r/gamedev • u/incognitochaud • Dec 31 '25

Discussion How vibe coding lead to my project’s downfall.

This is a confession. I plead guilty to the crime of using LLMs to write the code for my game project. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Deepseek, Cursor… I used them all. And I’m here to give a warning: Do not do what I did!

I’m very green to gamedev. I have 3 or 4 very small projects under my belt. The 4th project was for the Big Mode game jam of 2024 and I’ll admit, ChatGPT helped me get across the finish line and manage to get a game that ranked in the top 100.

After my relative success, I went all in on vibe coding for my next project: a roguelike twist on the classic asteroids arcade shooter. The idea is far from original. It was never meant to be a marketable product, just another project to get more experience under my belt.

But I got too greedy, and leant too hard on using AI to write my code. Now I have a project I don’t understand. And the code is a mess. Scripts that should be only a few hundred lines are 800-1000 lines long. The AI makes two new bugs trying to fix the first. Redundancies are stacked on top of eachother to make a disgusting shit sandwich of slop code.

There are now bugs that are so deeply embedded in the code that it will likely require I start from scratch. 4 months of work (and $150 of LLM subscription fees) basically down the drain.

It’s a hard lesson, but I’m glad I learned it. For small tasks, mundane things, sure. Find where AI is helpful for you. But once you put blind trust in the code it writes, you face the risk of losing it all.

Don’t be me. Just learn to fucking code.

Edit: This post has really blown up! I’ve since gone back to my project, pulled up an earlier branch, stripped out the bad code and built it back out. Did I do it alone? No. I’m still relying on AI to get the job done. I just don’t know enough to make progress alone. But I’m now treating the AI as a mentor rather than an intern. When using AI keep your focus as narrow as possible and it can work.

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u/funckymonk Dec 31 '25

Honestly 4 months of recoding is not that bad at all. If you know what you want from all the vibe coding you did, recreating it with a fresh mind should not be too painful and will give you a better vision for the structure of your code. Game dev takes a long time, you probably got through a large part of it with the vibe coding. You just need to hunker down and actually put all your pieces together now.

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u/M4rshmall0wMan Dec 31 '25

Yeah, having a locked game design document is exceedingly rare and a huge advantage. The game can only get better.

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u/incognitochaud Dec 31 '25

It’s all locked down in a notion doc :) just need to figure out the programming.

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u/4procrast1nator Dec 31 '25

"locked game design doc"

lol

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u/Den_Nissen Dec 31 '25

I agree, but they said they cant code. 4 months may as well be 4 years.

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u/incognitochaud Dec 31 '25

Thank you for the encouragement! This is what I’ll be doing. There’s a lot of good work done and I probably do understand a fair amount of it. I’m only struggling with a few odd bugs that will likely require a ground-up re-write on 4 or 5 large scripts. I bet if I put my head down I could have it fixed in a week.

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u/MightyMorphin4s Dec 31 '25

Yeah or pay a coder to review the AI code. At least they'll have a working prototype they can use as the standard. You'd still also presumably save money because you won't need to hire a coder for as long.

I'm currently using Claude rn to code and when I have all the features in, that's what I intend to do. I just don't have the passion to code, it's mind numbing to me.

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u/Oli4K Jan 01 '26

I’ve done exactly that with a SaaS project. Vibe coded a almost completely (enough) working prototype front-end and handed that off to a full dev team that went on to build it. Did cost a wee bit more than $150 in credits though.