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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

The people who hand write code for a game engine will beat the people who try to vibe code a game engine.

But they'll both be beaten by people using AI intelligently to generate code, but not letting it drive everything. Who look at every line and apply their experience to fixing what the AI generates until it outputs more or less what you would have, only more quickly.

The false dichotomy that some of you are trying to push between "just taking whatever the AI slops out" and "pristine hand-crafted code by dedicated, loving experts" doesn't exist.

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> But they'll both be beaten by people using AI intelligently to generate code, but not letting it drive everything.

I mean, this remains to be seen. Is this actually much faster or better than coding by hand?

(Not a facetious question: it's one I grapple with all the time)

I'd put my estimates at 3x speed improvements. The amount of infra required upfront? 5x one time cost. These are estimates from Godot mobile app work. We have been trying out: no reviews under specific file sizes, except at design bottlenecks or large refactors. Number of PRs is probably up 3x with maybe 20% increase in regressions? Number of tests in our CI is up 500% (again, approximate), but this is absolutely required or we'd be awash in uncaught regressions with the velocity of code changes.

We have PR auditing skills, PR writing skills, testing conventions, etc that all need to be self-monitored for bullsh*t Claude ignorance (e.g. you apply them many times, then review your own PRs manually before merge). None of that is free, but we have shipped significantly more code as a result.

Hearing about a Godot mobile app is hilarious to me. If there was ever a signal that Godot is not a serious tool to create releasable games, but rather a toy for beginners to mess around with, spending a bunch of resources on porting the engine to phones is it. Wowza

I am struggling to understand the exact content of your message. I believe it's that Godot is unserious. Okay? Game engines serve a niche much smaller than broad consumer apps or SaaS platforms. Seems like a dunk I don't quite understand.

It's a game built in Godot that runs on mobile (a mobile game). Godot is C++, there is no porting of engine to run on mobile? Slay the Spire 2 is built in Godot and has 500k concurrent users.

I interpreted your comment "Godot mobile app work" to mean you worked on porting Godot itself to mobile, which I then checked and found that it did actually happen https://godotengine.org/article/gabe-stable-release/

If Godot for Android is unrelated to you then I misread. But I still find it hilarious conceptually, unrelated to you, that Godot is spending resources on porting itself to phones while it has so many serious outstanding issues. As though game devs are going to be coding on their phones in any meaningful way.

Thank you for clarifying! That totally changed my interpretation.

There is a surprising number of projects dedicated to making Godot work on mobile, and I am equally confused by that focus. I guess it's more possible with AI coding though, but couch game dev doesn't feel like a real thing.

An important compilation target for Godot is mobile, since it's obviously a very large games market.

And, since the Godot IDE is, itself, an app written in Godot, porting to mobile is almost free. More a question of tweaking than rewriting. That's the same reason there's a version of Godot runnable in a browser... it's a consequence of Godot allowing webapps as build targets.

How does this square with the blog post I linked, that sounds like a lot of work, and its ending blurb, "It’s been a long road to bring full build support to the Godot editor on Android and XR devices, and we are excited to see what you build entirely on device!"?

A long road does not sound like something almost free

Seeing what y'all write in the child comments here, I think there is a massive misconception. Games made with Godot can be deployed to mobile fairly easily. The recent "breakthrough" about Godot working on Android was about making the Godot editor (which itself is made with Godot) fully work on Android in the sense that it can actually build project there which is more about getting build tooling to work on an Android device than actually running the Godot engine on Android. Totally different things. For quite some time you can quite easily deploy your Godot game to mobile, it's not a real problem.

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