Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software Still the Same? [video] | Hacker News Reader

Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software Still the Same? [video]

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145 pointshelloplanets130 comments

Blow argues software development hasn't advanced much since the early 2000s. As a game developer, I want to offer a counter point.

In the last 3 years, there have been a lot more indie games of far higher quality than we used to get. I'm thinking of the RTS space right now. The Scouring for example. We went from having nobody but Blizzard able to make something that complex to several games with outstanding performance and complexity, often with their own custom game engines that are not only working but working better than I remember wc3/sc2 working at launch.

I don't know how much of a role AI is playing in those games, but I think the performance and complexity of indie games is shooting up and we are seeing very, very small teams make things that large teams struggled with in the past. Honestly, I think indie studios are outperforming AAA in most ways besides spend and length and art budget --and yet, it's the indies who are making their own game engines these days, isn't it?

(btw, we have to also admit that many of these game engine builders look to blow for inspiration (to carmack too), and their architectures are not what you'll find at typical saas companies. Game coding is complicated in a really fun way I didn't get doing plumbing on web projects, speaking for myself)

The indie game bar being higher is the result of the tooling being easier and more common.

Yeah, the engines help a lot with rendering, physics, and scene/level building/making custom tooling, and a bunch of other things. They are honestly amazing tools.

AAA and indies now use the same engines for the most part

In game dev however, there's a lot fewer reliable open source tools around. You have a game engine, a small number of great plugins, and a lot of dodgy stuff. You have to/get to make a lot of things yourself.

The scope and complexity of indie games, even allowing for this, is still increasing staggeringly.

...and don't get me started on unreal engine physics and pathfinding issues, or rendering bugs in unity

Yes, AI tooling.

Indie games didn't get THIS good because of Unity and Godot, if you think that you're deluding yourself.

I've done amateur and professional game-dev and Unity and Godot existing don't make making an FPS any easier than before, engines have existed for a long time.

A solo dev can create (from scratch) an FPS engine, assets, music, levels from scratch over a weekend now.

This is only possible with AI.

> A solo dev can create (from scratch) an FPS engine, assets, music, levels from scratch over a weekend now.

And when they do, this is what we get:

https://i.imgur.com/w25SmDR.jpeg

This link doesn't work outside of the US.

It didn't work for me inside the US, either. https://rimgo.bloat.cat/w25SmDR.jpeg

Works fine in Sweden

Indie games have been this good for 10 years now?

Which good indie games, specifically, are you talking about here?

There's been a lot of good indie games recently (Queen's Domain[0] being a recent example that's taken off) but I don't know of any which are using an AI-coded engine or use AI-generated assets extensively.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1799840/Queens_Domain/

If we exclude AI art assets from that criteria, wasn't AI also used for coding in Mecha Chameleon, which recently achieved big success? Quite a few games have AI code in them. I know of a Korean game company too. It's just that labeling yourself as having used AI is marketing-negative, so it hasn't become widespread.

Just recently, someone used AI code to fix a Unity engine bug and hand-wrote the rest, and it still caused a huge uproar. It's a world where honestly disclosing that you used AI code is not a good idea.

I'm not talking about using AI to help code, which seems obvious, the parent commenter is talking about people building game engines and assets from scratch in a weekend. Meccha Chameleon was built on UE5[0], and Big Walk (the game you're talking about where the devs solved a bug using AI) is using Unity. Both of these games, I believe, took longer than a weekend to create.

[0] https://www.unrealengine.com/developer-interviews/meccha-cha...

I misunderstood what you said Thank you for correcting me.

>A solo dev can create (from scratch) an FPS engine, assets, music, levels from scratch over a weekend now.

What does "from scratch" even mean when using an LLM trained on existing assets, music, art and code? Why even bother with that parenthetical? No one believes an LLM creates ex nihilo like God.

Show me the AI generated game that's superior to Balatro, or Hades, Or Undertale/Deltarune? Cult of the Lamb? Expedition 33? Factorio? Kerbal Space Program? Ultrakill?

It not being easy means it requires actual effort and skill, and effort and skill are where the quality comes from. No one is ever going to care about whatever vibe-coded slopfest you had Claude shit out over a weekend. Being able to make low quality low effort shit quickly is not better.

But can't we then say that software engineering *has* advanced, when the tooling has improved?

No, because the quality of the tooling and the output they afford hasn't changed.

I think the majority of the improvements come from 3 places.

1. Hardware advancements mean that you can get the same results with less optimized code (this is what allowed 3rd party engines with GC scripting languages to become popular)

2. The proliferation of learning resources and open source code.

3. The budgets and size of indie studios as well as total time spent on the games. Seriously look at some of the games these days that get labeled indie.

