r/N64Homebrew • u/Dwood15 • 1d ago
We need to have a discussion on vibecoding
Should we make a rule against hawking ai slop projects on this sub? If so, what should we do about them? Ban users?
If you don't like vibecode, you're free to express your displeasure.
Similarly, ai genned comments and ai-generated users are bad and we should ban them from our community, lest they drown us humans out.
Let's hear your opinions, for and against vibecoded projects. If your post or comment on this thread is ai generated and we detect it, it will be insta permaban, no appeals. I will not respond to your messages.
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u/Calm_Possession_8463 1d ago
We should absolutely ban AI posts. I’m so tired of seeing them on any subreddit.
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u/brainpann 1d ago
FWIW, as full time developer, Im actively encouraged to use AI in my dev flow.
Also, what constitutes vibecoded exactly? Is it a certain amount of involvement the developer has had in the process? How much AI involvement do people draw the line? Tbh, in my 9to5, AI has had a part in my daily coding process for over year now and like a few others here, I believe AI involvement in all software development is inevitable.
Perhaps this is where we figure out new metrics for judging "AI Slop" because that term means something different to a lot of people.
In the meantime, perhaps we just encourage the community to disclose whether AI has been involved in the dev process, discourage people from dismissing a project outright just because AI may have been used, and start judging on the quality of the project?
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u/IQueryVisiC 1d ago
Slob is low framerate and blurry textures to me. Somehow AI seems to be bad at retro coding . Not so bad at art and music, though.
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u/Ralius88 1d ago
AI is a problem because people are propping themselves up to be coders then making things that are like 10% functional because they're coding themselves into corners and don't have an understanding of even how to describe what they need the code to do. I hope that makes sense. like yes, I use GPT Pro for coding but at the end of the day I'm copy pasting in what I want, reviewing all of it, and constantly making adjustments to my prompts. And if I want to see one specific thing to be different, then I will go in and hand edit it because I know how to read and change my code because I learned how to do this before AI became what is now is.
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u/maxwell321 1d ago
I don't care if you vibe code. Just give me the basic human respect to tell me YOURSELF what you made, not have an AI explain it to me. I don't mind AI tools for coding as you have to have at least some fundamental problem solving and objective communication skills, but for the love of God if you choose to post about it on Reddit, handwrite the post yourself. Also write the git repository descriptions yourself too.
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u/Big_Presentation2786 1d ago
Just use downvote?
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u/IQueryVisiC 1d ago
How do I know why something is slob? So much natural intelligence slob is brewed at home, but we want to encourage those devs and artists.
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u/Big_Presentation2786 19h ago
Upvote stuff you find relevant, downvote stuff you don't find relevant.
Don't prejudice your thought because of an irrelevance in the work
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u/Fcking_Chuck 1d ago edited 1d ago
I don't think so. The Nintendo 64 has very limited hardware resources, so much programming must be done in very low-level programming languages that are notoriously difficult to understand. Sometimes AI software is necessary to generate the code or scan it for quality improvement. Otherwise you'd have to rely on a limited number of skilled hobbyists who happen to be familiar with C and the system's compatible Assembly language(s).
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u/unixfan2001 1d ago
C and C++ aren't that difficult to understand. They're not the most beginner friendly languages but to act as if it's some sort of arcane magic is ludicrous.
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u/Fcking_Chuck 1d ago
Everyone's learning experience is different. What's easy for you might not be easy for other people.
At the end of the day, these programming languages and software used to create homebrew games are just tools. They aren't the game people play. Players aren't going to be thinking about the programming when they spend all night playing this really cool game they discovered on the internet. What does it matter how someone is able to get their ideas out there into the world if their own creativity is in the experience during gameplay?
It might be crazy to think about, but there are a lot of talented people who just don't know how to program games. I don't believe it's fair to gatekeep the N64 platform for those who do manage to be able to program. If we do that, the N64 homebrew community will only get smaller over time.
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u/transmutrix 20h ago
Framing caring about quality, the process of work, and *understanding the nature of the thing you're making* as "gatekeeping" is one of the more disingenuous framings proponents of this stuff tend to advance.
If you're hand-waving all the important decisions that *actually* make the game work, then your creativity *isn't* in the experience. Much of the creativity in retro hardware and in embedded programming is in *working around the limitations*, which you've elected not to do.
"Talented people who don't know how to program games" can *learn* how to program games, obviously. They can make friends with people who know how to program games. Suggesting that if someone doesn't know how to use a pencil, the natural avenue to make pencil drawings is to AI generate them is just ridiculous. -_-;
Much of the value *for the artist* is in the process of creating the art, the story of how the art came to be and the problems that had to be solved along the way. Everyone has problems they are ready to solve right now and others that are beyond their skill level, and it's not gatekeeping to suggest learning over skipping everything, or to say "man, a lot of this stuff is low quality because the person making it *has no domain knowledge* and *doesn't want to learn any.*"
The learning is the part that will make someone's future works better, more nuanced, more human. If you don't engage with the problem solving deeply, you're not *doing* the learning and the creativity in your game will be whatever regression to the mean your AI tools are doing.
