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> I've seen people supposedly smarter than I advocate for just giving in, conceding to AI coding as it's the future. But doing so means tossing out my friends w

> I've seen people supposedly smarter than I advocate for just giving in, conceding to AI coding as it's the future. But doing so means tossing out my friends who make art or the people who work their asses off to properly test and review code or the writers pouring all of their energy into even mundane dialogue. It means throwing out my dignity Conflating things in this inflammatory way is a big mistake. Using a technology employers want you to use is not betraying your friends. Not everything has to be a culture war front.

iwontberude 4mo ago
I think you might not get the context this is coming from, it’s about a game developer laid off from Blizzard not wanting to partake in the technology that will justify layoffs of their friends. Pretty straight forward to me.
- echelon 4mo ago
  You will not have a job in software in the future if you refuse to use AI. I fully stand behind that prediction. edit: despite the downvotes, I'll double down: most of today's software jobs will disappear. Your job, if it is in software, will disappear. It might transform into something new, if you're lucky. Or it might just go away entirely.
  - bayarearefugee 4mo ago
    For the vast majority of people who currently have a job in software... you will not have a job in software in the future whether you use AI or not. The tide is coming for almost all of us.
    - Bombthecat 4mo ago
      Yap, the signs are here. Software and code is turning into a commodity
    - mynameisbilly 4mo ago
      I guess I'm just confused by this sentiment. Are you making these conclusions while considering the fact that AI is still heavily subsidized? The economics of AI isn't quite the same as other software/tech. I don't think it's going anywhere, but I don't know what happens when prices start to rise because these companies need to start turning a profit.
      - InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
        I'm happy using GLM 5.2 at API pricing. There will never be a point where essentially unlimited usage (i.e. what I, as a normal developer, can use at peak effort) of extremely good models will become financially unattainable.
        echelon 4mo ago
        > There will never be a point where essentially unlimited usage (i.e. what I, as a normal developer, can use at peak effort) of extremely good models will become financially unattainable. The way you phrase this prevents refutation. But there will be a point where ordinary individuals cannot participate in the majority of the upside. In the future, some class of models will require enormous compute that is outside the financial capital capability of ordinary individual contributors, middle class, and upper middle class. This will be sold as a capability to well-funded companies.
        taintballs69 4mo ago
        [dead]
        InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
        Yes, I don't disagree with what you're saying. I'm responding to a specific claim: that the capabilities we have now will become much more expensive in the future.
    - gafferongames 4mo ago
      > For the vast majority of people who currently have a job in software... you will not have a job in software in the future whether you use AI or not. The tide is coming for almost all of us. I'll agree with you as soon as all video games are in the metaverse and run natively on the blockchain.
      - echelon 4mo ago
        Metaverse is bullshit. Blockchain is bullshit. Crypto is bullshit. VR and wearables are bullshit. AI does your job. Robots do your job. These are real and substantial and actually provide enormous value. You can get more done per unit of time. I want them to do my job and everyone else's jobs, I just want to make sure there's a functioning economy we can participate in and benefit from at the other side.
        gafferongames 4mo ago
        AI makes up shit that doesn't exist and lies to you. Sure, let's get the word salad generator to write all the code. What a great fucking idea.
        echelon 4mo ago
        I've just built a $3M run rate company in five months on mostly AI outputs in Rust, which is rock solid code. In my career I've been a six nines systems engineer. Stuff like billion dollar daily volume payments platforms, and my work was always situated in critical flows - so I know a thing or two about solid engineering work. Just a moment ago I asked AI for a complicated multithreaded state machine with variational queuing logic. Claude Code Opus delivered. I'm reviewing it now. It's phenomenal code. You need to reassess the world. Your priors are deeply flawed. These models are absolutely incredible. I mean it - you're going to be hurt badly if you don't reevaluate what is happening and plan accordingly.
