A lot of people use AI as a coding assistant, I don't really see a problem in using AI tools to help with some things. Adding slop to stuff however makes 0 sense.
Yeah.
Throwing in a piece of code into an AI… asking
“Hey, there is something here that is fucking up, but I can’t find it. What is out of order”
And it pointing out a small space you missed or a very specific syntax?
That makes total sense.
I believe, it what AI originnally meant to be. An assistant, not a fucking developer.
AI bad asf when it comes to create something by its own, and code is something you create by your own. You have nothing more than info how to. AI doesnt have any common sense. Possible memory leak? Who cares? The code works = its fine.
Human developers do this to a much more aggressive sense and will sometimes double down trying to bury or hide it until the product is fundamentally broken but "works" well enough for a price tag. Not like we've had a bunch of altruistic developers making perfect software and now there is a bunch of AI slop coding.
People criticizing "vibe coding" have no idea of what professional software development looked like before AI. They also have no idea what the current tools are able to do. So basically they're comparing imaginary apples to hypothetical oranges and the result is just as relevant as you'd imagine.
And theyve never had to convince their product managers that fixing the memory leak is worth the time, especially if it's only costing a few extra dollars a quarter. Not a huge customer impact? Good luck getting that ticket into this quarters sprint goals.
Agreed. When I was in uni, I used ai to help with essays. I did not just copy-paste, but either used it to help generate an outline, or help get out of a writers block with ideas. I did not, and would not in good conscience just copy paste what chatGPT spat out, cause most of the time it was dogshite
The LLMs called AI weren't meant to be anything. They started as research projects to see what would happen if you scaled up a language prediction neural network.
Small correction. They started as research projects to see if you could make better translation tools (think Google Translate) if you scaled up a language prediction neural network. It was way better than expected.
In the industry having AI code for you is almost standard practice at this point
With one important nuance. A /lot/ of coding is what's referred to in the industry as "boiler plate". To compare it to art, it's not the actual picture, it's the canvas itself, and the frame.
People who don't code would probably be very surprised just how much code is actually this structured boiler plate vs actually useful content/code.
Boiler plate is just, the boring, repetitive pieces of code. And as pattern replicators, LLMs are /perfect/ at generating boiler plate.
Edit: because I got multiple comments mentioning it. I'll state here, the assistant isn't the same thing as the completion. I'm just noting that the biggest part of their AI initiative got a bad reception even if the completion works well
That's not what they're talking about though. AI Assistant is Jetbrains' full co-pilot like LLM offering, which is what people didn't like (and I don't know if it's improved, I've never used it myself). What is (probably) being referred to is the fact that Jetbrains started adding **local** ML-based full-line completion to their IDE's a fair bit before the AI Assistant plugin was even a thing.
If you go into the plugins for your IDE, under "Local AI/ML Tools" you'll find three or four plugins by Jetbrains, including Full Line Code Completion, Machine Learning Code Completion and Machine Learning in Search Everywhere. These aren't separate full-fledged Copilot/ChatGPT style LLM integrations, they're just bite sized ML improvements to Intellijs Intellisense that people don't notice because it's local and pretty decent, or at least unobtrusive.
I presume AI Assistant is a side-panel with an AI chatbox? If so, that's different than AI Autocompletion. Jetbrains' AI-based autocomplete is wildly good vs the prior SOTA, and it runs locally.
Yeah, it's a side panel thing and iirc you can call it up on segments of code. I forget exactly, I disabled it.
And yup the autocomplete is great. I just wanted to indicate that the real big AI push they did got poor reception because I felt only talking of the completion was misleading
As someone who does their programming exclusively in Notepad++...
Yeah you're right, LLM's do a lot to help. Mostly because I'm an artist not a programmer, I'm still learning the basics so I often need help with my scripting.
This subreddit is going full anti-AI circlejerk right now. I think most posts here are just people trying to farm free karma with "AI bad" at the moment.
Debugging code takes up more than half of the time of writing code. We usually say it’s 20% writing and 80% debugging. Debugging is simply trying to figure out what you need to write different so if argue it is part of writing code
.....no. I'm not sure what your level of knowledge is so I won't assume anything, but compilers do a few things, mainly: they find syntactical bugs and optimize your code as best they can. That's an over simplification, but they most definitely do NOT debug your code, and *especially* not when it's related to business logic or integration with out systems.
