Much of what they are doing is incomprehensible to me. I often find that being a programmer is actually holding me back in this regard, because I feel the need to understand everything the code is doing, as well as the specialized knowledge (e.g. the math involved in audio processing and sound effects). Whereas my friends can just say... yeah add a phaser effect to the synth and it just does it.
The only way this will go pervasively mainstream is if AI gets so good that it can autonomously recognize what tools a user would find useful, and would create it for them without specific prompting. That will pretty much be AGI.
AI is not a feature of the product. GTM will be interesting, have some good ideas.
It's really up to you to be clever. I've never used Js/Ts/node/these apis etc. I started programming as a non-cs engineer to automate stuff and then got into SWE. This is truly an amazing time.
I've seen a few live streams vibecoding video games on Twitch, and it was so hilariously bad and cringe-inducing I am back working on (hobby) game dev, my hopes restored, at least for the immediate future.
I also like how that entire field, gamers and devs, compared to regular software engineering, is so set against AI it can provide some pushback to the starry-eyed comments you read on here all the time. The only people using LLMs in gamedev are grifters and the dreaded idea people with not a single bone of talent or love for the craft in their body.
What happened to your hope previously?
Did you get discouraged by the idea that it was now easier for other people to make games?
I'm curious about this anti-AI sentiment you're talking about in the games world. I'm not really part of any gamedev communities, but I did make some simple browser games myself, including a multiplayer game. (In early 2024 I was doing a game jam every week!)
I didn't use much AI at the time, maybe copy-pasted a few snippets from ChatGPT, and that really felt like cheating!
I'm getting back into game dev now, after becoming a lot more comfortable with AI programming tools. I haven't really used AI for game dev, but I imagine they'd be helpful with some aspects like debugging, and the usual code snippets (tab complete etc).
The games my friends are making are text-based, "choose your own adventure" type games (interactive fiction?), so it's pretty straightforward for LLMs. I don't imagine they'd do very well with realtime stuff though, at least not without very heavy hand holding.
I know this company uses LLMs, because I'm working on another project for them where one of the co-founders is relentlessly spamming the repo with overwrought Claude Code output like there is no tomorrow. This shit sucks at code generation and it most likely sucks at everything else too, except people often assume it's better at things they don't know about.