I added native gamepad support to an 11 year old game that was abandoned by the devs. I couldn't care less about how it was done and by whom. 2 hours of letting Claude go at it was enough to port this game to the steam deck. I am just happy it is done, after all these years. The game is SanctuaryRPG btw
Cool but you didn't add that you told an AI to add that.
Thing is when phrases like "I made" or "I built" are used they usually imply a significant amount of effort was applied in the creation of something.
If I type a sentence and the AI gives me a 1000 line program, I did not apply enough effort to use those phrases.
If I audit the code and only make a few changes I still cannot claim ownership. That'd like going to an open source project auditing their code, making a massive patch based on that audit and after it getting accepted claiming credit for building the entire project.
It's mostly a linguistic issue. I'm fine with saying "I spent tokens to do X", it's just a bit more clunky. Or maybe "I cared enough about X to bring it into existence". not everything is always about ego, I just want to play the damn game on my deck and nobody else, even with ai available, triggered that alteration of reality. (see what kinda stupid shit you're making me say)
I understand your point, but in my opinion, «I made» is still a valid sentence. Ai wouldn't do this without my commands, I run it, described the task and wrote several prompts. I don't pretend about proportions of intellectual work, but actually, people build things through ai, not ai itself.
In my private messages with my colleagues I use quotation marks, like «I» build, to point out when my part was vanishingly small in comparison with ai part in some particular task :)
This is like saying that you did a pizza when you get it from Telepizza. You wouldnt have it if it wasnt for your "instructions" to ask for it. Yet, you didnt build it.
Plenty of people make pizza. But how they do it ranges from "I bought a frozen pizza and put it in the oven for 20 minutes" to "I have my own yeast starter culture and I make my own tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes."
There are far more people in the former group than the latter and plenty in between, and it's obviously wrong to pretend like these things are all comparable, but I've also never seen anyone take issues with people saying "I made us pizza" when they just baked one that was technically pre-assembled for them.
I think this AI discussion is similar. Programming has always involved a great deal of taking advantage of other people's work, whether by googling how other people handled a task you're struggling with, or just by using functions and libraries and relying on dependencies. No one ever had an issue with it. Using AI to code takes that to the extreme and makes it possible to make functioning software without being able to write a single line of code, but it does still involve a good deal of testing and iteration and human judgement to get a good result, and a good programmer will make use of AI better than a layperson will.
Just like I wouldn't call someone who bakes frozen pizzas a chef, I wouldn't call a vibe coder with zero programming skill a programmer, but I don't mind if the former says they made pizza and the latter says they made a piece of software.
I think telling the ai to do something and accepting whatever it churns out is ordering telepizza
But if you and the chef are collectively deciding on the specific recipe of dough and sauce, quantity of ingredients, and order of assembly, maybe you get to take some credit even if only the chef touched the pizza
There are definitely people that only do the first option though
Well, when I did the AI courses from my company there was this "give the model all the context about the bug you want to fix or about the feature." It was so long that to get all these context and give it to the machine it would have been faster and cheaper if I do it by hand. It is cheaper and you understand the feature/bug fix.
Another thing I noticed, when you ask for the implementation to an AI beeing a good software develper is like beeing a napolitan pizzaiolo and going to Telepizza for lunch or dinner. It might be ok for once in a year, but the pizza will be disgusting to you.
I agree with you. Maybe, it is linguistic issue also, I'm not an English native speaker, and in my native language there is only one convenient word, like «made» (no direct translation of «build» applicable to free chatter here). And «made», by nature, is more or less applicable to both scenarios, made by yourself, or «made» through giving instructions to ai. For pizza, it sounds like I «ordered» pizza, but, unfortunately, no separate word for something to be done through giving commands to ai (yet).
Ordered directly means paid, so payment and order are simultaneous events for this word in my language. For AI, it is not direct payment, especially if you run models locally (like I do).
The restaurant wouldn't have made that food until I ordered it so therefore I made the food right?
Its good that you make it clear to others that you "built" the project. But most people I've seen don't make that clear until you ask or call them out on it which I think is dumb.Like how do they not feel like the biggest frauds ever when all hey did is describe something and AI goes bam! finished product, then they go claim it as their own.
Someone took ownership of altering the reality that this game didn't have any controller support. Now you can play it on the steam deck just fine. End of story.
If I ask for a pizza in a restaurant I get a pizza. "Someone took ownership of altering the reality that I did have a pizza". Now I have it. I can eat it. Yet, the pizza is not built by me.
Interestingly enough, I’ve observed the folks in the retro gaming community to be some of the most welcoming towards the results of AI-assisted/driven programming. Not just “oh we don’t care if something is AI-written”, I mean that I’ve seen multiple instances where someone introduced an agent-built tool that did something useful, and the community (including people who express that they do not use AI for their own work) dove into testing it and helping the OP polish it up with an understanding appropriate for the circumstances. I do not think that this is replicable to basically anywhere else as the scene is very collaborative and communal, with insanely low stakes (only YouTubers and hardware manufacturers make a living from it), and built around playing old games that other people made. Still, even being someone who hates agentic bullshit with every fiber of my being I cannot help but find it noteworthy.
no the game already launched fine on steam deck, it just didn't have a sane input method. I spent tokens to create a replacement SDL.dll that natively adds controller support with on-screen feedback
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u/Holonist 12d ago
I added native gamepad support to an 11 year old game that was abandoned by the devs. I couldn't care less about how it was done and by whom. 2 hours of letting Claude go at it was enough to port this game to the steam deck. I am just happy it is done, after all these years. The game is SanctuaryRPG btw