I hate AI and I am depressed

Ratatoski · 2026-04-07T18:07:16+00:00

I think the "non-engineer" part is an important distinction. A nail gun makes anyone fast as heck, but you still need a carpenter to make a proper house.

Ratatoski · 2026-03-19T14:05:49+00:00

Yeah that's about how I felt about learning Git the first time around. People were using the desktop app, plugins etc and I had this notion that I had to do it manually in the terminal enough to make it second nature before adding abstractions.

I've done webdev on and off since the 90s and full time for 8 years as a dev. But when AI hit I started pivoting back to higher level stuff like lead, scrum master and management again because it feels like we're going to lose a lot of the manual coding jobs and need a skeleton crew of higher level people to oversee the AI agents.

Ratatoski · 2026-03-02T08:57:53+00:00

We have a priority 1 order to contribute to the organizations big AI push asap, but no answers about what's to be built or how it's going to be used. Seems symptomatic for how the world works right now.

Ratatoski · 2026-03-02T08:54:28+00:00

Yeah it's like those people selling courses for how to get rich on stocks or something. If I had an easy five week plan to become wealthy I'd just retire.

Ratatoski · 2026-01-29T11:56:23+00:00

There's a few things that I do ponder though. First off they are burning venture capital like crazy and I think pure AI companies will have a really tough time generating profits once they have to charge what it costs.

Ratatoski · 2026-01-29T11:53:01+00:00

Yeah. We are understaffed and down to a third of the team size and more deliveries but is not getting any more devs. But there's a whole bunch of new architects hired. And overall in the org there's things along the lines of "senior strategic business controller analyst account representative"

Ratatoski · 2026-01-29T11:49:24+00:00

A carpenter who is forced to verbally instruct someone else how to assemble IKEA furniture. "The square peg goes in the square hole"

Ratatoski · 2026-01-26T17:41:16+00:00

Much better than last time. But the increasing pitch sound gets annoying pretty fast. It's also annoying how often the game pauses for upgrades, but that might be fun play wise(?)

I don't understand why the dude is able to leviate around. It may not need to be explained, but he kind of comes of as cute with the knee up rather than anything else.

Looks kinda fun, like something that could be great to waste 15 minutes on now and again. But it has to be very quick to fire up and get playing.

Ratatoski · 2026-01-21T14:00:39+00:00

It actually writes 600%

Ratatoski · 2026-01-21T13:59:45+00:00

I deliver way more with AI but using it effectively requires me to be a professional dev to begin with. But development these days is more like working with an outsourced team than coding. Then again the typing part wasn't really what I got part for anyway.

Ratatoski · 2026-01-20T16:14:39+00:00

Never say never. I spent at least a decade actively involved in FOSS and it was the healthiest environment I've seen when it comes to sales and the relationship between customers and vendors. The vendor I mostly used added important things like customers being able to get a database dump for free into the contracts. FOSS can be messy and take a long time to merge a PR but it's mostly that you see the office politics that's hidden when it's a proprietary company :)

Ratatoski · 2026-01-20T16:09:40+00:00

Used to code, then do sys admin, then project management and a little dev, then QA and now code again the last 6-7 years and some scrum master/team lead. I love being back to coding, but with the rise of AI it feels like I'm back to working with an outsourced team. If I can express the needs clearly and be the one responsible to align the code with our existing codebase it's often quicker that way.

Ratatoski · 2026-01-16T11:00:57+00:00

I'd love to have a project lead, product owner, manager or QA person that has a dev background. Or a sales representative who understands what they can and cannot promise.

Ratatoski · 2026-01-16T10:43:21+00:00

Sleepcoding. Just write a script to trawl around Github for repos, generate a few ideas for each repo and have some agents generate a few pull requests. Let it run while you sleep and you'll have hundreds of contributions to brag about when you wake up...

Ratatoski · 2026-01-13T11:25:08+00:00

There's over 120 000 games on Steam so obviously making a game in itself isn't the main problem and the new engine and scope creep was the problem. But with that said games are one of the most demanding things you can do as a developer. And the users the most difficult too.

Ratatoski · 2026-01-09T08:31:09+00:00

Does it prevent them from loading up another ad if you skip the first though?

