I think this is true for projects beyond a certain complexity. I have 100% vibe coded projects with tens of thousands LOC, and haven't seen any real issues with fully automated maintenance. Will that approach work in every scenario, absolutely not, but the size and complexity of projects where it does is growing with each new model release.

I’ve found it very easy to maintain, add features to and fix bugs in software I’ve written entirely with LLMs, and in languages and frameworks with which I’m unfamiliar. You just ask the LLM to explain the code and then work with it to come up with the fix.

LLMs are good now at looking at existing project and suggesting big refactors for technical debt removal and new better architectures after the project grew organically for a while

I think that's exactly why AI is suited for 99% of stuff we do.

I have pointed out on here before that instances of truly unique human ideas not grounded in nature or previous ideas from others is almost nil, there are not many examples that someone can give me. All human ideas and work is derivative.

Elves? Humans with pointy ears. Werewolves? Humans mixed with wolves. Car tyre? Cart wheel...stone wheel/roller. Etc.

I also realized this, a quick Google search would’ve told me that this game has been made several times before, also way before I ever had this idea. Apparently it’s a pretty obvious game idea.

Ah well, it’s still fun and it does appear to measure how good AI is in creating these kind of games.

While I agree that it isn't revolutionary that it could implement this from a single prompt, what's surprising to see is how well done this one is compared to the other tries. The controls and movement are smooth, the animations aren't jittery, the ui makes sense, there's a clear progression in difficulty. This model clearly "understands" the implementation of this game far better than the others did.

This is a thought I've had about genAI.

In case it all just comes from training data, "one shotting" a game would be more comparable to "git pull" and changing some assets than "generating code".

I'm not saying this is how it works, I'm trivializing LLMs with this statement, but when I see someone on linkedin excited about generating checkers and chess my first thought is "you could have done that with git pull for the past 20 years".

Same thoughts exactly. I personally started looking into indie game dev and I've just started to realize how naive I was and how hard just game design can be, and that I'll probably never be good at it, and that most of my ideas are pretty garbage (or incomplete at best).

Even with the perfect AI to write, one would need to iterate through many different ideas, play testing constantly, getting people to play test and analyze what they found fun and where they got stuck. And to get the best ideas you'll need to be playing lots of different kinds of games.

Well, “an idea I’ve had for years” and “something that has never been done before” are not the same thing.

Usually it’s an idea somebody had in a flight of fancy or inspiration but they haven’t really shown much interest in the actual medium prior, so they don’t really have any knowledge of its existence and then they also don’t go out of their way to confirm if it already exists.

Like I remember in college I had something akin to the idea of “50 people 1 question.” I was starting to become interested in shooting my own documentaries and was particularly interested in man on the street style interviews. I pitched it to a friend who then told me about 50p1q, which baffled him because it was like the hot thing already a year or two prior haha.

Anyway that’s just something I think happens a lot. And now with genAI people don’t throw the idea around even, they quickly do a crappy version of the thing, present it, then find out it exists. Which isn’t terrible I guess but it’s one less filter for my better or for worse.

Cursor has access to the latest models so it should be equivalent, right?

Or is there some other AI usage described in this article that is not supported by cursor?

How big are those projects.. I dont think this is good for your mental health or physicaly your brains health. Problem solving keeps your brain strong. The laziness in us is inclined to take shortcuts, don't do it. Its like driving your car 3 blocks instead of walking, your physical health will suffer.

It seems to me that most media genres discover the most interesting parts relatively early, then most subsequent work is deeply derivative. I feel that way about video games, digital music, movies.

I'd wager it's because ideas are simpler to explore orthogonally, giving an overview of what's possible.

Just because AI can give you a recipe for an sandwich doesnt mean everyone who sells or buys or experiments making sandwiches are going to stop.

I feel like prior to GenAI, you’d have had to reckon with the true originality of your idea in some form as you did the research. Creatives having to confront their own unoriginality is such a thing it itself is reflected in countless pieces of media.

So it’s interesting to me that the creator here didn’t encounter the tens of physically published versions, or the hundreds of them shipped to digital app stores, or all the codebases on GitHub, in the course of making this. I’m sure they would have done naturally prior to GenAI. Is that good or bad? I don’t know! But it’s interesting to me.

I think this is false. New ideas are born every minute, and llms arent going to help people with those for the most part, they'll end up steering you back towards the gradient if you do.

Well … it’s a measure of how good it is at reproducing a game that probably already exists in multiple forms in its training data.

This is fair! I am possibly attaching some notion of originality to the word “idea” in the context of a project that others don’t.

