AI this, AI that - you can't go anywhere without something trying to force AI on you. Usually a company trying to get you to buy into what they've wasted billions on. So indie devs have begun fighting back with their No Gen AI Seal.
Yeah, totally fair. I’ll note that you’re kind of describing the typical software development process of a customer talking to the developer and developing requirements collaboratively with them, then the developer coming back with a demo, the customer refining by going “oh, that won’t work, it needs to do it this way” or “that reminds me, it also needs to do this”, and so on. But you’re closer to playing the role of the customer in this scenario, and acting like more of an editor or manager on the development side. The organizers of a game jam could make a reasonable argument that doing it this way is akin to signing up for the game jam, coming up with an idea, then having your friend who isn’t signed up for the game jam implement it for you, when the point is to do it all in person, quickly, in a fun and energetic environment. The people doing a game jam like coding, that’s the fun part for them, so someone signing up and skipping all that stuff does have a little bit of a “why are you even here then” aspect to it. Of course it depends on the degree the AI is being used, how much editorial control or tweaking you’re doing, it’s a legitimate debate and I don’t think you’re wrong to want to participate.
But like, I do like coding, I just have an incredibly hard time thinking in any language other than English because my brain is essentially defective.
Writing code entirely manually inevitably ends with me incredibly frustrated for hours because despite thinking I’ve done something correctly, and even knowing ‘no, I know this is how it’s supposed to work so why isn’t it?’ All because I’ve made a couple of typographical errors that I’m too stupid to parse out from a debugger.
And because I don’t have any friends with even a passing interest I don’t have anyone to turn to for advice there. Nor do I work in the field or went to school for it. My only human options are on the internet but replies often take hours and you have to sift through nine people calling you stupid before finding someone being nice let alone actually helping.
I empathize with that frustration. The process of thinking you’re right, learning you’re wrong, and figuring out why is very fundamentally what coding is. You’re taking an idea in one form (the thing you want to happen in your mind) and encoding it into another, very different form, a series of instructions to be executed by a computer, and your first try is almost always slightly wrong. Humans aren’t naturally well-adapted to this task because we’re optimized for instructing other humans, who will usually do what they think you mean and not always what you actually said, can gloss over or correct small mistakes or inconsistencies, and will act in their own self-interest when it makes sense, but a computer won’t behave that way, it requires you to bend completely to how it works. It probably makes me a weirdo, but I actually like that process, it’s a puzzle-solving game for me, even when it’s frustrating.
I do think asking an AI for help with something is a useful way to use it, that really isn’t all that different from checking a forum (in fact, those forums are probably what it’s drawing from in the first place), and hallucinations aren’t too damaging because you’ll be checking the AI’s answer when you try what it says and see if it works. It’s more the blindly accepting code that it produces that I think is harmful (and you aren’t doing that, it sounds like.) In an IDE it’s really easy to quickly make pages of code without engaging the brain, and it works well enough to be very tempting, but not, as I’m sure you know, well enough to do the whole thing.
Yeah, totally fair. I’ll note that you’re kind of describing the typical software development process of a customer talking to the developer and developing requirements collaboratively with them, then the developer coming back with a demo, the customer refining by going “oh, that won’t work, it needs to do it this way” or “that reminds me, it also needs to do this”, and so on. But you’re closer to playing the role of the customer in this scenario, and acting like more of an editor or manager on the development side. The organizers of a game jam could make a reasonable argument that doing it this way is akin to signing up for the game jam, coming up with an idea, then having your friend who isn’t signed up for the game jam implement it for you, when the point is to do it all in person, quickly, in a fun and energetic environment. The people doing a game jam like coding, that’s the fun part for them, so someone signing up and skipping all that stuff does have a little bit of a “why are you even here then” aspect to it. Of course it depends on the degree the AI is being used, how much editorial control or tweaking you’re doing, it’s a legitimate debate and I don’t think you’re wrong to want to participate.
But like, I do like coding, I just have an incredibly hard time thinking in any language other than English because my brain is essentially defective.
Writing code entirely manually inevitably ends with me incredibly frustrated for hours because despite thinking I’ve done something correctly, and even knowing ‘no, I know this is how it’s supposed to work so why isn’t it?’ All because I’ve made a couple of typographical errors that I’m too stupid to parse out from a debugger.
And because I don’t have any friends with even a passing interest I don’t have anyone to turn to for advice there. Nor do I work in the field or went to school for it. My only human options are on the internet but replies often take hours and you have to sift through nine people calling you stupid before finding someone being nice let alone actually helping.
I empathize with that frustration. The process of thinking you’re right, learning you’re wrong, and figuring out why is very fundamentally what coding is. You’re taking an idea in one form (the thing you want to happen in your mind) and encoding it into another, very different form, a series of instructions to be executed by a computer, and your first try is almost always slightly wrong. Humans aren’t naturally well-adapted to this task because we’re optimized for instructing other humans, who will usually do what they think you mean and not always what you actually said, can gloss over or correct small mistakes or inconsistencies, and will act in their own self-interest when it makes sense, but a computer won’t behave that way, it requires you to bend completely to how it works. It probably makes me a weirdo, but I actually like that process, it’s a puzzle-solving game for me, even when it’s frustrating.
I do think asking an AI for help with something is a useful way to use it, that really isn’t all that different from checking a forum (in fact, those forums are probably what it’s drawing from in the first place), and hallucinations aren’t too damaging because you’ll be checking the AI’s answer when you try what it says and see if it works. It’s more the blindly accepting code that it produces that I think is harmful (and you aren’t doing that, it sounds like.) In an IDE it’s really easy to quickly make pages of code without engaging the brain, and it works well enough to be very tempting, but not, as I’m sure you know, well enough to do the whole thing.