Comment by ang_cire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ang_cire | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think that's insane, at least not in the game dev world. I was big into the Bethesda game modding scene 15-ish years ago, and did some work on e.g. Tamriel Rebuilt, and saw the scale and man-hours that went into that- and that was even using a premade modding toolkit, and I compare that to what I can build with Claude...

To be fair, in the game dev world there are a lot of things you can do now that would have been impossible, or required 10,000x the number of devs that it does now, e.g. making No Man's Sky without the proc-gen tools that can exist now would have been physically impossible. Point being, it's perfectly normal to be able to say, "using the tools available now, I can build what would have taken tens or hundreds of devs years of work in the past", in game dev.

The project I'm building rn is a black-box rebuild of a client that has been being developed for ~22 years, and I've rebuilt significant portions of it over the last 2 weeks. That was, quite literally, equivalent to tens or hundreds of peoples' labor.

> a client that has been being developed for ~22 years, and I've rebuilt significant portions of it over the last 2 weeks.

Taking the end result of a 22 year old dev process and telling Claude to rewrite it, is in no way equivalent to doing 22 years worth of the work put in by the developers working on it.

That’s like saying replicating a paper that was the result of 22 years of research is the equivalent of 22 years of the author’s labor.

No Man’s Sky isn’t the equivalent of 10,000x the devs who made it. Because the procedurally generated content isn’t equivalent to handcrafted content. I’m also not aware of any procedural generation techniques in No Man’s Sky that weren’t possible 30 years ago.

As far as Tamriel rebuilt goes, if you’re talking just about just reimplementing Daggerfall in the Morrowind engine, you might be able to do that in a month of vibecoding.

But that’s not hundreds of dev years worth of work.

I feel like this is just an emotional argument, because if I asked a human team to black-box recreate a complex piece of software, it would absolutely be thousands of hours of work. Pretending that the ability to look at a piece of software and recreate it is straightforward or simple is just false.

And no, the procgen techniques and capabilities utilized by NMS were not available 30 years before NMS (important distinction, because NMS is already 10 years old, and 2006 vs 1996 is quite a big jump in game complexity as well).

Saying, "isn't equivalent to handcrafted content" is a fallacy, because hand authoring doesn't denote any particular level of quality or outcome. You can absolutely hand craft the NMS assets and game systems, but not at the scale that NMS did using procgen.

Wrt TR, it literally has tens of years (if not hundreds) of labor hours that have gone into it.

I'm not sure where you got the idea it's about recreating Daggerfall- it's not, it's about implementing the rest of the Morrowind province beyond just the island of Vvardenfell- but it's a massive, multi-decade project with hundreds of contributors.

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