Yes, and I didn’t say that. I even argued in favor of his response thoughout this whole post (getting a shit ton of downvotes all along). But I think that doesn’t invalidate my point either: without this one sentence, his whole chain of arguments would have been pretty good and reasonable. It was just unnecessary to then add this snarky remark. It’s understandable if he’s pissed, but just because you are pissed when you say something doesn’t make what you said a clever move.

The response is only nuanced until the “good luck” sentence. If he swallowed that it would be an almost perfect response. But that sentence is a quite big “fuck you”.

Thanks for that long answer. I agree completely with the second half of it. I also agree with most of the first half of it, but I have to add a remark to it:

My understanding is that it’s harder to get AI code in general because when it hallucinates it may do so in ways that appear correct on the surface, and or do so in ways that don’t even give a significant indication of what that code is attempting to do. This is the problem with vibe coding in general from my understanding and it becomes harder and harder even for senior code engineers to check the output because of the lack of a frame of reference.

That is mostly true, but also depends on the usage. You don’t have to tell an agent to “develop feature X” and then go for a coffee. You can issue relatively narrow scoped prompts that yield small amounts of changes/code which are far easier to review. You can work that way in small iterations, making it completely possible to follow along and adjust small things instead of getting a big ball of mud to entangle.

And while it’s true that not everyone is able to vet code, that was also true before and without coding agents. Yet people run random curl-piped-to-bash commands they copy from some website because it says it will install whatever. They install something from flathub without looking at the source (not even talking about chain of trust for the publishing process here). There is so much bad code out there written by people who are not really good engineers but who are motivated enough to put stuff together. They also made and make ugly mistakes that are hard to spot and due to bad code quality hard to review.

The main risk of agents is, that they also increase the speed of these developers which means they pump out even more bad code. But the underlying issue existed before and agents don’t automatically mean something is bad. That would also be dangerous to believe that, because that might enforce even more the feeling of security when using a piece of code that was (likely) written without any AI influence. But that’s just not true; this code could be as harmful or even more harmful. You simply don’t know if you don’t review it. And as you said: most people don’t.

What you’re taking issue with though is deeper than ai. It’s online discourse that is so rude and nuance-less.

I guess that’s a fair assessment. It’s just recently quite annoying that we have tons of AI-hate, age-restriction-FUD, etc., while at the same time war rages, the economy goes to shit, and more and more governments turn right-wing or outright fascist.

We have so many problems, yet we rip each others throat out for topics that are ultimately irrelevant.

But no, he was a dick about it and is now hiding his use of ai moving forward.

I am with you that his last sentence was completely stupid. I am not with you regarding the “hiding” part. I was actually surprised there even were commits marked by claude. The way I use agents is typically completely local, then I review each diff, adjust as necessary and then commit. The commit is then obviously by me; not claude or whatever agent I am using at the time. I am pretty sure a lot of people work that way. So I actually think the default is to not see the involvement of AI. And I don’t do this to hide anything … that’s just a consequence of the workflow and how git works and I didn’t even consider that this should be done any differently.

That’s why I also understand his point - that he shouldn’t have said so bluntly: if that marker was never there, probably no one would have noticed to begin with.

Depends. If you are generally careful about what products/projects you use and audit them, and you notice that the owner has horrible code hygiene, bad dependency management, etc., then sure. But why judge them for the tools they use? You can still audit the result the same way. And if you notice that code hygiene and dependencies suck, does it matter if they suck because the author mis-used coding agents, because they simply didn’t give a damn, or because they are incapable of doing any better?

You’ve likely stumbled on open source repos in the past where you rolled your eyes after looking into them. At least I have. More than once. And that was long long before we had coding agents. I’ve used software where I later saw the code and was suprised this ever worked. Hell, I’ve found old code of myself where I wondered why this ever worked and what the fuck I’ve been smoking back then.

