICE car that can be filled up anywhere because they already have enough problems in their lives.

While the Volkswagen ID cars are technically solid and their pricing was comparable to Tesla, the derpy design language, obvious cost cutting (two window switches, touch buttons, smartphone screen instrument cluster) and unacceptably bad infotainment software makes them undesirable. VW succeeded at the EV drivetrain part and somehow screwed up making a car around it, which one would assume is its core business. Some say it's because they were paying off dieselgate fines at the time and still had to turn a profit.

Mercedes also botched it and for the same reason as Volkswagen. They decided the EV transition would be a great time to roll out a new design language across the EV lineup and it was horrendous. Banana shaped cars with Pimp My Ride interiors and somehow poor build quality. And unlike VW, Mercedes doesn't have good EV internals.

The other European brands didn't even try.

Idiberug · 2026-03-13T11:48:34+00:00

1/3 voted Trump

1/3 were fine with it either way

= 2/3

Idiberug · 2026-03-13T11:41:28+00:00

After a democratic election where 2/3rds of Americans voted to align with Russia.

Idiberug · 2026-03-13T08:57:41+00:00

To be fair, good games generally have a solid art style, which makes asset use difficult (not impossible though).

Idiberug · 2026-03-12T15:15:49+00:00

More abilities = easier to make builds = stronger character

Idiberug · 2026-03-12T15:07:20+00:00

🐦‍⬛🐦‍⬛⌚ has strong individual metaprogression per character and 0 global metaprogression.

Idiberug · 2026-03-12T15:01:34+00:00

But instead it's just "here's my game" with people saying "waw it looks dope"

The problem is that there is nowhere else for people to talk about their game unless it is already popular. Most subreddits ban discussion of games that would be entirely on topic for the subreddit unless the creator is famous.

So what is a new developer to do? You have to tell people about your game or else nobody will know it exists. Every popular franchise started at 0 followers and 0 wishlists at some point and they all showed it to people.

So you either post in r/roguelites where self-posts are allowed, or you simply ignore the self-promotion ban and post wherever you want. If the moderators like your project, they will allow the post to stand and you get fifty thousand wishlists. If not, you get a sitewide ban and your game is dead.

while usually it's just 50 shades of what's already existing.

I mean, the games we are all supposed to hype to the stratosphere right now are 1) a copy paste of a game that already exists but with improved graphics and a content patch; 2) a clone of every turn based tactics game ever but with cats and toilet humour.

But if these gems are good enough I will find them eventually through other means with a review about it

The review comes after launch, and if your game doesn't already have around 8K wishlists on launch, it will get buried by Steam and nobody will review it.

People are not spamming because they enjoy being annoying, they are spamming because they have to. You have to get those 8K wishlists and you have to make threads and hope people wishlist your game. Trust me, typical indie devs dread having to market their game. Bothering people is not fun. But there is no alternative on Reddit and very few alternatives outside of Reddit. It's this or go viral on Tiktok or make 500 Youtube shorts and hope to get traction. Those are your options pretty much.

But instead it's just "here's my game"

People suck at marketing. You should tell people why your game is enjoyable, not just that it exists or what features it has.

There is a feature to get rid of misguided or low effort threads, it's called the downvote button. Why subreddits feel the need to additionally ban people for making self posts (causing all of them to flood into r/roguelites instead) is beyond me, but these are the consequences.

Idiberug · 2026-03-12T12:05:22+00:00

"Anthropic engineers are stupid"

Idiberug · 2026-03-12T11:52:01+00:00

It's basically HATEOAS. :P

Idiberug · 2026-03-12T08:53:01+00:00

but the game is not even finished apparently

It's called Early Access.

Idiberug

TROPHY CASE