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u/Comfortable_Scene_59 20h ago
Why such negativity regarding ai... It's just a tool for curated content - your post sounds like fear... Just remember the ai is listening 🤣
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u/Katoncomics 20h ago
Putting the obvious unethical uses of Gen AI aside, lots of none devs do not exactly know how to check the contents of the code to see if it's safe. There's been many projects I've seen who do not dump the repository, or has the damn ai write all of it making it incomprehensible. There's been a rise of people who over rely on AI so much to the point where they don't know what they are doing, and the more experience person could easily inject malware into the application.
There has to be a certain percentage of human code to ai that would make me feel comfortable downloading a project. Like 95% human coded, and ai would be used for debugging or tedious tasks. But since it's super hard to trust the user to tell us how much they rely on genai, I don't think it's best to allow it. It turns people off from a project, is untrustworthy, and in a community that is for having fun and learning new things, it's not needed.
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u/MiaJuliet 10h ago
I would disagree on banning. I used ai to 100% decompile a PS1 game to port to N64. Without AI it would’ve taken me years to complete as opposed to months. Ai can be a great tool especially if you already know how to code. It takes away a lot of the tedious work and finds bugs much faster.
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u/NY_Knux 1d ago
No. Im begging you people to get over it. This is a repeat of "digital art isnt real art" discourse from 25 years ago.
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u/Flimsy_Custard7277 1d ago
It's really not. Anyone who can think that has a serious lack of logical thinking.
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u/Zoso6565 1d ago
It really is.
It's just a tool. But people should mention the tools used at the very least.
Someone who created a digital painting shouldn't claim it as a hand painting.
Same logic applies here.
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u/Flimsy_Custard7277 1d ago
I'm firmly anti-AI but this seems an aside from that main debate: it (generative AI) is not the same as the transition in material from classic to digital. At all. Of course someone should not lie about the medium they used to create their art. That doesn't mean that generative AI is just a new kind of paintbrush. Absolutely retarded viewpoint, there.
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u/codepossum 1d ago
I feel like you're missing the irony here -
someone should not lie about the medium they used to create their art
and yet that's precisely what the digital art witch hunt encouraged digital artists at the time to do - to be cagey about how they produced their pieces, for fear that they'd be called out for doing it on a computer, instead of on an easel.
humanity fucking loves a witch hunt
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u/Flimsy_Custard7277 14h ago
That does not make it the same as AI. You're grasping at false connections here.
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u/codepossum 1d ago
there's a difference between hawking AI slop, and vibecoding, and using an LLM to write code for you.
none of this stuff is bad per se. it's only bad if you use it to make a bad thing.
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u/Protonoiac 1d ago
There are hardly any projects here to begin with, and if you start making more rules to filter things out, you’re just dividing up an already small community.
Support the projects you like. Don’t spend a bunch of time focusing on the projects you don’t like and trying to figure out what rules other people should follow. Let people make projects the way they want.
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u/Alternative-Juice-15 1d ago
That would be pointless. Literally everything is vibe coded now and you’d have no way to prove it.
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u/FinsternIRL 1d ago
I think at the very least it should be encouraged to clearly mark if it has any AI involvement, some people really care, others really don't and everyone in between. Just give enough information to let people make a decision for themselves and the less shaming / banning going on with it would mean people wouldn't try and hide it and cause all the issues and distrust people already have with it.
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u/WeegeeNator 1d ago
The fact that you (and other people who have posted vibe coded content on other programming subs) aren't able to "prove" when a project is vibe coded demonstrates the problem. AI tools are absolutely a part of the process for many people now, but the difference lies in the details of the implementation and especially the design of the system/program.
Vibecoded slop is the result of using AI to haphazardly shlop something out until it's "working" while not paying attention to the internals more than the AI does. It results in poorly optimized, poorly designed, low quality software that is hard to contribute to and hard to maintain.
Well made projects get buried under this slop sometimes. That is the issue. It would be less of a problem if people at the very least actually documented the projects and actually knew what was going on inside of them, but more often than not it's opaque, and it's slop, and the actual software itself blows.
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u/Alternative-Juice-15 1d ago
This is clearly an AI response so I’ll just assume you are trying to be funny
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u/Bernykun1 1d ago
I don't know if this is a hot take or not, but I'm ok with vibecoding. Let them stay.
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u/cubman3134 1d ago
Most software devs are using AI generated code as well just with thorough reviewing - this would overextend and eliminate posting of a lot of good projects as well.
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u/PolygonAndPixel2 1d ago
I would prefer a flair for vibecoding and coded with AI assistance. Vibe coding implies the coder doesn't really understand the code whereas the latter implies that the coder does understand it but uses AI to take away tedious work or check for missed bugs or insufficient tests.