When people figure out how to make a computer do something that it couldn't do before, that is interesting and impressive. It doesn't need to be useful.

You can criticize the code but "wow looks like total shit" is such an embarrassing thing to say considering the context. Imagine going back a few years and show them a tool outputting this from text. No-one would believe it.

It simply is non impressive at all to me, we had an industry(games not web) that was the most innovativd and was able to do things, and in part still is, thousands of years ahead of the slop glorified here

Such an absurd comparison. It's like hearing the world's first audio recording, saying "wow sounds like total shit" and not be impressed because you can go listen to a full symphony orchestra live.

Yeah, yeah. It will hit an imaginary wall any moment now.

You are missing the point of this exercise. This is not about code quality - its about capacity of model to generate visuals with no guidance.

For the code quality it can really be as good or as bad ad as you desire. In this case it is what it is because I put zero effort into it.

non impressive at all to me, visuals are bad not even a student starting in animations would produce that slop. You're glorifying slop, as for the code quality that's not about styling or semantics the tecniques used are BAD and won't scale at all, eg setTimeout is not designed to be run at exactly that interval, it's just a timeout suggestion. And no it cannot be good or bad as you desire it's just bad, I have YET to see something better than an animation student on the first year would do. You're destroying the software industry with this mentality

FWIW I don't agree with anything you're saying but again, I'm glad there is some debate from another side.

I suck at writing software, like bad. I can't remember syntax at all. I couldn't write working code on a whiteboard if you asked me.

But I don't know how to solve problems very well, and I'm good at understanding what people want and don't want. I do understand logic and pseudocode.

The code LLMs write is good enough for 99% of the things I need it for, and I'm not writing code that will be used in some life determining situation, and I'd wager that most aren't either.

We could debate on if my code is usable/supportable long-term, by myself or others. However, I don't see how that debate would be any different if I wrote it myself (worse) or somebody else.

Yes, it’s a very narrow-minded perspective that cannot understand the second-order implications of this development beyond their own experience as an experienced developer. For argument, let’s imagine that the quality of software at the top valley firms is just phenomenal (a stretch, as we all know, even as a hypothetical). That is obviously not the case for the quality of software at 99% of firms. One could argue that the dominance of SaaS this past decade is an artifact of the software labor market: any vaguely talented engineer could easily get a ridiculously well-paid position in the valley for a firm that sold software at great margins to all the other firms that were effectively priced out of the market for engineers. I think the most interesting case study of this is actually the gaming industry, since it’s a highly technical engineering domain where margins are quickly eroded by paying the actual market wage for enough engineers to ship a good product, leading to the decline of AAA studios. Carmack’s career trajectory from gaming industry to Meta is paradigmatic of the generational shift, here.

TLDR; in my opinion, the interesting question is less what happens at the top firms or to top engineers than what happens as the rest of the world gains access to engineering skills well above the previous floor at a reasonable price point.

Prompting is not engineering nor a skill let alone a whole engineering skill. Excel has been around democratizing programming for the businesses of any kind and people of any kind and created a lot of value, i believe it's a great product YET it didn't lowered the need of engineering people... the contrary

Business software that is responsible for millions in revenue tends to resemble an ETL shell script more than a 3D game engine.

Tell it to Hollywood and movie studios that uses derivations of game engines

Let me double down to get even more downvotes, here's a snippet of the code:

> setTimeout(() => showSub("Ah, Earl Grey.", 2000), 1000);

> setTimeout(() => showSub("Finally some peace.", 2000), 3500);

> // Scene 2

> setTimeout(() => showSub("Armor Clanking", 2000), 7000);

> setTimeout(() => showSub("Heavy Breathing", 2000), 10000);

If we will lose our jobs to this dumb slop I'd rather be happy doing something else

How would you do it?

I would properly separate data and code so that I can easily change the dialogue and its timing without having to rewrite all of the numbers in all of the code.

Your desired setup is just a single prompt away...

sure let's keep piling slop over slop, they're not very good to de-spaghettify code, they're good at piling further slop

LLMs only as good at software architecture as you are.

Bold statement not true

Isn't that the issue though?

If you are good, like, no?

I mean I crafted complete complex game prototype using Gemini 2.5 Pro with nearly zero coding. I done it in a week: with client-server architecture, robust networking, AI, acceptance test coverage, replays.

It just different way to build software. You just spend 30% of time on specification, 30% on testing and 30% on refactoring also using AI.

Actual slop generarion take like 10% of time and rest of the time you turn it into maintainable code.

Of course you can do it manually, but then it will take 5-10 times the time and you wont be as flexible in changing things because with AI you can do major refactoring in a day, but manually it could take weeks and kill the project.

Share or you're just lying

You're free not to believe me, but I do shipped 3 commercial games (links in profile). I know that what would usually take to build 2-3 months of developer time can now be built in a week.

PS: I might eventually post here about rapid game prototyping with LLM.

If you actually have some credibility feel free to reach me via Linkedin or non-anonymous email and I'd happily share my experience or the code.

BTW if you need to refactor on day one it already smells like good slop

This is a game prototype. If you ever built one you know how iterate on one trying things,

Why bother doing that when a non-engineer can just change the prompt and output a different result? :shrug:

right and keep piling slop over slop, software will collapse with this mentality. And more importantly the more the code is convoluted the more even the llm will bail out and won't be able to make further adjustments because of bad code and context rot