As an experienced dev but who hasn’t done any game dev since my teenage years (I’m 40 now), I can say that getting anything that meets my standard for “this is worth showing to anyone” is really high and I’ve spent dozens of hours working on a few games and don’t really like any of them yet. But it’s been a lot of fun. The open models and an RTX 5090 can crank out models that are good enough that Astra can clean them up in Blender and get you a pretty good asset pipeline. But good looking assets do not a fun game make. That requires a lot of patience and small tweaks to get something that feels fun. But if you want a full 3D game with ray tracing and beautiful HDR visuals and particle effects, that stuff is easy.
Different person but I’ve been a SWE about ten years now - my favorite work has been improving the CRUD stuff people have left behind. Like the time I took a proprietary document they were using to document their REST apis and wrote a converter to turn those into OpenAI spec compliant yaml files, taking a single tenant application and making it a secure multienant application so instead of 80 different app services we had two, coalescing all their data sources into one normalized DB. There’s a lot of work I’ve done I’m really proud of. I’ve always found myself being the “in the muck” guy fixing up and bettering legacy code, I’ve always felt that was really rewarding and interesting.
Thats badass! I like doing that kind of work, but I got very jaded about it over the years, because management generally acted as if the engineers took a shit on the conference table in the middle of a Zoom call with their most important customer whenever anybody attempted to address technical debt, as opposed to delivering more more more features. Unless it was billable agency work, in which case they’d hate it even more.
With massive amounts of effort and strong communication it was usually possible to get some tech debt time, but management acted like they were doing YOU a huge favor. It was kind of a career killer, generally.
Alternatively it was possible to get this kind of work done on my own time… but that’s a marriage killer instead of a career killer.
The fun thing is: I don't think this will change that much with AI in the mix ;)
Shitty devs without AI are slowly building BS that wants to be cleaned up.
Shitty devs with AI are much more fasterly building BS that wants to be cleaned up.
I have a similar experience as yours, just add another 10-ish years to the timeline. Literally my first job out of uni, I got to work on a legacy code base that was another 15 years older than that which had a ton of reports all built differently over time with slight variations in both code and end user output that really all wanted to be "the same" both on the code and end user side. So I slowly but surely, one user/PM requested change at a time would build out a common layer of abstractions and shared code that both made the code shared and easier to maintain (great for me!) and consistent for users (great for the PM/users).
Heck, I built a rudimentary TransactSQL parser that'd output stored procedure call graphs to graphviz and then I printed it and hung it on the wall to get through all this and having an LLM to just make a mermaid out of this in 5-ish minutes would definitively have been faster than I was ;)
With an LLM all of that would just have been faster to do but still worthwhile and useful on both levels. I.e. both code abstraction/reuse and PM/user level. Similarly there was a report that one of the devs had to actually run manually and it took him a full week, so users that wanted the report would only request it once a year-ish. When I was asked to learn how to run it from him I was appalled and just took that week to put it into a script that we ran and emailed the report out once a month automatically. They ran that report manually like that for like 10 years prior to that :mindblown:
None of this is an "AI thing". It's a good dev vs. not so good dev thing. And none of it really has to do with coding as in "writing source code" as much as "solving problems for humans" somehow and the "language" you do that in changes over time. If you're the guy that's tied up with the particular language: yeah LLMs are gonna eat your lunch. If you're the problem solver type that uses whatever tools they have available, you're still in demand.
Sure. If you get pleasure in fixing really badly broken shite, there’s tons of opportunity for that, but no money in it. Only money in new features, which is why the codebase is what it is. I have, on rare occasion, been the fixit guy called in temporarily to fix another teams work or get it out the door: that was fun. Short lived , but fun.
It's a shame, because there is money in it. It's just (like most sensible preventative maintenance) that the financial benefits are typically delayed. And when it comes to software, they're notoriously impossible to quantify.
Generally the only way to get it done in a corpo environment (and receive any kind of thanks or glory, as opposed to just torpedoing your own career) is to let things get so bad that production stability suffers and/or the team's ability to ship features is severely impacted.
...I realize I'm basically just echoing what you said, except more verbose. I'm venting!
My cat desperately meowed at me this morning to go outside to hang out with her enemies, which I denied her request. She brought a very much alive and unharmed chipmunk home the other day which was booking it around our great room until we corralled him outside with a broom. The live bird incident was even more dramatic. It’s like having a mischievious goblin living in your house. But she does keep the mice from coming in during the winter!