Warcraft 1 (my first RTS) had just 4 programmers. And only one of them was on the project the whole time. And the entire project was only 14 months.

As far as the coding user experience that I have personally observed, game programming peaked with the team developing NBA Inside Drive 2004 for the Xbox.

Their workflow was:

1) Arrive at work. Get coffee. Fetch latest code from Visual Source Safe.

2) Turn on Xbox. Hit F5 to build, deploy and start debugging on target.

3) Edit and Continue C++ in debugger IDE all day on target without ever bothering to stop the game. (Yes, this took some coding discipline to maintain.)

4) Turn off Xbox and go home.

Between the Visual Studio debugger and the Whole Tomato coding assistance, it was easy to understand the code and the runtime behavior. For anything GPU-related, Microsoft Pix for Xbox gave you a scrubbable timeline of every action, every pixel, every register change in the GPU while drawing a frame.

The hardware capabilities, available libraries, and artist tools have increased tremendously since then. But, the coding experience has not. 20 years later, I'm outside of gaming and I find most people using re-run-and-printf debugging for professional development. Even locally. I don't know how anyone gets anything done.

The only significant improvements I've seen in 20 years (besides the occasional memory tracker or profiler tool) has been AI agents and reversible debuggers. Otherwise, it's all been downhill since 2004.

Live coding is making a comeback. I predict it for 2027. LLMs can and have made hot code loaders for any existing language, and make trivial the nasty bugs that used to plague JIT developers (like broken stack frames).

I haven’t used it personally, but I always heard that VSS was a complete train wreck.

Gamedev programming probably hit a low point for me when XBox One and WiiU came around. Those were some truly awful experiences.

how so?

The biggest issue with XB1 is that it felt like a massive regression compared to 360 development. We were forced to use this Windows 8 stack that came with all sorts of warts: “managed” C++/CLI, confusing manifest files, complicated app lifetime rules, only push deployment initially, limited threading control.

For WiiU, Nintendo used the Green Hills compiler. Their entire toolchain was simply clunky and unstable. You had to use this MULTI debugger which often didn’t work. My favorite line from their dev docs was “c++ not fully supported”. Well, that’s an issue since we used that extensively. It wasn’t even clear what actually wasn’t supported.

Visual Source Safe was definitely an unserious source control system. That part was kindof a joke... It technically got the job done for a small local team. But, it would be laughed out of town if it was made today.

I like REPL, but you can be quite fast with a Edit-Compile-Run cycle. But that require settings a test harness and have the run phase be a test run. It's not as fast and experimental as an REPL, but can be quite nice if you know the test cases for your code.

I lived through:

* before and after rails;

* before and after js UI frameworks;

* before and after scaled machine learning;

* now before and after LLMs;

And saying we haven't advanced much is wild.

The video does actually answer its own title, which is refreshing.

And I agree, it’s because organizations and people haven’t changed (yet, if you’re being positive) what it is they’re optimizing for and how they do work. AI gives you more of what you want and gives it faster, that doesn’t on its own change the culture or goals of a company.

A thousand times this. A lot of people are discovering that coding was never the bottleneck in their orgs and don't know what to do differently.

The communication skills to create the synchronized understandings necessary for teams of any moderate size to operate in concert is not there. Communications are everything when it comes to collaborations at any level, and we as an entire civilization are weak at this aspect. This effective communication necessity.

Also AI don’t seem to make communication better, worse if anything. I’m so sick of the whole team not understanding what is going on with Claude written docs and tickets

a lot of what i do with ai is write (gasp) requirements. which is horrifying to engineers for some reason.

I love requirements. Slop, not so much.

it's good to write requirements,

but when you have requirements,

why not render the code to fulfil them?

> but when you have requirements,

> why not render the code to fulfil them?

Because 95% of the time the LLM can turn the requirements into code, faster, cheaper, and with fewer defects on the first attempt, than most humans.

Your point needs to be emphasized more. Today is the worse AI will ever be, and it's still better than the average person. Recursive self-improvement will make it even better, maybe on orders of magnitude. When you task an AI, it will be able to walk upward abstractly to ask "is this even a good approach." AI's are good for compartmentalized tasks now, but the architectural tasks will probably be improved in the future.

I can imagine the meltdown when AI starts telling its users "that is not how it would work best, consider this ____" and they rant on about their need for and constant use of their "I don't care, do what I say" clipboard loaded paste.

I'm not generally sold on the "worthy successor" or "human disempowerment would be good" arguments (seems like jumping straight to Hard Mode of alignment when we've not even read the tutorial) but this is one of the ways it might be best for the AI to just… disregard what we say and do something else instead.

