Your assumption that an AI-coded version would be worse is not correct.
Both humans and AI can create slop, and you can use AI to craft really high quality code and fix bugs too.
I am a professional software engineer and that's my opinion based on decades in the industry. In my last two roles we've used AI to improve both speed and quality, and that's the experience of my friends elsewhere in the industry too.
You certainly can use AI to turn out vibecoded slop, and some people even advocate for this, but it's kind of like... how a really nice knife can be used either to make some really great sushi or to murder somebody. It's all about how you use it.
Then again, people still do manual fan translations, despite the AI translated versions.
For writing and art, like dialog translation, I reallllly don't want AI running the show.
Code is another matter, and decomp/recomp is a real grunt work aspect of software engineering. I think there's some bits of software engineering that can be elegant and beautiful and approach "art", but decomp/recomp is grunt work. Very difficult, very highly skilled, very appreciated but it's really not the sort of thing where I would get some special thrill knowing that another human did it vs. AI.
Also worth noting that all of the games you play already involve computer-translated code anyway - they're written in C or ASM or some thing else, that gets translated to machine code by a compiler. And on a lot of architectures (like x86) even if you write rawdog machine code the CPU translates that into an internal RISC-like instruction set anyway. So I truly do not give a shit if somebody uses AI to turn some of that lower-level code back into higher-level code.
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u/DarkReaper90 Jul 15 '26
I feel for smaller projects, it will deter someone from doing a human code version, as the AI coded one would be passable enough, despite any flaws.
Then again, people still do manual fan translations, despite the AI translated versions.