        jplusequalt 4mo ago
        >I mean it - you're going to be hurt badly if you don't reevaluate what is happening and plan accordingly. What plans can most people reasonably come up with? If AI is taking over software, it's taking over lots of other computer related jobs. If you're not a highly paid engineer, or come from money, most people can't just re-skill for entirely different careers.
  - amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
    What year, and how much money are you willing to bet?
  - iwontberude 4mo ago
    Not a chance… our backlogs are exploding with AI. The review work is so massive we are hiring to handle it.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- Bombthecat 4mo ago
  Yeah, but nothing he can do
  - iwontberude 4mo ago
    Social implications are really hard to shake, but I agree it’s basically a lost cause fighting at this point. I’m hoping like Ed Zitron that it fails via some more durable reason.
VonGuard 4mo ago
The author is coming from the games industry. As an arts based industry, AI is EXTREMELY divisive. The author really will lose friends over even so much as touching AI in certain ways, because the artists that built the games industry were already badly abused, and now, they're being squeezed out entirely. For business developers, AI is somewhat less existentially terrifying, as it can be seen to be really empowering to an experienced user. In the games industry, AI usage immediately eliminates a human job. Why pay a pixel artist if AI can generate 100's of unique little people pixels in seconds, and output them in the right format? Hollywood is going through the same thing: the companies that are building AI for Hollywood have to do so in the bushes, hiding. You don't see them advertising or flashing cash. That's because no one involved in using their wares wants anyone to know they're using them, lest they alienate the highly-talented people they still need to fill the gap between concept AI and full theatrical release AI. In the software world, we are worried about AI. In the creative industries, they are absolutely pants on fire, screaming at the sky, burning down the village terrified of AI.
- moralestapia 4mo ago
  Arts or no arts companies hire you to do X, not to make friends. If you stop doing X you will be fired/not-hired, simple as. You can make friends on your free time.
  - solid_fuel 4mo ago
    > Arts or no arts companies hire you to do X, not to make friends. If you stop doing X you will be fired/not-hired, simple as. > You can make friends on your free time. Most well-adjusted people work to live, they don't live to work. Life comes first, the demands of the job come a distant second.
    - moralestapia 4mo ago
      Great! All the more reason, then, for them to be okay with not being hired.
nyc_data_geek1 4mo ago
This particular technology has been trained by explicitly ripping off a lot of peoples' friends, though.
braden-lk 4mo ago
Just to +1 the sentiment here; AI in the gaming industry is absolutely a culture war front. Especially in the indie space, you will lose advertising deals with many sponsors & influencers, for example, if you appear to endorse AI. Probably won't be that way forever, but it's a hotbed right now.
- alephnerd 4mo ago
  Meanwhile, Asian studios are much more open to experimenting with AI workflows, and will eventually build the next generation of Niantics and AppLovins if this neo-ludditism continues. Heck, 50% of all Japanese game studios [0] along with all of China's largest studios [1] now use AI within their development pipeline - often with explicit state backing. You may not like Blizzard or Ubisoft but Tencent, Sony, miHoYo, and even Nintendo are much worse from a work culture, compensation, and work expectation perspective. [0] - https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUF251PU0V20C25A9000000/?n_cid=SNSTW005 https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUF251PU0V20C25A9000000/... [1] - https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3341063/next-level-why-chinas-game-makers-are-quietly-bankrolling-generative-ai https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3341063/next-l... --- Edit: can't reply > Why should that be a relevant concern? It's not like any of us will be working in game dev if AI wins. Becuase AI is not taking all jobs. Yes a lot of redundant work will go