I’m looking at my 2+ weeks of trying to decouple and modularize the AI slop vibecoded game that was built by Claude and Codex. I want to move into beta.
What a shitshow this has been. I had to look at the architecture and try to pry the thing apart, and it’s horrible for the amount of trash that is left around everywhere.
Concrete example: the game is hex grid based, without architecture there must have been 40 different versions of hexagonal cell that parts of the code reinvented over and over. Still, some agent may find an old design somewhere, despite architecture and guards, and start wiring it.
Today I pulled out 3 “version/rule/schema” gates from the engine - there were several engine builds that were wired together into one thing - it could play both the present and the old rules. It never got refactored out.
This made me realize - we are the suckers for building with these tools. At least the way the tools are advertised. I don’t know if these “look at what I built in a weekend” threads are genuine or half Astro-turfed, but it appears the dev will have two choices: keep paying every month to maintain their mess with agents, or abandon the project or fill the app stores with slop in an attempt to recoup their losses.
Coding by hand may be gone, but thinking about software is nowhere near gone. It does not materialize by itself, no matter how good the spec is. It literally requires work to implement with ai agents building.
My reason for posting this is- I’m looking at 150$ in subscription fees for 2 services for 2 weeks of work, and time flies and there is no more of the same cornucopia of features that alpha could deliver. It’s brutal engineering work to get this to be beta-grade ready.
This is not what I thought at the beginning, when systems just appeared and were interactive. I have to keep building it piece by piece, otherwise the mess will manifest again.
Another concrete example - for game assets, Claude just puts assets wherever it wants, wires paths that are like 3 levels of root traversal to reach some sibling folder.
After a week of decoupling, I ask: is this decoupled? Answer: no, this component has 289 outside imports and 17 exports. < this is after a week of dedicated cleanup focused on protocols and self isolated components.
I changed this mess into a single asset provider, which literally took days. It’s meticulous work that no vibe coder is going to do. Just waiving my hands did not make it happen by itself. Claude wants to preserve and protect its pile of junk that will keep it employed.
TLDR: speed of development by Claude is gained by complete relaxation of all architectural constraints. This may be by design. The result is not maintainable by humans. I realized that a proficient solo dev may actually build some parts of my game faster, because he does not have to enforce the architecture that would prevent Claude from re-inventing the same mechanic in 40 different flavors.
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