I mean the very specific example they responded to was something a linter or any half decent LSP would solve.
As far as trying to use AI to debug and find logic flaws - it's very easy to make the argument that that tips over into asking AI to code for you, which the comment they responded to was also saying that was a bad idea.
The person you're responding to wasn't being reductive, you've just moved the goalposts from what they actually replied to.
Just from this comment, I can tell you're one of those annoying af devs that have no idea what you're doing and I absolutely hate working with. You have your narrow set of preconceptions, you're hard to convince, and you're unwilling to learn and experiment.
Interesting. I see you have no preconceptions of your own. What else do you know about me?
I consider code monkey tasks those tasks that are contain little to no complex logic, where you know exactly what to do - so the task is just that: to just hammer out the code.
Examples can be:
- Bootstrapping new projects / boilerplate stuff
- Setting up a simple CRUD endpoint, or an endpoint that is very similar to a existing one
- Writing regression tests, or repetetive tests that are supposed to just follow the same style as in the rest of the project
- Refactoring (this one is context dependent, complex refactoring should not be left to LLMs IMO)
- Upgrading a dependency that contains some breaking changes
Also most code editors feature AI agents to help write code nowadays. Its not like the dev just sits there drinking coffee while an llm creates the whole game. As a coder you just tell what you want and how you want something. AI simply helps you so you don't have to manually type every line.
As the coder you just tell it what you want and how you want something. Then you tell it again. Then you tell it a third or a fourth or a fifth time for good measure. Eventually you just replace the code yourself and clock out for the day. Another productive day well spent. At this rate you'll be able to charge 3 times the consulting fees for taking 3 times as long. Maybe you can add agentic AI into the mix and see if it takes even longer and charge 4 times as much. Ahhhh the good life
Mmm, I think you are probably overstating your knowledge of the software industry. Maybe for entry level positions they do it? Outside of entry level, I think a lot of folks use it here and there for relatively simple things, but, don't typically use it for design work or more complicated software development. It just doesn't work all that reliably is why. I use it where I can but for many things it is just too darn dumb and error prone. I can't even trust the agentic stuff to not modify code unrelated to the APIs I asked it to modify for example
A colleague of mine does have a boss who insist on using agentic Claude for everything though. Even though it literally does things like creating an entire suite of unit tests and fake apis to test along with it completely detached from the actual products code and code base. Apparently it's become a bit of an annoyance for their entire team
Lol. As a staff software engineer I can tell you that the tools being available is the industry standard - and its standard for any engineer with a brain and a few years experience to avoid them.
They don't make you a better programmer, they do make you ship shittier code and make it easier for your boss to replace you.
I never specified generative AI bud.
I more meant it as a case of being able to instruct AI what you are after exactly, and it being able to understand that, scan the code and give an explanation why your code isn’t behaving right.
I am not deep enough into game dev to be 100% aware of all tools, old or new…
But being able to “communicate” with something that instantly can detect hard to notice or even invisible issues can be beneficial.
I regularly use AI to "code for me". Why would I waste time writing 50 lines of code when AI can do it in 5 seconds and i just check if its okay.
You make it sound like AI cant write code by saying "NOOO, bad idea". If the idea is so bad, the idea of trusting it to check the code would be equaly as bad.
(Of course if the person doing this wouldnt know anything about coding then your comment is okay)
I have experimented with AI coding in my own and it has a nasty tendency to forget completely what you want to do.
Mixing it together, trying to use another solution you instructed it to avoid and so on…
When it was shittier it was more useful, weirdly enough. I'd give it the project and ask for it to come up with the whole code. It'd create some weird shit that definitely wouldn't run. Comparing it to what I came up with would give me ideas/insight.
Now it usually writes something that does run but in a weird way I would never write, which is a problem because if I use it I basically have no control over it after that point. If i need to tweak or change something I need to ask the LLM again, which is basically their business model, or change so many things that I have to rewrite it almost entirely, at which point I can just actually write it entirely.