I wonder how much of your requirements would / could be reinterpreted as a dependency graph of logical constraints. I think we may end up with "writing software" to end up being writing such logic + process dependency graphs in plain language. And by extension, given we're talking about people here, committees will form and hammering these out is the new politics.

The more code, the more worry; the more workers, the more theft; the more AI, the more sorcery; the more flesh, the more worms.

The ancients knew it all along!

That also is dependent on the company and who works there. Some companies are meeting heavy. A meeting for every little decision. Some are not. Some are paperwork heavy and you need to fill out the form to do anything. Coding is like the 4th or 5th on the list of things that get done. Handed to the most jr of devs to 'just figure it out'. Some companies are just not software companies but they have enough of it that they needed but do not care about it. They only care enough to get their hardware out the door. AI in this case only changes when software is done and how. Not all of that other stuff. Such as have you checked in today during your standup and that your story is progressing?

>> coding was never the bottleneck

What utter twaddle.

I’m old enough to remember pre AI programming and it very very much was the bottleneck.

> old enough to remember pre AI programming

So old enough the remember the ancient times back in 2023?

Where did 2023 come from?

The Heuristic Compiler, dating back to the early 1960s, is generally considered the first instance of AI programming.

Maybe you mistakenly confused AI with a particular AI technology, like LLMs? But even then we had LLM-based code completion tools in 2020.

Is 2023 when you became old enough to start remembering things?

I think it was indeed the bottleneck, however the assumption that "coding is the bottleneck" was baked into how organizations were measured, optimized, staffed for the last couple of decades.

From "The Mythical Man-month" (1995 ed)

  For some years I have been successfully using the following rule of thumb for scheduling a software task:
    l/3 planning
    l/6 coding
    l/4 component test and early system test
    l/4 system test, all components in hand.

The separation can be blurred if you follow an iterative approach (also explained in the book), but it aligned roughly with my experience. And whenever I helped a colleague in the past, coding was not the problem. It was either the lack of planning (no data modelling, no rough algorithm design), or no test setup (trial and error coding). It was never the coding part. Syntax errors is trivial to solve (with any good editor) and most libraries have good reference docs (not learning the library is an orthogonal matter).

Say what you want about reducible fractions but that's a pretty nonintuitive way to describe how you divvy up time. Weird to not use percentages or a common denominator...

I think it would be funny if the fractions summed to more than 1. Like the old joke: "the first 80% of the project takes 80% of the time, and the last 20% of the project also takes 80% of the time."

That's nice, but not authoritative for ~20 years (since before VMs and AWS). This book was before CI was commonplace.

Doesn't matter. Nothing has fundamentally changed since he wrote it, because the book is more about how people act than technology.

If anything, testing/TDD is a bigger share compared to coding than before. LLMs can write tests too, but it's still something that has to be managed.

It meshes with my experience. Coding was never the bottleneck. Understanding what the customer/business wanted or needed was always the vast majority of the time spent on a project. A developer might not have seen that, depending how the organization worked. If you got specs from a manager you might not have been aware that those were 6 months in the making. If most of what you experienced was writing code then that could feel like the bottleneck especially if your manager demanded frequent status reports.

AI practically zeroes out the coding and component test part of the process and massively accelerates the system test. What's left is "planning" which under a modern iterative model apparently includes deployment/distribution and getting/understanding/incorporating feedback. With a fully optimized process, knowing what to build is nearly the entire problem.

> AI practically zeroes out the coding and component test part of the process and massively accelerates the system test.

Have this been measured, not comparatively, but absolutely? Where you plan, but don't code, instead leave the task to an agent (while you do something else), then test the result (maybe a quick look at the code), and ship. Is it sustainable? Or is it for greenfield setup and common ideas (things you would use tooling and snippets before)?

> What's left is "planning" which under a modern iterative model apparently includes deployment/distribution and getting/understanding/incorporating feedback.

That is not "planning" means. Planning is usually understanding, research, and design.

bottlenecks constantly change. every time you fix one, a new one emerges. coding is and isnt the bottleneck depending on your organization at that snapshot in time. It often was, and often was not

Just because there's a new bottleneck now doesn't mean coding was never the bottleneck. It was for many orgs, and now it's probably not the bottleneck anywhere

Coding was a huge bottleneck in my bottom dollar offshore contractor infested company, the point where it would have been faster for me to solo projects than work managing a team of them. Their organizations are unfortunately highly optimized to entrench themselves, and no VP’s want to take what from their perspective is a risk to hire expensive onshore contractors or just let someone internal give it a shot.

AI has been a huge disruption to that status quo though because it enables people like me that were stuck managing these bozos to just do the thing on a timeline that wasn’t feasible before. AI also removed any excuses these people could make for never getting anything done. It exposes clearly for anyone tangentially involved in these projects that the devs often can’t even begin to understand the problems they are trying to solve.

