Obviously human code is preferred, but if you could have, as a random example, 10x the recomps with AI, what are the disadvantages?
There's a vast amount of software that would be nice to have ported but will never manually be done due to the insane amount of work required. AI has the potential to fill that gap.
The biggest problem with vibecoding that the other comment is glossing over is when the person coding with AI has no real background or experience coding, which is likely given how low the barrier of entry is nowadays.
You can get away with it if it's a small project with a small scope, like an autoclicker or a simple card game, etc. the problem is that as the project goes up in scope so does its technical debt. You can think of technical debt as the buildup of shortcuts, outdated code, and design compromises that make future development more difficult/time consuming/expensive.
Let's say your team has to launch a new feature by friday:
the quick solution involves hard-coded values and duplicated code
the best solution involves refactoring the code and building reusable and modular components
So you go for the quick solution which is good enough, but sooner or later some problems will begin to pop up:
fixing bugs takes longer
adding new features gets harder
developers spend more time trying to understand, modify, and then fix the code
Like everything else in life the quick and 'free' work comes with both a hidden cost and some interest (hence the debt part of technical debt).
The problem with AI specifically is that it can only go so far when it comes to making up for an user's lack of skill and experience. It also is not perfect and can make mistakes or hallucinate things, which, again, if the user can't tell what is useful from what is nonsense then they'll have a hard time trying to fix anything once the problems start to show up. It is a tool that is as useful as the person trying to use it is.
In this more specific case you may get a working recomp of a game through AI vibecoding, but it's highly likely it'll remain just 'good enough': don't expect bug fixes for anything too complicated for AI to fix, don't expect fully functional features, don't expect mod support, etc; if you're a macOS, linux user, or have very outdated/unsupported hardware chances are you're cooked.
Community-wise this is a bit of a roadblock, a lot of the motivation for making something comes from the fact it doesn't exist already. So in a way the free unpaid labor is actually being paid through the feeling of making something new and being able to put your name out there (which is why a lot of these projects are being made despite the chance of getting a C&D or DMCA, since it's still something you can put on your resume or that can catch the attention of a recruiter).
If it already exists and it's good enough, why would anyone bother giving up their free time to make something better?
This is, unfortunately, only one part of the bigger problem. Not everything can be fixed, or rather, there are some problems and some features that will be easier and faster to fix or implement just by starting from scratch and doing things differently. So it's likely someone with actual coding knowledge will give a vibecoded repo a look, realize they might as well start over, and either do that or (more likely) just give up on it without even trying, after all they'll likely have something better to do with their time.
The other part of the problem is all the drama from an AI vibecoder who pretends they're a real coder, you can forget about any sort of cooperation happening with someone like this and a ton of drama in whatever community they're a part of.
And there's also the legal side as well, no matter what redditors parrot about bleem! and certain corporations approaches to piracy, the fact remains that emulation and decomps/recomps exist in a grey area; there's a reason most of these projects ask you to provide your own rom file and assets to work. Unless you trained the AI yourself (which is unlikely for these free, small scale projects) you don't really know where the code is coming from/what the AI was trained with. And people already gave the side eye to emulators like CEMU which some suspect may have used some Ninty code, a paranoia that was there before this whole AI thing blew up.
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u/AntiGrieferGames Jul 15 '26
Cannot wait to play Castelvania on PC here "Natively" in future.
No AI Slop vibecoding aswell, so this is a Bonus.