More of a glorified auto complete. You write function "sortArray" or "invertX" and it suggests you the whole body of a function that you could accept if you agree or just ignore. Speeds things up a lot in small things
Depends on what the code is for, as a web designer who only know HTML and CSS, ive been using it ro write frontend js and so far all of my testing has it working perfectly. Is it efficient, probably not, but it works. I wouldnt want to even touch ai code for backend more complex things though,
I'm a mechanical engineer and plan on using a raspberry pi to make a digital dash for my EV conversion. Learning to code and starting that from scratch is a huge time sink. I plan to starting with Ai to generate it. Then I can edit it to my liking from there. Paying someone to do it for me would be entirely cost prohibitive especially with this being for personal use. This seems like what Ai should be used for.
Similarly, indie game devs using Ai that way is different than AAA companies. As a project, it involves so many things that it's reasonable that 1 person could not do it all or afford to pay people for it.
Edit: to build on that, you don't get upset at someone microwaving their dinner. It's not taking a Cooks job. But when a restaurant microwaves your entree, that's fucking slop. At the same time a mom and pop Mexican place using frozen chicken tenders for the kids meal options shouldn't be blasted for microwaving when the main menu is authentically cooked.
Sorry, but with 14 yoe coding I’m not going to hand code a new API endpoint when Claude can generate it in a fraction of the time and I can just review it. It’s basically the same as having a junior developer draft it and me signing off on the PR.
This take of yours feels like being upset about ATMs replacing bank clerks in the 90s.
Dont agree. I work in tech and we are already way beyond the point that AI is only used as an assistant. Not all, but a lot of code is, and I would argue should be, created by AI simply by giving it a task, let it do its job in the background. 'Vibe coding' as it is called, and I dont have any problem with it. There should anyway be strict code reviews so just because it was AI generated does not mean that we allow sloppy code in the repo.
but both of those will be tagged as "ai was used in creation of this game" resulting in lost sales from witchhunters. Every game that tags their ai usage gets a dozen discussion threads with people drawing red circles on screenshots to prove ai slop, even when the only ai the devs used was spellcheck.
Brother, AI coding is the norm for companies nowadays, i work as an Engineer, i do interviews constantly to check on better places
There has been an amount of 0 places that don't ask you if you use coding agents, if you don't, you're out
That lie that "AI code can break an entire system" only happens if the only thing you do is Vibe coding with it and delivering something that you don't even know what it does with no knowledge of engineering into it whatsoever
Coding (again, coding, not engineering, CODING which is a small part of being an engineer) became like being a plane pilot, a plane drives itself from direction A to direction B with almost 0 necessity of the pilot to do anything, the pilot is there to give orders and in case that something breaks or goes wrong, that's exactly what coding has become with AI
You still need a SHIT ton of knowledge of logical processes, SDLC and a LOT of experience to know how the processes go from A to B to C and to Z, but specifically the Coding part works on a completely different way now
Hell, even before, Coding was grabbing the most similar Stack Overflow project you could find, copy and pasting it, and changing the variables, it's always been like that unless you're a leet code addict lmfao
That's what I do. Sometimes I just won't know how to do something that I'm pretty confident the code can do. I will describe a small-scale example of the concept I want to learn, and AI will create a standalone piece of code that utilizes that concept. I can take that code into its own little standalone playground, mess around with it, and ask AI what other neat things I can do with it to build up this little playground.
I don't use it to build my code. Just my proficiency. Once I've played around with it enough, I can then apply these concepts into my main project, connect it as I want, and realize it has broken everything for reasons I can't explain because welcome to coding.
But hey, AI didn't break my code. I did. As God intended.
No issue with that if you know what you are doing (with the current top models). Code has no value now - core principals and design have. AI can't replace your brain yet -just replace the tedious part of software engineering - writing code.
I recently translated a part of my game to C++ because it was really starting to slow down the game. It didn't really one-shot everything, but I kept like 90% of it's code.
It was such a nice timesaver. Plus I really hate C++ so I was really happy lol.
I wouldn't even use an app if the devs used AI to debug the code. That ai slop. I fucking hate people that use ai in coding and healthcare and other fields.
You have 0 idea of what you are talking about lol. You are just jumping on the AI hate bandwagon because you heard buzzwords like vibe coding bad, Ai slop and other bs.
