AI this, AI that - you can't go anywhere without something trying to force AI on you. Usually a company trying to get you to buy into what they've wasted billions on. So indie devs have begun fighting back with their No Gen AI Seal.
I am never going to believe this tag, because if your game has code and was written since the start of 2025, you will not convince me Gen AI wasn’t used in the coding process at bare min. I work with devs, I know how much people will just grab and use it without even thinking about it. IDEs come with features pre-enabled to help with autocomplete powered by Gen AI, basically everyone is using it in one way or another.
The chance that none of your team of developers on your project arent even at minimum doing basic querying gippity on stuff, is… so low
IF you tell your devs they cant use it, they’ll still use it but just not tell you they are using it, they’ll just open up gippity on a second laptop and use it that way if forced to.
Now to be fair, there is a massive difference between using the fancy “AI” autocomplete to fill out the rest of a line when writing a function or something. And actually generating music, voice acting, art, etc.
That’s at least where I personally draw the line between proper generative content and not. Partly because the autocomplete is possible without any form of ML. Some of the suggestions are often of similar quality as ones I got in Dreamweaver over twenty years ago.
If you label your stuff as ZERO gen ai being used in it, I would damn well expect you truly mean that.
Otherwise it is 100% false advertising.
And, as a result, I classify everyone who uses this label as false advertising, and as a result am 0% interested in buying their stuff.
There’s a huge difference between AI Slop churning to produce a garbage product, vs trying to outright lie to me and try and pretend you didnt use AI at all to make your thing, in any way.
Thats just not how reality works.
You used it, admit you used it, everyone uses it, and thats fine
But theres a difference between using AI to make the output, vs making the output with AI
I give zero fucks if your team used, for example, AI to generate placeholder images for your game development to act as sort of templates for the developers, so you can make your game way faster, and then replaced them with real actual art made by humans, ensuring key things in the art are roughly in the same spots so stuff like hitboxes and etc still line up.
Or using AI generated music placeholders so you can asap start testing your sound engine actually works, as well as a way to convey vibes and what you want to your music engineers so they can make something better.
Or using AI to assist with generating the code for your project, because everyone already does that and you are huffing copium if you think the industry isnt rife with that already
Jep, that’s something that bothers me now, every algrorithm or autocomplete is now also branded as “with ai support”. I don’t need ai to add the 'if name ==“main” stuff in my python file IDEs (or even lightly advanced text editors) can add that stuff since long before LLMs where a thing…
This is a bit of a tangent but this is a big part of why I didn’t get back into software dev after my team was let go. My old company is basically just a genAI shitshow these days and the entire culture in that industry is fucked.
I’m still in a role adjacent to what I used to do, but I’m much happier here even if it pays substantially less.
Everyone is using it for a reason, as long as you arent doing anything esoteric or bleeding edge, gen AI is about 60% accurate at producing pretty useable results for code. And I say that as a developer with 15 years experience.
If you try and point it at some niche library or framework, or a new version with stuff that just came out, yes, it shits the bed.
But if you just prompt it to do an extremely bog standard task that is already a very well solved problem, 99% of the time it mostly gets it right, right enough that all you gotta do is clean up the formatting and maybe organize it better, make it tighter or better looking, etc, but it’ll complete about 90% of the work up front.
Its extremely good at when all it has to do is just replicate code you already wrote but slightly different, like when you need to just invoke some logic for 1,2,3,4,5… You do it once for 1, start typing for 2 and it’ll just autocomplete it.
Mind you, in neovim Shift+A can do the same pretty well too if you know what you are doing.
But nonetheless, everyone uses this stuff because it works, not amazing but its really really good at doing a lot of the boring/repetitive/easy boilerplate kind of stuff.
If you arent using it, you’re going to start falling behind as other people get better and better at using it.
I am never going to believe this tag, because if your game has code and was written since the start of 2025, you will not convince me Gen AI wasn’t used in the coding process at bare min. I work with devs, I know how much people will just grab and use it without even thinking about it. IDEs come with features pre-enabled to help with autocomplete powered by Gen AI, basically everyone is using it in one way or another.
The chance that none of your team of developers on your project arent even at minimum doing basic querying gippity on stuff, is… so low
IF you tell your devs they cant use it, they’ll still use it but just not tell you they are using it, they’ll just open up gippity on a second laptop and use it that way if forced to.
Now to be fair, there is a massive difference between using the fancy “AI” autocomplete to fill out the rest of a line when writing a function or something. And actually generating music, voice acting, art, etc.
That’s at least where I personally draw the line between proper generative content and not. Partly because the autocomplete is possible without any form of ML. Some of the suggestions are often of similar quality as ones I got in Dreamweaver over twenty years ago.
If you label your stuff as ZERO gen ai being used in it, I would damn well expect you truly mean that.
Otherwise it is 100% false advertising.
And, as a result, I classify everyone who uses this label as false advertising, and as a result am 0% interested in buying their stuff.
There’s a huge difference between AI Slop churning to produce a garbage product, vs trying to outright lie to me and try and pretend you didnt use AI at all to make your thing, in any way.
Thats just not how reality works.
You used it, admit you used it, everyone uses it, and thats fine
But theres a difference between using AI to make the output, vs making the output with AI
I give zero fucks if your team used, for example, AI to generate placeholder images for your game development to act as sort of templates for the developers, so you can make your game way faster, and then replaced them with real actual art made by humans, ensuring key things in the art are roughly in the same spots so stuff like hitboxes and etc still line up.
Or using AI generated music placeholders so you can asap start testing your sound engine actually works, as well as a way to convey vibes and what you want to your music engineers so they can make something better.
Or using AI to assist with generating the code for your project, because everyone already does that and you are huffing copium if you think the industry isnt rife with that already
Jep, that’s something that bothers me now, every algrorithm or autocomplete is now also branded as “with ai support”. I don’t need ai to add the 'if name ==“main” stuff in my python file IDEs (or even lightly advanced text editors) can add that stuff since long before LLMs where a thing…
So just… fuck indie devs? What’s the point you want to say?
More that this is lip service.
This is like the indie label itself.
There’s companies with 50 employees calling themselves Indies alongside the solo developers.
This is a bit of a tangent but this is a big part of why I didn’t get back into software dev after my team was let go. My old company is basically just a genAI shitshow these days and the entire culture in that industry is fucked.
I’m still in a role adjacent to what I used to do, but I’m much happier here even if it pays substantially less.
Everyone is using it for a reason, as long as you arent doing anything esoteric or bleeding edge, gen AI is about 60% accurate at producing pretty useable results for code. And I say that as a developer with 15 years experience.
If you try and point it at some niche library or framework, or a new version with stuff that just came out, yes, it shits the bed.
But if you just prompt it to do an extremely bog standard task that is already a very well solved problem, 99% of the time it mostly gets it right, right enough that all you gotta do is clean up the formatting and maybe organize it better, make it tighter or better looking, etc, but it’ll complete about 90% of the work up front.
Its extremely good at when all it has to do is just replicate code you already wrote but slightly different, like when you need to just invoke some logic for 1,2,3,4,5… You do it once for 1, start typing for 2 and it’ll just autocomplete it.
Mind you, in neovim Shift+A can do the same pretty well too if you know what you are doing.
But nonetheless, everyone uses this stuff because it works, not amazing but its really really good at doing a lot of the boring/repetitive/easy boilerplate kind of stuff.
If you arent using it, you’re going to start falling behind as other people get better and better at using it.