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"LLMs can help non-programmers with no technical background get a foothold in doing something that used to require a LOT of technical knowledge to get started in, putting them in a better position to learn the technical stuff over time by providing a less steep learning curve" feels uncontroversial?

As a former academic I take some issue with this, since just having the tool do work for you is not learning. It's going to a restaurant and pretending you're a chef. If you use the tool to help understand what's going wrong with what you made, i.e. as a tutor, that's a lot better

So the situation I was really talking about is one where you have to learn a lot of technical skills before you can get to the thing you want to actually learn.

In particular, if you want to make videogames, you generally have to learn a lot about programming before you can really get to the part where you're designing games. My hope is that LLMs will facilitate people being able to get to a place where they can design a game, test it, and iterate on it...

...more quickly, so that they don't have to learn a bunch of learning programming to even get to the place where they are developing the skills the care much more about and potentially end up becoming discouraged because of it.

Like, I don't actually know if this happens. The only real way we'll find out is if a game designer 20 years from now talks about how they got their start vibecoding their own kinda-crappy games and then learning to code. But I'd like to think there's a chance?

I'd take exception to a lot of those technical skills being useless, unless the goal is not to understand the code you're producing. But really, the biggest blocker here is wealth inequality. The cost to do the kind of work you're talking about is nontrivial now and will only get worse.

I am not saying those technical skills are useless. I AM saying that people having the opportunity to build some things they find interesting and experiment with game design before being pushed into the deep end technically speaking might help them learn.

Compared to the cost of producing code the trad way the cost is quite trivial and trending down.

Wealth inequality is gonna get so much worse in an AI powered world. It's going to make now look like a wealth paradise.

What seems to be happening is that people just create deceptive slop that rips off indie games and then don't give a shit about the long term. That was a business model before, but now it's just accelerated. It's the same problem with any LLM creative right now, that just being "good enough"...