My parents' cat delivered a live baby bunny to the entrance hallways in the middle of my pre-wedding dinner. Once released the thing unfroze and zoomed under some baskets. It was an all-hands-on-deck exercise to corral both the terrified bunny, as well as the over-excited large dog who "wanted to get to know it".
I have similar stories with mine. Bringing live game into the house isn't mischief though. It's the highest praise a cat can express: as a trusted member of the pride, you're entitled to a share of the catch. You're also expected to notice the prowess.
It’s the trick where people would take two phone books and if you interleave every page you can literally have two cars going each direction and can’t rip them apart. Ropes are this on a smaller scale.
Yup someone started to aggregate those. Corp lawyers probably laughed at their cuteness and then proceeded to obscure the process even more. Say, only publish in newspapers without an online presence, so someone has to physically scan it. Or find a small town where few people in tech live. Also notify the HR department to ensure to flag out all US applications for some other "unrelated reason" that look plausible on paper.
I'm not American and I don't live in the US, and I pretty hate Trump and his allies but this ad is just...wow.
I think this is a loophole that should be closed.
Do note there are similar practices in many (all?) countries. Recently there was one case in Finland where job posting was extremely specific saying "We require, and by that we mean require, not recommend, experience in Leader and EU funding as well at least 14 years and 5 months of relevant experience". Their CEO admitted publicly that it was just done due to them being to public funding and that requires job postings to published. One of the articles (in Finnish): https://www.hs.fi/alueet/art-2000012282918.html
I recently saw the job posting in Finland (Suunto, I believe) that had diving experience as an imperative requirement for an embedded software engineer role. I've applied and never heard back. HR contact that they posted also never replied. The job was closed a couple weeks after. I never even got a rejection email.
So yeah, everyone do that, that's kind of the de facto way of hiring specific people when there is a requirement to post jobs. That doesn't make it ok though.
That’s a frustration. People project their hopes and dreams onto Donald Trump, but the president isn’t t a king. The same neoliberal order remains, another war crushing global trade, but still no action taken. Donald Trump did make a lot of crypto money though.
It makes sense they’re doing this - I’ve noticed lately when asking a more complex question involving a lot of nonlinear data using Codex work mode, Astra and Sol will write a fully html document to better display the info with a Cliff’s Notes version in chat.
I’ve hit model not available limits for GPT 6.1 Sol multiple times over the last week. It’s never for very long, and I can switch to Astra, but it seems like OpenAI is struggling with capacity. This has happened with my personal $200 Pro connection and my Codex enterprise connection.
I had a codex session stop in the middle because the auto-reviewer timed out with something like "auto-review not available at the moment". The capacity issues are very clearly observable since gpt6-astra launched.
But nobody will play it? Steam exists and all those games get pirated. You can’t force gamers to buy duds. I have a gigabit connection wired and found a cloud version of Control to be totally unplayable.
It is in the realm of design to make games playable within the context of their technological limits.
In this case, I could see games moving towards being turn-based i.e. online chess.
I could imagine a Counter Strike RTS,
Also one of the best selling games, Pokemon, is a turn-based game.
Genres are design problems rather than descriptions
No one thinks RuneScape is a "topdown RPG", rather than a "fantasy game with a lot of freedom and many things to do"
The genre can be made secondary to the design, so I don't doubt game designers can make turn-based games widely appealing
Turn based isn't really a genre, it's a play style. A lot of people out there actually want fast paced action and wouldn't enjoy Pokemon. Baldur's Gate 3 also did quite well recently but real time games consistently perform better.
RuneScape as an example is a funny one because it is comparable to turn based games at a competitive level due to its slow tick rate. You're basically taking very fast (0.6s) turns and can stack certain actions within those turns to do better. But there is no pause between turns so it's just (ab)using game mechanics, which also means it is latency sensitive.
there will be eventually people who grew up with nothing but lag introduced by the cloud streaming. They won't know how much better they could have it. So they won't complain.
As someone who programmed in Rust since before 1.0 (I started by reading the github issues daily in college when that was still feasible, volume-wise) and worked professionally using it, it can’t write better Rust than I can yet.
Save for one area, which is mostly because it was annoying to write and check with miri, which is unsafe code. It can loop through testing edge cases at my direction quickly.
But it can write code better than the average programmer without doubt. It’s only at the edge you can tell the places where it suffers. It has improved a lot, though. That rate of progress doesn’t guarantee it will capture all of that remaining edge but it’s still impressive.
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