It’s ok to consider agent usage a red flag that makes you look closer at the code. But I find it unfair to dismiss someones work or abilities just because they use an agent, without even looking at what they (the author, ultimately) produce. And by produce I don’t mean the final binary, but their code.

Ok maybe I mis-use the word. If that’s the case, sorry about that. But I hope my point comes across anyway: I really really dislike that the community (or multiple communities, even) get split between people who are ok with AI and who are against AI. This is, IMO, completely unnecessary. That doesn’t mean everyone should be ok with it, but we should not judge or condemn each other because of a different opinion on the matter.

If you notice a project goes downhill, it’s fine to criticize the author (or the whole project) for the degredation in quality. If there are strong indicators that AI is involved, by all means leave a snarky remark about that while complaining. But ultimately it’s the fuckup of a human.

The way flat earthers act? Yes. They treat it as a culture war. Just like anti-vaxers.

I also brought facts and objective reasoning, yet I get downvoted.

Yet anecdotal comments like “I tested it myself and it sucks” get upvoted; apparently simply because it fits the own worldview.

That’s not polarization to you?

Yeah ok. True. I think the rest of the post has much more weight, though. But yeah, he should have swallowed that last sentence.

But those issues get determined by reviews and tests. You determined these issues and worked against them, why do you think the author of Lutris is not able to? Neither I nor the author says anyone should use AI produced results as is (i.e vibe code).

Trolling? They gave a pretty good answer explaining their reasoning.

The culture war part is the call to boycott a project or shit on its author because they use coding agents, as is done throughout these comments. The whole separation into “those who use AI are bad” and “those who hate AI are good” is a culture war. A needless one at that.

I am not talking about the result of the AI. I am talking about Lutris. If the code that ends up in the repo is fine, it doesn’t matter if it was the author, an agent, or an agent followed by a ton of cleanup by the author. If the code is shit it also doesn’t matter if it was an incompetent AI or an incompetent human. Shitty code is shitty, good code is good. The result matters.

That is for each developer to decide, if they can handle it or not.

As I said: judge the result, not the workflow.

Does everything have to be a god damn culture war now?! I really don’t give a fuck how people do their work. Judge the outcome not the workflow. No one gave a damn how sloppy some developers hacked together solutions that are widely used. But suddenly it’s an issue if coding agents are used? WTF.

Stop the damn polarization for completely irrelevant things; we get polarized enough for political reasons; we don’t have to bring even more dissent into our communities and fuck each other up with in-fighting.

That article applies an interesting click bait tactic. I had to click it to find out which part of the title is the game name, because no combination I came up with made sense and they simply capitalized everything, making it impossible to separate game title from content of the heading. Chapeau.

They were making games in that time, just not Elder Scrolls

Yeah, one of them being Starfield. Which wonderfully highlighted how much they limit their own creativity. They had to shove their ideas into the severe limitations of their stack making the game the mess it is.

Could be they simply didn’t give a fuck, but I doubt it. They likely invested a lot of time into bending the engine and it still doesn’t bulge nearly enough.

If their engine has so much cruft that even with multiple years of development they can’t make it do what they want, it’s apparently a tech debt nightmare and should be reworked completely.

We are not talking about a scenario where they only had 2 years to pump out new content so they had to work with what they had. That they didn’t manage to build a new tech stack in the absurd amount of time since Skyrim is just embarrassing.

milk, manipulate and fuck

That definitely sounds like porn /s

If you hold Control that high, then no worries: everything will be under Control.

Before you start your own, contribute to Revolt Stoatchat.

I don’t get what makes this game so special that Geoff Keighley hyped it so much. That this thing was the big surprise that ended the game awards show was completely underwhelming. Out of the show, Highguard was the most generic game presentation. There was absolutely nothing about this game that seemed new or even interesting. Just the next hero shooter with comic look.

The cheat developers, yes. Because there is demand. The question though was, why there is demand.