away, but there is still a real need for human intervention, monkeypatching, and ingenuity. The North American gaming industry only exists because the entire ecosystem from AdTech to Engines to Marketplaces exists to develop, finance, and distribute IP. If you stay frozen in the past, you eventually get outcompeted and the ecosystem will leave. And unlike the automotive industry, game devs aren't a core voting bloc. This is what happened to the entire animation industry and is what is happening to the film and television industry. Gaming will be the next IP driven industry to leave if everyone remains frozen and opposed to innovation. > Maybe (sic) Chines sell tools for artists pitching them as useful rather then "haha this will make you obsolete you looser look at slop I made" middle finger pitch? The obsolence and cost saving message is true though and used all over Asia - even in China [0][1]. Either you innovate and compete, or you will get trounced. THIS is the cultural mindset back in Asia. Americans best learn how to compete again. [0] - https://www.zaobao.com.sg/news/china/story20260622-9245522 https://www.zaobao.com.sg/news/china/story20260622-9245522 [1] - https://m.tech.china.com/articles/20260615/202606151894081.html https://m.tech.china.com/articles/20260615/202606151894081.h...
FrustratedMonky 4mo ago
Not sure the technology is the issue here. He isn't debating using Java v C#, and one is a betrayal of all that is holy, so he refuses to use it. I think everyone kind of feels that AI is sucking up all the content that we have all created collectively, and we all know that the bell is tolling for thee, no matter how much you adapt. So if you see friends being fed into a meat grinder, you can have a 'culture war' take on it. He's posting on line to vent, something everyone is venting about. Of course, for a job, to get a paycheck, we'd use any technology, even if we are the ones running the meat grinder.
fragmede 4mo ago
yeah, the question is what would you do with $100 million? I mean I don't have $100 million but I'd give it to the arts after I've taken care of myself well and science. Am I gonna make $100 million playing with AI? I don't even know if I can take care of myself, shit, but the government ain't gonna do that. What are the new jobs after the Saaspocalypse? Well all the money went to those companies and what do those companies want or what do those newly minted millionaires want? Hopefully something I have but shit yo. So they're gonna go back to where they came from and be millionaires but how much is Dave Chappelle changed the city that he moved to? Is there a Dave Chappelle center for comedy? some of them want ASI so I look forward to studies on human intelligence. Maybe they'll pay human subjects to model supply two digit numbers while in an MRI machine hopefully enough of those studies to pay my mortgage.
- falcor84 4mo ago
  > I mean I don't have $100 million but I'd give it to the arts I might be naive, but rather than giving money "to the arts", I would much prefer to give money "to the people" en masse, and then leave it up to everyone to decide whether they want to make art for art's sake.
  - fragmede 4mo ago
    When you get $100 million, you can do with it what ever you wish. KLF got $1 million and decided to literally burn it.
soiltype 4mo ago
> Not everything has to be a culture war front. This is seemingly spoken from an ignorant and insulated position. The victims of invasion don't get to decide whether or not they live on a war front, nor do the countless skilled and creative individuals losing their entire careers almost overnight. By the way it's class war you're talking about, not culture war.
rektomatic 4mo ago
Propertly testing and reviewing code is a must with AI, it's actually more important. I don't know why the author feels like it's assumed that this goes out the window with AI
casey2 4mo ago
Corporations are the organizational equivalent of AI, they one thing well asmass money, their output aside from that is total shit. Not only are you betraying your friends/community/loved ones but such a setup is necessary to prevent the total collapse of society.
coldtea 4mo ago
>Using a technology employers want you to use is not betraying your friends. If it means helping the employers erase their jobs and their dreams for a career in the industry, then it is.
h4kunamata 4mo ago
As a gamer, if a game has mention of AI in any way or form, that equals to slope. And it is always the case, bugs, broken arts, you name it, so no, I disagree with you and agree with OP. By using AI for gaming development, you are taking away job from real people to replace it with AI slope.

