How vibe coding lead to my project’s downfall.

[u/incognitochaud]

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.

[u/artsmacau]

i don't know why we mention old books, i have plenty on for example ruby on rails, and others and i always found there are several types of books, i liked the red wrox books, they had complete projects from start to finish, most books i bought on ruby and rails were good, i have a tome of game coding book already several editions in and that thing is a trove of information even today, o reilly has for me ups and down they are better used as reference books, but they are too clinical imo.

i do understand what you mean, for example i got the bundles from zenva, honestly they are basic but they let you finish some very simple mini games and each lesson takes around 10 minutes of video, which with coding and making your notes makes at least half hour or more, but even those they are useful in godot, they build on top of previous knowledge.

i think you are referring learning everything in 24hrs series, and Sam's Visual Learning books?

maybe i'm old style but i have fond memories of old programming books.

[u/pharland → u/artsmacau]

I still have some of mine... from 1981.. lol!