If you like Lord of the Rings: Lord of the Rings Online is extremely nice story wise. It’s an old school MMO, but that shouldn’t shock you when you only know old school ones anyway.

If a low initial fee is fine, wait for Elder Scrolls Online sale. You can regularly get the base game for $5 or so. It has no forced monthly cost so those $5 are worth hundreds of hours or quest content.

It’s really sad. I truly believe that Yves (or rather the Guillemots in general) were passionate about game development once. Now it feels mostly corporate, even though they still claim to be pro-gamer and innovative and fun. It’s double sad because they acquired quite some good studios that have to be shaped into their corp structure and ultimately lose their innovation. It’s not as bad as old-school EA, but it’s still subjectively bad.

I think it’s not that easy. From what I understand, the payment providers enforce that for the whole store, otherwise they don’t want to be involved. Quite shitty, but they have enough weight to pull shit like that off.

I think EA was still worse. At least in my perception.

I think EA actually bought studios just to get the IP and immediately get rid of the employees. I also think they tried to milk a few of the IPs before letting it go downhill.

MS, from what I can tell, gave studios quite a lot of freedom to do what they do best. I don’t think they intentionally wanted to fuck over studios, but they rather sacrificed them.

Don’t get me wrong: that’s still bad. But there’s a difference between fucking studios over with intent and reacting badly to changed circumstances.

Do you want to know more?

If you go for subscription, you accept that the stuff is temporal. Or at least you should. So it should make no practical difference if a game vanishes because it gets pulled from the catalog or if you decide to cancel the subscription because you consider it too expensive.

If it fits your gaming profile, it’s a pretty good deal.

My impression of Starfield (after release, at least) was, that it was a bunch of pretty well intended and implemented subsystems (as is, to my knowledge quite common in game development; each team works on a different one), but they just don’t fit really well together. All the subsystems are good parts of a theoretically good overall big picture, but the complexity seemed too high for them to actually flesh out the big picture.

Technically it all works, but IMO you feel the conceptual gaps whenever you transition (UX wise) from one gameplay mechanic to the next. It just doesn’t (or didn’t) feel like a cohesive game.

I would rather bet that most people have no clue what an operating system is and that the one they (unknowingly) use is made by Microsoft. On the other hand if they play games (on that PC), they will know Steam, because they actively had to install it and click its icon frequently.

It kind of is, unfortunately. Games are often developed with a lot of pressure and the constant dangling of the budget being cut off. I don’t think the devs are incompetent and think what they produced (code quality wise) would be the best, but what could they do if they need a result to present to the publisher end of week and then don’t get money (aka time) to clean it up but instead they get the next deadline.

On the other hand I am also not sure I can blame publishers. Things can easily spiral out of control if managed badly in the other direction… see Cloud Imperium Games (i.e. Star Citizen).

The second one gives you the necessary flashbacks to catch up if you should intend to follow the story. It also explains all the basics of the game mechanics as part of the quests.

I even heard people being surprised it’s not Geralt. When they were surprised I started to question myself if I just dreamed that they announced that wayyyy back.

Or preferably: don’t care about the game at all until it releases. Ignore previews or alpha demos, beta footage, gameplay trailers/teasers, etc. That way you don’t build up hype that has a big chance to disappoint you. Take the game for what it is at release and either like it then or not.

Ah, good to know. Thanks!

Even CD Project Red added such shit. Instead of directly launching Witcher or Cyberpunk I now have to go through a(nother) launcher now. Pointless.

Baldurs Gate 3 needed one from the beginning as well.

I don’t get it.

While I like and appreciate the campaign, the issue IMO is bigger. IoT devices for example even have environmental impact when services behind them get discontinued.

I would therefore like a more general rule: whenever a product is discontinued for whatever reason, all necessary documents, sources, etc need to be released to allow third parties to take over maintenance (that also includes schematics for hardware repairs).

Unreal Tournament