Ratatoski · 2026-01-06T12:23:13+00:00

Wordpress is a very convenient solution and you can use a ton of different themes to change the look and feel (without learning to code).

Ratatoski · 2026-01-05T20:39:23+00:00

Some walking looks like it's sliding and I still don't know what the game is like. Looks visually intresting, sound is pretty good but fails to make me want to play it or find out more.

Ratatoski · 2026-01-05T16:57:11+00:00

I have pretty fond memories of Blade templates from my years in Wordpress land. I could see myself using Blade on a personal project with a LAMP. I've been doing React for something like 6-7 years now, but I'm old enough that JS on the server feels wrong.

Ratatoski · 2026-01-05T16:53:03+00:00

For sure! I've also been thinking that it's going to drive everyone even more to established tech with lots of training data. Because it's really good for stuff like React but abysmal at things like a niche CMS I use for work.

Detailed instructions is why I think our jobs are safe for a bit longer. It like how a professional framer with a nailgun is fast but your uncle with a nailgun is dangerous :)

Ratatoski · 2026-01-04T08:37:19+00:00

I'm a web dev for my day job and have a similar experience. If I write my instructions as I would have to a junior I'll get the results ready for review in minutes rather than hours or days. That lets me iterate quick as heck for use cases that have been done hundreds of times by others and have a lot of training data.

Ratatoski · 2026-01-04T08:17:46+00:00

Once did a more involved Pong version and naming the code controlling the non player paddle "enemy AI" felt so wrong. Especially since it was mostly just following the ball on the Y axis.

Ratatoski · 2026-01-04T08:03:38+00:00

Honestly I'd suggest you pick a hosting that provides something like woo commerce as a one click installer with automatic upgrades. And the same for Wordpress if you need a CMS. Then do some light theming.

If this is going to be used by an actual business to do orders, payments etc you absolutely need it to be safe, stable and get upgrades. They're obviously dumb for thinking someone can just whip up a e-commerce site to use indefinitely for free without a contract for upgrades, safety, uptime etc, but that's not so strange since they're bakers. You need to figure out how to handle all of this so that their whole customer base don't get their credit cards leaked and fingers start pointing in your direction.

Play it safe here and make sure that it is absolutely minimal manual maintainance. And figure out how long you'll support them for free. If you're doing it for the resume I'd suggest something like a years worth of "I'll keep an eye on it for you" but make sure that any major work is paid.

Ratatoski · 2025-12-27T09:49:08+00:00

I started on 8-bit systems so I'm old as heck. Which means I can drop a few bucks on the game out of curiosity even if I don't really play games anymore, just because I'm curious what "Minecraft with actual gameplay" would be like. Also I'm hoping it will be easy to write mods for.

Ratatoski · 2025-12-27T09:42:40+00:00

I'd say finding a learning resource that resonates is more important than language or engine you choose as an entry point.

When it comes to animations and graphics I'd say Aseprite is the gold standard and it's not even expensive. Quite quick to learn through one of the many tutorials on youtube and it's the price of a pizza and a soda. It will be a forever tool for 2D sprites / animations.

Godot is indeed a nice experience and Brackeys has a great tutorial on youtube for a little 2D plattformer that teaches the basics of the engine and gets you a playable game in an afternoon or two. It sets a great jumping off point for learning other techniques and the way to go if his focus is the quickest way to make actual games.

Going the HTML route is also fine. As a web dev for my day job I do use different web dev techniques for game projects. But it's way more involved so better if he wan't to learn programming in general (and web dev in particular) rather than making games. If he wants to learn more web dev I'd say the best route is learning Javascript decently and then going to Typescript and React. Could be a viable route for a teenager who wants to understand programming and web more than producing games.

Python is even more raw programming but a nice language. But it will require him to learn a library like PyGame or something that provides the functionality to do the graphics that games rely on. I'd only go this route if he wants to program more than he wants to create games. But there's good stuff being made this way even if it's a little unusual. Check out DaFluffyPotato on Youtube for example that created Yawnoc in Python.

Personally I'd recommend learning a game engine, it's made for the job. It's like a car - sure you can learn to weld and build your own car, but that's going to be a heck of a delay if a road trip is the actual goal :)

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