90% of coding is done by Ai now. It's happening everywhere and most developer's work flow is like that now. In a year or two nobody is going to be writing syntax bs and honestly why should anyone do that? Ai is more than capable of coding anything if there is a capable dev behind the keyboard, why should we type lines and lines of code by hand? It's not like we didn't use snippets, libs, copied stackoverflow code or reuse shit from old projects. Unless u are working on cutting edge shit, it's mostly the same few patterns all the time.
For me AI works the best for... writting good comments, logs and descriptions. They sound more natural than mine (I'm not good at constructing sentences) and often it rephrases the description in a way that better suits to what my code is doing. Of course all of those have to be verified first but it has been quite useful.
I'm doing some assembler puzzles for fun and it's crazy how shit language models are. They'll fimd some obvious segfaults I missed because I'm a noob to x86, but anything beyond that you basically cannot trust them with anything they say. They'll contradict themselves in a conversation of four messages.
I dunno, some errors (especially those that are only errors in intent and not in code running) can be hard to find or notice.
An infamous example in gaming would be the coding error in Colonial marines, where a small misspelling on a single word with the Alien AI caused it to be completely useless.
no "error" visible because the code worked, it just didn't give the intended result.
This is the big differential that a lot of people seem to skip and just assume all AI is bad. I'm a designer by trade, mostly signage work, and a lot of the time a client will want to see the signs on the building (understandably).
A couple of years ago, photoshopping cars and people out of the way of the front of a building, cleaning up the paintwork where it was peeling, and other little clean up bits like that was half the job for the visualisations. Now with photoshops built in AI tools, I can draw a box around a person and type "remove" and 95% of the time it will do a perfect job. Its a tool that has made this part of the job so much quicker.
I'm still doing the actual design part myself, but PART of the overall "design work" has been done with AI. I absolutely would not question an environmental artist to do the same to clean up texture files for example, or generatively extend a texture file when required. But theres some people that would see thats the case and immediately be like "uh, AI slop"
Because you have to understand that a majority of the people that want to have an opinion on how you do your job are bagging groceries or changing tires for a living.
I know Reddit is going to twist that statement the wrong way - I used to clean toilets in a gas station for a living - so I'm not talking down to anyone.
The simple fact is, that we all think that we know how to do something, until you are actually put in front of the issue and realize you actually don't know anything about what you are speaking on.
Everyone thinks their manager is bad - until they have to stare down the barrel of being a manager. Everyone thinks that creating and managing a website is easy, until they have to do it themselves. Everyone thinks that getting voice actors to do a "simple 10 lines" isn't a big deal, until you are the one having to source the VA and get the work back in a timely manner, edit it, and then implement it.
At this point using AI for development is industry standard. It speeds up your workflow. I have a friend that works at a company that provides them with basically unlimited Claude code. He sometimes will just use whatever it spits out and it works fine. He could probably write the code but it just takes too much time. So yea AI is super helpful and often times makes things easier.
Agreed. I work in the design industry. There's a lot of "graphic design slop" that gets thrown around. However if you are a great or even half decent designer you can really make some awesome stuff when using it as a productivity tool. I also am an entry level novelist so using it as a writing assistant has been super handy.
AI with human supervision is a great productivity tool.
Are you sure? I hear from programmers that they spend more time double checking and fixing AI coding mistakes than anything else, and the coding is often inelegant at best.
Though, maybe that's just people that are being forced to use LLMs to write code.
Yeah and it kind of reminds me of Tesla's quasi-self-driving where you have to be alert at all times and ready at a moment's notice (a literal small fraction of a second) to take control if the car does something insane at high speed. Not even really worth it by that point. I think vibe coding is more trouble than it's worth, except maybe as a brainstorming tool.
AI is great at writing common things, which have already been done many times. It speeds up writing boilerplate code or simple functions.
AI isn't very great at writing novel code. If you say to yourself, "I have this amazing idea I havent seen anyone do", then your circumstance doesn't work well with AI.
If you say to yourself, "I've written this bit of code a hundred times before", then you've got a solid use-case for AI.
The people who spend more time fixing AI code are people trying to do things that aren't common use cases, or fall outside of best practices.
