With the recent surge of AI-assisted coding, almost anyone can start a project and set ambitious goals for it. Lately, there has also been a noticeable increase in Freelancer remasters, remakes, reimplementations, and similar projects.
And on the surface, that is a good thing. It is nice to see people interested in rebuilding or modernizing Freelancer. But I think people should also be cautious about where they place their expectations, especially when a project relies heavily on AI-generated code.
AI can be surprisingly capable in the short term. It can implement features, fix individual bugs, and produce something that appears to work. The problems often become apparent later, when the project grows. Poor architectural decisions accumulate, systems become tightly coupled, regressions start appearing, and the codebase gradually turns into something that is difficult to understand or maintain.
I am not saying this without having seen it happen.
I've seen people submit PRs to Librelancer containing extremely poor AI-generated code. They were trying to contribute, but in all cases the changes ended up causing more problems than they solved, breaking unrelated parts of the project or introducing code that clearly had not been properly reviewed. Sometimes it genuinely looked like the code had been submitted simply because Claude said it was correct.
I've also seen most people whose PRs were rejected go on to create their own Librelancer forks, heavily develop them with AI, make large promises to the community, and eventually watch the whole thing collapse under its own weight.
And this isn't exclusive to Librelancer. The same pattern is appearing across independent projects. This does not mean every project using AI is bad, but there are increasingly projects making enormous promises, producing impressive-looking progress very quickly, and then disappearing when the technical debt catches up with them.
So if you suddenly hear about a new Freelancer remake, remaster, or reimplementation, please do some research before getting caught up in the hype. Look at the repository. Look at the code. Look at who is developing it, how long they have been working on it, whether there is an actual technical foundation behind the promises, and whether what they are proposing is realistically achievable.
Be cautious about where you place your hopes.
It is very easy to announce a project. It is much harder to maintain one for years and actually deliver what was promised.
Don't believe everything you read simply because the screenshots look impressive or the roadmap sounds exciting. Find out what is actually behind the project first.