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Y'all know I still code games the old-fashioned way, because I do that on my stream for everyone to see. There is a strict no-AI policy for any visual work I do, professionally or personally. I want to draw, animate, and design. It's my craft. But software is also utilitarian to that end.

Now, I've experimented and made utility software with AI (on my website, disclosed as such, including source). I wouldn't call them vibe-coded: I'd ask for a function, read, understand, integrate, test, and debug it. Its similar to a pre-AI workflow except I'm not constantly going back to examples.

The content serves up by AI is always ethically dubious at best, but also the modern internet has that process baked in. These days, there's not a functional or computational difference in asking Gemini for an example of a JS canvas draw function, or using it through search to direct you to one.

I'm not minimizing, its proliferation has just hijacked the process. Using digital tools and to do better, faster work was always part of the job of the digital artist, so it seems systemically impossible now to not leverage it, moral implications aside, even if I want to do the drawing myself.

To address the above: people were credited with their code solutions when you find one on stackoverflow. For those people it mattered, and it's often a tracked metric on a site. It also pays towards site ads and other financial models. I think treating code like isolated data is not a good thing.

Code is often opinionated and it's important to know whos opinion that is. Even picking the language is a big deal, and it should matter that the code is readable and maintainable by humans.

Your argument for AI coding is that it is faster and optimised, which means you can do things quicker. I don't think we needed to be faster with our code. We need to be more thoughtful and directed. It turns out when time and effort is finite, people direct it with more purpose and less whim.

It can be very opinionated and can be an art form as well. There's plenty of people who have said they saw a piece of code that inspired them, fast inverse square root has been referenced so much in Quake 3.