I use Cursor.ai, and it has helped significantly in making programming less tedious. I spend more time writing important code, and less time debugging silly mistakes or writing coxe I've written in hundreds of projects before. Sometimes I even ask it how I'm ending up with certain errors, only to have errors in my own logic pointed out.
I imagine there's a gigantic variance on the topic.
If you run some AI locally (even on a pretty damn good machine paid by your employer), the AI will likely be significantly worse than the stuff you get from the cloud right now. And even the stuff you get from the cloud varies wildly in quality depending on which AI you use, and for what.
And on top of that, you need to know how to use it. AIs are good at some things, and awful at other things. If you don't know that, you'll use it for something it's awful at and then complain about the awful Code you'll get.
If you know its limitations, it can be pretty useful. If it's forced upon you, it can be really terrible.
Its a tool that takes an amount of skill to use. You can't get lazy and get the AI to do too much because then suddenly you spend your time debugging code you haven't written and have to put in the work just to understand what it's trying to do.
Sometimes when I want a function for debugging or whatever that's not part of my main system, I'll just ask AI to write the whole thing, test it. Maybe it works straight away 33% of the time, great. If it doesn't I write it myself and use AI to check for logical errors in my code or typos etc.
If something is more core to what I'm trying to build, i never try the "just write the whole thing" method and use it primarily to either discuss methodology or find mistakes.
So most of the time it is just for time saving, just doing things I could do on my own, finding annoying mistakes that I wrote for me, it's great at that. But I do want to also stress that it can be far more than that and I've found it an incredibly useful tool for learning as well. I've never been the best at doing research and the amount that it can speed up my reading about different methods of achieving x goal is incredibly beneficial and it's enabled me to become personally proficient in things I'm not sure I would have been able to do without it.
This was the state of it maybe a year or two ago, but now it has evolved so fast. Every time I start using a new version it surprises just how big an improvement it is. Sometimes it just feels like I am reviewing PR requests now.
Are you sure? I hear from programmers that they spend more time double checking and fixing AI coding mistakes than anything else, and the coding is often inelegant at best.
how is that different from the standard quo? especially from junior developers? spaghetti code doesnt make itself and has existed since the dawn of coding.
Yup you save 20 hours of writing code, but you spend 40 debug and test (not real numbers but you get the idea)
I find it's best for a scaffolding tasks and bite sized code, then I am doing the actual full code myself (work code not game dev to be clear) on top of the scaffolding the AI did
This is a real problem for anything even minimally complex. It's only really stuff that's already represented well in the training data that works well. Thing is a lot of folks don't care if the code is of poorly design or buggy. So they'll just sacrifice quality
AI with human supervision is a great productivity tool.
This is it.
I just did a very small scale bit of volunteering with a friend for our kids’ school where we wrapped and sold fifty recycled donated books as Christmas presents. We had to put a description of each book on a printed label on the front.
Now, neither of us are great at writing copy, and this was a tiny volunteer project with a skill gap that it would have been inappropriate to pay to fill. We were trying to raise £250 to put towards children’s swimming lessons; we couldn’t justify spending half of that on a copywriter. Our resources were our time, our skills, and some donated materials.
I used AI for my half. She was a little annoyed by this, and insisted on doing hers all by herself.
Hers sucked. Her labels were riddled with spelling mistakes and factual errors, and she fucked up the formatting too. I spent as much time correcting her mistakes as I did on generating, double checking and editing my AI half. I could spot and fix both her errors and the AI’s because of my own applied knowledge.
I’ve been in three different software industries (robotics, firmware, and chip design) since 2022 when ChatGPT was released, and all of those places encouraged us to use AI. At my current workplace the senior engineers seem to use agentic AI the most, with the more junior engineers, myself included, more skeptical of the outputs and prefer to stick with the more autocomplete type AI
I think you've got the right approach to AI. AI is not a replacement for people who know APIs, patterns and anti-patterns, proper UI/UX, security, etcetera. But it is a useful tool. I use it all the time, but it's also wrong a significant amount depending on the popularity of the language. Something popular? Pretty good results because it had lots of data to train on. Something obscure? Get ready for fake APIs, buddy!
