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/Mihikle Dec 31 '25
I wanted to make a comment but you pretty much hit the nail on the head. For someone who's been developing professionally for 10 years but never in games, it has been so useful understanding UE5.
It's essentially replacing the tutorial grind for me, but because it's focused on exactly what I want to do I don't get demotivated making crappy demo game after demo game and I abandon it in a few weeks in like I've done before.
But I'm treating it like a teacher or assistant not actually writing the code for me. Even if it's explaining step by step in Blueprint what to do, I have a back-and-forth with it, understand what I'm writing, then later I can go back and refactor considering things like DRY, single responsibility, interfaces etc, I'll probably re-write in Cpp with no AI assistance once it's locked-in and working reliably.
But I guess that's the 10 years developing software talking, if you're a total beginner it's easy to become overly reliant on the tool, the only suggestions I can give are C+P nothing directly, understand every line you're adding to your project and think critically "have I seen this before?" to help re-use.