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Comment by m-hodges | Hacker News Reader

Remember that "Where's the Shovelware?"¹ post?

¹ https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...

I think one look at the flood of vibe-coded projects (like decomps, mods, etc) hitting the retrogaming scene now proves this article wrong already. You literally see a major project blow up in one day, then immediately get 'busted' for AI.

And it's almost certainly hitting other fields too. Games on Steam, mobile apps, websites and web apps, etc.

Busted? I’d think that AI would be a godsend for retro computing, a field always starved for programmer support especially in emulating obscure stuff.

People do it for the pleasure of figuring out obscure stuff. The point is dealing with that old unsupported tech as much as the games themselves.

Yeah, people on HN don't do anything for the pleasure of anything but to be productive and provide value to whoever. So, don't bet on people here understanding this mindset.

The business/money and startup culture is only a part of HN. I'm here because computers are cool and news hits here fast (also the comments can be interesting). I don't care about IPOs, unicorns, celebrities, AI, etc. I like to see the new Asahi Linux updates, Dolphin progress reports, new OpenBSD releases, discussions about vim and emacs or other unix tools, stories of repairing old arcade hardware, that kinda stuff. Some guys on IRC used to post HN links all the time and at some point I became one of them. Perhaps I'm a minority, but I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.

It's possible to use AI to help create non-slop. However, almost nobody does.

Exactly! AI is just mirroring the slow death of creativity over the last couple of decades. If you have the willpower to live a more analog life free of creativity-killing digital wasteland-type deathtraps, the creative spark that hits in moments of quiet contemplation can be funneled through the accelerator of AI-assisted coding to create incredible things. Why does no one seem to realize this?

There's a lot of hatred for AI in these communities, to the point half of Twitter/Bluesky/Reddit goes ballistic when they learn the developer used Claude or Codex at some point. Media outlets and influencers are doing the same thing too.

Yes I’ve seen this. The hatred is easily as unhinged as some of the stuff from the “AI will soon learn to fold space and access infinite energy from the zero point after it recursively becomes god” delusional AI utopia crowd, or the “nuke data centers” crowd.

AI seems to break a lot of peoples’ brains. It’s like it totally bypasses nuanced thinking and understanding and normal curiosity and goes straight to some kind of overflow state.

The hatred stems from retrocomputing enthusiasts wanting an escape from modern computing. When someone's having fun with their retrocomputing hobby, they don't want what they see as the worst part of modern computing playing any role in that hobby. They're trying to get away from the hype, but it's inescapable.

A lot of friends who were not computer illiterate but also definitely not coders are now publishing websites regularly with whatever comes to their mind at the time.

Quality could be questionable but quantity-wise I can definitely see the start of the exponential growth.

Yeah, I think the ideal AI user for coding is the one who is not so ignorant that they can't even explain what they want done, but not so knowledgeable that they could simply do it themselves. It's like a crutch: if you don't have legs it's completely useless, but it can let you hobble around if yours don't work perfectly, and if they do work then it's also pretty much useless.

My wife plays the web games from the New York Times.

There was one she liked but she wanted to change the rules.

Of course it took Claude Code about 10 minutes to do it, and she was delighted.

For websites, isn't that just Wix? Or Microsoft Frontpage?

I can definitely see the start of the exponential growth

No you can't

Oh yes, first thing that sprung to mind when I started to see games being made with Ai on itch and then steam and of course the posts showing up daily on certain subreddits.

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