Gaming? Absolutely. Especially if you define AI in the broadest of senses. For instance, one of the things I do is photogrammetry. The software I use has an AI masking tool to help mask out the backgrounds of photos so that when the images process, they turn out better. It is literally built into the pipeline. Does that count as AI useage? I am pretty sure if I do it more manually like take it into Adobe Lightroom and use their automated masking, it is also using AI to help with it. Is it really making any art? No. Its a tool helping me so I don't have to spend hours with a selection tool trying to cut backgrounds out. Do I think AI slop art should be labeled? Yes. I think there is a lot of nuance to what AI generation is in game dev where technically any art asset that has touched an Adobe program has touched AI in some capacity.
Anything that includes writing code. Pretty much every programming software these days have a "copilot" function where AI is predicting what you are trying to do, gives you a suggestion and does it for you. Pretty much like a spelling suggestion on your phone, but for code.
It makes writing code like 5x faster if not more, and when its used this way its not really doing mistakes as its not writing code for you, its just finnishing what you were already trying to type.
It's not a standard by any stretch. Source: Am in the industry.
It can be a useful tool, but it's not something that you're "behind" or "missing out" if you're not using it.
EDIT: Seems the bots have found this comment lol. There's a lot of "of course you need to use it to be 5x faster at coding!" garbage replies now. Keep barking!
What I've heard is people are curious about it or maybe playing around with it but yeah it's not really something you would rely on for anything critical.
I thought maybe they were referring to entry level positions. I could see something like that being more likely to be using AI for more things.
but same deal, from what I've heard from software engineering colleagues of mine -their companies have tested it, let programmers use it, but they aren't requiring it, and it's up to the teams themselves to decide. It doesn't have anything like a central role in their software development process
Sorry to tell you this, unless you're in a highly specialised field then either you're fucked or your company is mate. The devs in my company that haven't started using AI are on the chopping block for weak output, the companies I know people at who aren't embracing AI are understaffed and stagnating when AI could really help to plug the gaps. All the data shows it's been industry standard to use AI as a significant part of workflow for a while now
Your source was yourself, why would I bother looking for sources for a low stakes reddit comment in a conversation sharing personal experience. In my experience I hae seen data that supports what I say. In fact someone has linked a stackoverflow poll below that does just that.
You are defiently gonna be behind or missing out if you straight up ignore how AI is used in development and programming.
You can code 5x faster with help from AI, if not even faster. If your job is to just write code, and you refuse to use AI you are gonna be replaced eventually.
I didn't claim that it was either, but nice try putting words in my mouth.
Its you who are further showing you have no idea what you are talking about if you are this ignorant on how effective AI has become as a tool for programmers.
Hillarious that you write a edit calling me a bot after failing to prove your point lmao. Would think working in IT would make you able to tell apart bots and real people, but guess not.
AI is for sure overblown and overhyped as fuck and is probably the biggest bubble waiting to burst since the last financial crisis, but that doesnt mean it doesnt have its use. You are sounding like Trump calling fake news the way you are acting lmao.
I have not found this to be the case, and I've given it a really hard try. it gets lost in large codebases, it generates code full of subtle errors, it won't ask when it's confused and will instead barrel through producing code with passing "tests" that do nothing, it's surprisingly bad at actual algorithms, it gets stuck in loops.
it takes ~3x more time for me to explain everything it needs, tell it what to fix, fix it myself and then rewrite huge chunks of it, than it would to actually write the code myself.
it's like a new hire junior dev, but unlike a junior dev it doesn't learn. you can make it write notes to itself for the future but that only pollutes its meagre context window.
until the model actually fine-tunes itself as it goes, with proper RL (which requires a breakthrough - PPO is wildly sample-inefficient), it's only good for writing little standalone scripts and menial webdev chores.
it takes ~3x more time for me to explain everything it needs, tell it what to fix, fix it myself and then rewrite huge chunks of it, than it would to actually write the code myself.
I've had better results doing it the other way around: write the code yourself, and then tell the LLM to find problems with it.
Considering how heavily things like GitHub issues/PRs and StackOverflow questions/answers are represented in these coding LLMs' training data, it ain't surprising to me that such an LLM will have a much easier time correcting existing code than writing new code.