I don't use Cursor so I mentioned it as slightly impartial suggestion but my point is broader. I hear and have seen results from others using Composer 2.5 which is only available in Cursor.

> Its like driving your car 3 blocks instead of walking, your physical health will suffer.

And be sure to only walk barefoot. Relying on artificial shoes weakens the muscles and the skin of your feet.

> How big are those projects

Define big I guess. They're non-trivial, mix of internal enterprise tools, a multiplatform app (android/ios/mac/windows/web currently headbutting its way through review), including a billing system for my small telecommunications business.

> I dont think this is good for your mental health or physicaly your brains health

I find the experience of doing it without writing the code to be intellectually pretty similar. I still solve a lot of problems, the LLM couldn't, for example, one shot the event sourcing model I built for synching data between devices. It took quite a few iterations and I had to define a lot of the architecture, but I did it at a level that wasn't "here is a class, here is a module, this module does XYZ", more at the "whitepaper" level or describing how specific bits of the app needed to work in order to solve some problem.

It's also very similar to managing other developers.

> Its like driving your car 3 blocks instead of walking, your physical health will suffer

It's more similar to having staff rather than doing everything yourself. The problem solving just shifts to a different area, and you get more done.

> Problem solving keeps your brain strong.

Coding is not the sole problem solving skill. In fact, coding may be one of the easier skills much of the time. Deciding what to build, where to focus efforts, understanding a customer's needs, could all be just as if not more challenging than the coding part.

> the creator here didn’t encounter the tens of physically published versions

The simplest counterargument: since there are already tens of similar games out there, why didn't the previous authors, supposedly grass-fed genuine checkmark blood-through-their-veins humans didn't notice the other 9-8-7-6-5... games, and still released their own version? Maybe because it was still that they wanted the game out there? Maybe because originality really isn't that common? Maybe because each individual had their own idea and spin to it? Maybe because they wanted the game out as they made it?

Same for this author. How they made the game is irrelevant, and nitpicking the "originality" or anything else is silly. Something like this wasn't possible 3 years ago. Now it's possible. Deal with it, and stop trying to find ways to diminish it. It's a huge accomplishment any way you cut it.

i had a boss. before he was my boss, he was a friend. he took me under his wing, musically speaking. he showed me new music. told me what gear he was interested in. we went to some gigs.

he used to say “the best artists have the biggest record collections”.

they’ve done their research. they developed taste. they’ve been in that battle with the unoriginality demon. they’re still in that battle with the unoriginality demon. they’re always searching for new. for unexplored. for different.

they’ve also figured out what “good artists copy, great artists steal” means.

we take small bits. small ideas. small riffs. we turn them into our own. then we repeat that N times to create “a song”. we borrow. we revere. we obsess. turning lots of little differences into a completely new work. yes it’s all derivative. but derivative originality takes a lot of fuckin’ effort to get right. to be tasteful.

this thing isn’t artistic stealing, it’s the most low-effort stealing possible. creativity, originality and more importantly taste appear nowhere here.

so, is it bad? depends on your perspective on creative endeavours being worthwhile and whether you have taste or not i guess.

edit - personally i don’t think you can polish a turd. even if you rewrite it, the memory lingers.

Can you give us an example of a new idea that is not derivative of something that already exists? Should only take about a minute.

Snark aside (and apologies), there's absolutely nothing wrong with the "no new ideas" take and nobody should think there is. Humans tend to work collectively, try as we might to do or appear otherwise, and often come to the same conclusions through reasoning and logic. No one-person truly invented the light bulb, etc, when really all inventive thought is branches of derivative thought as we build our collective knowledgebase. A better question would be how many novel ideas are the logical conclusion of branches of derivative thought and how many are tangential brought about by the injection of our irrationally.

A reasonable compromise in the face of frostbite and hookworm.

I suppose critical thinking skills are also as bad, making you question the state of the world. Problem solving is another one, deluding one into believing there are solutions to suffering.

Also what the code should do and how it should do it. LLMs regularly cannot come up with the best way to approach something. Once those decisions are made, codifying them is kind of the least interesting part of the entire exercise.

> why didn't the previous authors, supposedly grass-fed genuine checkmark blood-through-their-veins humans didn't notice the other 9-8-7-6-5... games, and still released their own version?

a) To make it better

b) To learn, in service of a) or another project

My thoughts are less about the merits of creating something that already exists than they are about _knowing_ you are doing that. Which I think my post made very clear :)

They said they think they would have encountered those other games without GenAI, not that they or any of those other authors shouldn't have released the game.