iwontberude 4mo ago

I think you might not get the context this is coming from, it’s about a game developer laid off from Blizzard not wanting to partake in the technology that will justify layoffs of their friends. Pretty straight forward to me.

echelon 4mo ago
You will not have a job in software in the future if you refuse to use AI. I fully stand behind that prediction. edit: despite the downvotes, I'll double down: most of today's software jobs will disappear. Your job, if it is in software, will disappear. It might transform into something new, if you're lucky. Or it might just go away entirely.
- bayarearefugee 4mo ago
  For the vast majority of people who currently have a job in software... you will not have a job in software in the future whether you use AI or not. The tide is coming for almost all of us.
  - Bombthecat 4mo ago
    Yap, the signs are here. Software and code is turning into a commodity
  - mynameisbilly 4mo ago
    I guess I'm just confused by this sentiment. Are you making these conclusions while considering the fact that AI is still heavily subsidized? The economics of AI isn't quite the same as other software/tech. I don't think it's going anywhere, but I don't know what happens when prices start to rise because these companies need to start turning a profit.
    - InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
      I'm happy using GLM 5.2 at API pricing. There will never be a point where essentially unlimited usage (i.e. what I, as a normal developer, can use at peak effort) of extremely good models will become financially unattainable.
      - echelon 4mo ago
        > There will never be a point where essentially unlimited usage (i.e. what I, as a normal developer, can use at peak effort) of extremely good models will become financially unattainable. The way you phrase this prevents refutation. But there will be a point where ordinary individuals cannot participate in the majority of the upside. In the future, some class of models will require enormous compute that is outside the financial capital capability of ordinary individual contributors, middle class, and upper middle class. This will be sold as a capability to well-funded companies.
        taintballs69 4mo ago
        [dead]
        InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
        Yes, I don't disagree with what you're saying. I'm responding to a specific claim: that the capabilities we have now will become much more expensive in the future.
  - gafferongames 4mo ago
    > For the vast majority of people who currently have a job in software... you will not have a job in software in the future whether you use AI or not. The tide is coming for almost all of us. I'll agree with you as soon as all video games are in the metaverse and run natively on the blockchain.
    - echelon 4mo ago
      Metaverse is bullshit. Blockchain is bullshit. Crypto is bullshit. VR and wearables are bullshit. AI does your job. Robots do your job. These are real and substantial and actually provide enormous value. You can get more done per unit of time. I want them to do my job and everyone else's jobs, I just want to make sure there's a functioning economy we can participate in and benefit from at the other side.
      - gafferongames 4mo ago
        AI makes up shit that doesn't exist and lies to you. Sure, let's get the word salad generator to write all the code. What a great fucking idea.
        echelon 4mo ago
        I've just built a $3M run rate company in five months on mostly AI outputs in Rust, which is rock solid code. In my career I've been a six nines systems engineer. Stuff like billion dollar daily volume payments platforms, and my work was always situated in critical flows - so I know a thing or two about solid engineering work. Just a moment ago I asked AI for a complicated multithreaded state machine with variational queuing logic. Claude Code Opus delivered. I'm reviewing it now. It's phenomenal code. You need to reassess the world. Your priors are deeply flawed. These models are absolutely incredible. I mean it - you're going to be hurt badly if you don't reevaluate what is happening and plan accordingly.
        jplusequalt 4mo ago
        >I mean it - you're going to be hurt badly if you don't reevaluate what is happening and plan accordingly. What plans can most people reasonably come up with? If AI is taking over software, it's taking over lots of other computer related jobs. If you're not a highly paid engineer, or come from money, most people can't just re-skill for entirely different careers.
- amanaplanacanal 4mo ago
  What year, and how much money are you willing to bet?
- iwontberude 4mo ago
  Not a chance… our backlogs are exploding with AI. The review work is so massive we are hiring to handle it.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
Bombthecat 4mo ago
Yeah, but nothing he can do
- iwontberude 4mo ago
  Social implications are really hard to shake, but I agree it’s basically a lost cause fighting at this point. I’m hoping like Ed Zitron that it fails via some more durable reason.

VonGuard 4mo ago

The author is coming from the games industry. As an arts based industry, AI is EXTREMELY divisive. The author really will lose friends over even so much as touching AI in certain ways, because the artists that built the games industry were already badly abused, and now, they're being squeezed out entirely. For business developers, AI is somewhat less existentially terrifying, as it can be seen to be really empowering to an experienced user. In the games industry, AI usage immediately eliminates a human job. Why pay a pixel artist if AI can generate 100's of unique little people pixels in seconds, and output them in the right format? Hollywood is going through the same thing: the companies that are building AI for Hollywood have to do so in the bushes, hiding. You don't see them advertising or flashing cash. That's because no one involved in using their wares wants anyone to know they're using them, lest they alienate the highly-talented people they still need to fill the gap between concept AI and full theatrical release AI. In the software world, we are worried about AI. In the creative industries, they are absolutely pants on fire, screaming at the sky, burning down the village terrified of AI.

moralestapia 4mo ago
Arts or no arts companies hire you to do X, not to make friends. If you stop doing X you will be fired/not-hired, simple as. You can make friends on your free time.
- solid_fuel 4mo ago
  > Arts or no arts companies hire you to do X, not to make friends. If you stop doing X you will be fired/not-hired, simple as. > You can make friends on your free time. Most well-adjusted people work to live, they don't live to work. Life comes first, the demands of the job come a distant second.
  - moralestapia 4mo ago
    Great! All the more reason, then, for them to be okay with not being hired.

nyc_data_geek1 4mo ago

This particular technology has been trained by explicitly ripping off a lot of peoples' friends, though.

braden-lk 4mo ago

Just to +1 the sentiment here; AI in the gaming industry is absolutely a culture war front. Especially in the indie space, you will lose advertising deals with many sponsors & influencers, for example, if you appear to endorse AI. Probably won't be that way forever, but it's a hotbed right now.