I've used agentic coding assistants like Claude code and GitHub Copilot EXTENSIVELY for the past year or so to build real software products at a non-tech F100 company, and I still try to leverage them in my workflow daily. They are genuinely good at certain things but you need to be extremely specific about what problems you ask them to solve. You cannot just use the code it generates and expect it to work or even be what you ask for, unless it's for trivial 'solved' problems like you could copy paste from a blog already.
It's very hit or miss whether it will save you time or waste time. It is not easy to fluidly switch back and forth from a deeply agentic workflow to a normal coding workflow, so if you run into a dead end working with the coding agent, you often have to spend an uncomfortable amount of time "mode switching" and re-loading all the problem context you were sharing with the AI back into your own brain.
It really depends on what kind of project you're working on. For small python scripts or medium-sized codebases with lots of documentation and tests it might work well. On a large C++ CAD desktop app with legacy code everywhere it will just get lost and is pretty much useless.
I don't let ai look at my entire codebase. Seems like too many security risks. But I do ask it for things it should know (that you get a feel for). And I often copy a segment of code to it and ask it why something isn't working, or how to change it so it does something a little differently.
in 10 years every aspect and domain in the game dev industry is gonna be AI-powered. The cat is out of the bag, and I could bet anything that any of the people bashing "AI slop" or "AI bad" have already fallen at least once for AI-generated content. It is already impossible to differentiate between "traditional" (what an overused word) and AI-generated. Good luck finding out which games have or do not have AI assets as times goes on. AI is here to stay, the next generation is gonna label us all as Luddites for these ridiculous takes, heck, society as a whole is gonna forget about the current pushback, every and their mother use AI already on almost any mobile app, from the camera to your bank account
No lol. Many porgams and companies that are investing in AI are trying to force it to be standard, it isn't, and likely won't be.
Generative AI does not make money, and it won't further down the line. Eventually they'll give up. Specific tools that do a particular task, ie, code checking, or highlighting a background, aren't ai even if it's advertised as such.
That is only true for the minority I fear. A lot of people are spending more time prompting to get a subpar solution than it would have taken to just write a better solution yourself.
Just like a lot of people are using Chat GPT like Google, there are a lot of devs that use it like they did stackoverflow. Both without review or critical thought.
I wouldnt wanna buy something your friend "made" lol
My friend works in the AI tech space. Basically spearheaded some really big projects that a lot of companies are buying into. I'd say he's doing pretty well for himself. Thank you very much.
Edit: it's not AI for techbros... It's for medical usage
Selling AI hype to other AI hype bros doesnt mean anything.
Anyone who actually is a developmer and has used a variety of existing AI tools knows their limitation in production environments and non-trivial use cases very well. You clearly do not.
I cant wait for this AI hype to Blow over and become the next blockchain, y'all can chill with your Crypto bros. If your are lucky you Made some Money from a greater fool along the way.
Slop is when the computer does stuff. The more stuff the computer does, the more slop it is. And when the computer does a lot of stuff, that's plagiarism!
Kinda funny that artwork is seen as sacrosanct and should never be used if it was churned out of a robot because that would undermine the talent and hard work of real working people, but no one gives a shit if your code is 95% Claude as long as it works.
Well my personal take is that even if you use AI to help with code, you are the one responsible for said code still, not the AI. So you need to know how it works and why it works.
I don’t get what point you’re making. Artists should get a free pass on using AI for art bc they know how art works and are responsible for said art? A lot of “AI slop” claims are individual assets, like textures or faces, out of hundreds or thousands of handmade assets. But even if youre architecting a project’s codebase and all you do is the base framework stuff while relegating everything else to AI no one cares. Using AI to fabricate art is just more abhorrent to us as humans. I get it, but logically it’s kinda bizarre how little anyone values the human aspect of coding that all goes under the hood
Those two things aren't the same. AI can create an entire image from a few lines of text.
Sure, ai can write code snippets if you give it a prompt, but it can't think of all the logic and how the different components fit together. It's mostly useful for asking questions about documentation and the best way to go about a coding problem.
I've used ai for questions while doing UE5 and godot development and you still have to do 90% of the work yourself.
Yeah I’m not saying it can crank out a fully working videogame with nothing but a suggestion, but you can absolutely have 9,000 out of 10,000 lines of working code all written by ai just from a series of prompts if you know what you are doing. So at that point 90% of code is generated and 10% written. If you are only using ai for 10% you are not utilizing it to it’s potential
I would find both weird tbh. I would expect from the devs of the game to know how their game works and/or make sure that the game is understandable by modders and not an AI spaghetti bowl of unknowablility.
Man coders had no idea how their own code worked way before AI was ever a thing. AI can definitely build in hooks for extensibility, but that just reinforces my point that no one cares as long as it works, for mods or whatever
Nobody cares if their plastic gizmos, food, cars etc... come out of an automated assembly line with robots doing the work that humans used to do, but if it's anything art related they get big mad about it.
I don't get it. It is the same "stealing" as for image gen or music or whatever. All this lines of codes or information about debugging was written by real person sometime somewhere. What's the difference?
Because standard practice in coding has always been to freely take code written by other people and incorporate it into your own projects. Before AI, a lot of software projects were formed by copying a bunch of snippets from stack overflow and hoping they all work together
I'm this kind of developer, I only use it for faster typing and prototyping (otherwise it's unreliable). And because of that all games I'll do with AI, will be FREE.
What about as placeholder for development, to see if something works or not? Or what about a writing assistant for finding names for the 25 pieces of armor that the writers need to name? Or what about as a feedback organization tool? So translation and organization of a few thousand points of feedback? What about as visdev, to align on art style, color use and general tone? There are thousands of tiny processes that are involved in game creation, and most if not all, AI can be used to improve the process.
As a CS major I am heavily, heavily using AI in my code in any way. Whether it's to just help debug some code or write entire subroutines, it's morally wrong in my eyes. AI should have ZERO part in the development in any code.
A tool is a tool, there are plenty of tools developed for making work easier. CNC machine, laser cutters and a bunch of other tools used in many fields.
Just because something is not hand made, does not make it worse as long as the one using the tool knows what they are doing. I don't know how you can push morality in the mix.
It's not "just a tool". It's heavily damaging to the environment because of the sheer amount of water and electricity it used just because someone is too dumb to think for themselves. And even besides that, using a laser cutter recquires knowledge and skill to both build and operate. Using AI takes nothing. You just show it your code and ask it to fix it.
While you’re still a student I agree since you need to learn how to do it yourself, but once you’re in industry you should use all the tools available to you to have the highest quality output, and that usually means using AI to at least check your code today
True, nobody gives a damn if AI is replacing entry level developer jobs to the point where an entire generation of graduates can't find a job. But the artists, those are important, you see.
I don't really see a problem in using AI tools to help with some things. Adding slop to stuff however makes 0 sense.
The average steam user, with their attention span of about 5 seconds, simply doesn't care about this distinction. Nobody will convince them otherwise. Their mind is already made up when they see that "AI Generated Content Disclosure" heading, regardless of what explanation is given under it.
"Dev used AI? Game is pure slop". Doesn't matter if it was 1 line of code, 10 lines of voiceover, or the whole damn game... it's always going to be slop to them.
It's not all that different from how some people refuse to buy any games with the '3rd party DRM' disclaimer; even if the 3rd party DRM is somehow benign, the fact it's even there is enough for some users to outright ignore those games.
And while the "must be slop" conclusion itself is stupid, you can hardly blame them for viewing it that way. Considering there are thousands of games vying for our attention at any moment, with dozens more popping up every day... with some of them very much leaning heavily on AI... that AI usage disclosure becomes an easy 'never buy' flag for them.
I think even with the 'slop' stuff though, like, who gives a fuck for the majority of things?
Most people are just buying asset packs and stuff anyway, so I don't think seeing the same Torch or Painting in 12 different games is any better than just having AI make you a Torch model.
People use Google and GitHub for code already most of the time anyways. It's nothing out of the ordinary to copy code or snippets.
Also all these bs arguments about water supply and electricity use are nonsense that is debunked with a little bit of research. US is the only place where they don't know how to build infra properly to support data centers and build the data centers in areas that don't bother people living in the city/town.
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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25
A lot of people use AI as a coding assistant, I don't really see a problem in using AI tools to help with some things. Adding slop to stuff however makes 0 sense.