alephnerd 4mo ago
Meanwhile, Asian studios are much more open to experimenting with AI workflows, and will eventually build the next generation of Niantics and AppLovins if this neo-ludditism continues. Heck, 50% of all Japanese game studios [0] along with all of China's largest studios [1] now use AI within their development pipeline - often with explicit state backing. You may not like Blizzard or Ubisoft but Tencent, Sony, miHoYo, and even Nintendo are much worse from a work culture, compensation, and work expectation perspective. [0] - https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUF251PU0V20C25A9000000/?n_cid=SNSTW005 https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUF251PU0V20C25A9000000/... [1] - https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3341063/next-level-why-chinas-game-makers-are-quietly-bankrolling-generative-ai https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3341063/next-l... --- Edit: can't reply > Why should that be a relevant concern? It's not like any of us will be working in game dev if AI wins. Becuase AI is not taking all jobs. Yes a lot of redundant work will go away, but there is still a real need for human intervention, monkeypatching, and ingenuity. The North American gaming industry only exists because the entire ecosystem from AdTech to Engines to Marketplaces exists to develop, finance, and distribute IP. If you stay frozen in the past, you eventually get outcompeted and the ecosystem will leave. And unlike the automotive industry, game devs aren't a core voting bloc. This is what happened to the entire animation industry and is what is happening to the film and television industry. Gaming will be the next IP driven industry to leave if everyone remains frozen and opposed to innovation. > Maybe (sic) Chines sell tools for artists pitching them as useful rather then "haha this will make you obsolete you looser look at slop I made" middle finger pitch? The obsolence and cost saving message is true though and used all over Asia - even in China [0][1]. Either you innovate and compete, or you will get trounced. THIS is the cultural mindset back in Asia. Americans best learn how to compete again. [0] - https://www.zaobao.com.sg/news/china/story20260622-9245522 https://www.zaobao.com.sg/news/china/story20260622-9245522 [1] - https://m.tech.china.com/articles/20260615/202606151894081.html https://m.tech.china.com/articles/20260615/202606151894081.h...

FrustratedMonky 4mo ago

Not sure the technology is the issue here. He isn't debating using Java v C#, and one is a betrayal of all that is holy, so he refuses to use it. I think everyone kind of feels that AI is sucking up all the content that we have all created collectively, and we all know that the bell is tolling for thee, no matter how much you adapt. So if you see friends being fed into a meat grinder, you can have a 'culture war' take on it. He's posting on line to vent, something everyone is venting about. Of course, for a job, to get a paycheck, we'd use any technology, even if we are the ones running the meat grinder.

fragmede 4mo ago

yeah, the question is what would you do with $100 million? I mean I don't have $100 million but I'd give it to the arts after I've taken care of myself well and science. Am I gonna make $100 million playing with AI? I don't even know if I can take care of myself, shit, but the government ain't gonna do that. What are the new jobs after the Saaspocalypse? Well all the money went to those companies and what do those companies want or what do those newly minted millionaires want? Hopefully something I have but shit yo. So they're gonna go back to where they came from and be millionaires but how much is Dave Chappelle changed the city that he moved to? Is there a Dave Chappelle center for comedy? some of them want ASI so I look forward to studies on human intelligence. Maybe they'll pay human subjects to model supply two digit numbers while in an MRI machine hopefully enough of those studies to pay my mortgage.

falcor84 4mo ago
> I mean I don't have $100 million but I'd give it to the arts I might be naive, but rather than giving money "to the arts", I would much prefer to give money "to the people" en masse, and then leave it up to everyone to decide whether they want to make art for art's sake.
- fragmede 4mo ago
  When you get $100 million, you can do with it what ever you wish. KLF got $1 million and decided to literally burn it.

soiltype 4mo ago

> Not everything has to be a culture war front. This is seemingly spoken from an ignorant and insulated position. The victims of invasion don't get to decide whether or not they live on a war front, nor do the countless skilled and creative individuals losing their entire careers almost overnight. By the way it's class war you're talking about, not culture war.

rektomatic 4mo ago

Propertly testing and reviewing code is a must with AI, it's actually more important. I don't know why the author feels like it's assumed that this goes out the window with AI

casey2 4mo ago

Corporations are the organizational equivalent of AI, they one thing well asmass money, their output aside from that is total shit. Not only are you betraying your friends/community/loved ones but such a setup is necessary to prevent the total collapse of society.

coldtea 4mo ago

>Using a technology employers want you to use is not betraying your friends. If it means helping the employers erase their jobs and their dreams for a career in the industry, then it is.

h4kunamata 4mo ago

As a gamer, if a game has mention of AI in any way or form, that equals to slope. And it is always the case, bugs, broken arts, you name it, so no, I disagree with you and agree with OP. By using AI for gaming development, you are taking away job from real people to replace it with AI slope.