With the level of detail that I had to specify things for them to be productive, it’s easier and more effective to just give that (often much less detail tbh) to GitHub Copilot or Claude.

It has massively changed the game for me and helps me enjoy my job quite a bit more.

Coding was a huge bottleneck in my bottom dollar offshore contractor infested company, the point where it would have been faster for me to solo projects than work managing a team of them.

so actually it sounds like coder management was the bottleneck, not coding itself.

Sure, management is always the bottleneck then. But somehow more coding productivity allowed us peons to outpace bad management and ultimately change their shitty strategy from India to Eastern Europe. Laundered through Accenture, wipro, et al still of course.

Good supporting evidence for this is that it is changing your software dramatically if you're making your own personalized software to replace subscription software. That works incredibly well. Also there are some examples of companies doing huge swings they wouldn't have done without it like the AWS emulator that just came out.

People just haven't figured out the tools yet.

I'm doing truly astounding - stupefying - levels of work. Others on my team are actively resistant to my advice but the C Suite isn't.

The numbers are shooting up and to the right but people don't want to get on board. It's too much too fast.

Edit. Consider your own reaction to my statement if down voting.

And you're likely not reading any of the code and just making the Black box bigger, which is not a fact I'd be proud to announce publicly.

If you keep doing the black box approach you will be deskilled in the medium term and your input less valuable.

If you are reading the code, explain how you can do the claimed amount of work, since whenever I review output it's a huge bottleneck

> I'm doing truly astounding - stupefying - levels of work.

> Consider your own reaction to my statement if down voting.

Down votes in reaction to comments like these are almost always due to there being no evidence shared when these claims are made. Share the astounding, stupefying amount of work you're getting done because you've figured out the tools and watch as your down votes magically turn to up votes.

I shared some and got downvoted for that too. So I find that hard to believe, if someone wants to comment on why writing an After Effects replacement that does more of what I want in many ways like custom shaders in 2 days is not a suitable example by all means explain it to me, because I find it insanely valuable to be able to do that. If anything people don't really like people posting their AI built products because anyone can do it, it's not that special, so it kind of proves the point.

Every engineer believes they are a 10X engineer. What makes thinking you're a 100X engineer with AI any different? Or any more accurate?

Recall the study done with open source devs, every one of them believed they were more productive with AI than without, yet the net effect of AI resulted in a 19% loss in productivity.

Im going to be annoying and show you a free open source vibe coded project to make a point. The viewer part of this project predates AI, it took me years just to get the viewer to be great. I built this Video compositor in 2 days that does beat matching, keyframe animation, parameter automation, shader effect layers, masking with SegmentAnything, auto looping and a ton of other things I need when im video editing, cancelled my after effects account and doing this is something I do professionally. There is absolutely 0 chance of a single person doing that in a month, let alone 2 days, before Opus level models. Its not really cloned from anything other than my experiences doing video editing.

https://lowkeyviewer.com/studio/

> The numbers are shooting up and to the right but people don't want to get on board.

Revenue is one of those numbers, right? Right??

> It's too much too fast.

Yes, that’s exactly what being over-leveraged looks like.

“The number one indicator of fragility is leverage” -Nassim Taleb

We have one of you at my work. He’s a god, but for the wisdom.

I think that's really the key for the most productive individuals I've met.

A lot of things that I've paid for subscription services in the past I've just replaced with personalized software for myself. It's not something I would ever release publicly for others to use because I'm sure there's a million edge cases that wouldn't work for a broader audience, but it's perfect for me and saves me a ton of money.

This is just like in woodworking and jig making. Sure you can buy a pre-made jig, but you can now just 3D print (vibe code) one that's good enough and is uniquely made for the way you work.

Does this mean that jig makers out there are out of business? Sort of, they need to sell jigs complex enough that you wouldn't want to / be capable of making.

The most productive individuals were already doing that before, maybe they were "just" scripting, doing macros, going to training on how to extend their workflow. The most productive individuals didn't wait for AI to bother IT by explaining how THEIR very unique situation was special and they needed that one special tool nobody else wanted. They were already using FLOSS tools or heck even had a budget dedicated for a dev to help them precisely because they care. Nothing changed for them ... but for those who wanted to emulated them and never dared, maybe those do have now an excuse to try.

It is not the same, it is worst. Nothing seems functional nowadays

> Nothing seems functional nowadays

It also wasn't functional before-a-days [=

Now we have the added benefit of nobody understands it.

> Now we have the added benefit of nobody understands it.

You should peak inside some old COBOL codebases running some of the most important software in the world [=

Now we can make even less functional code much more quickly! All it costs us is some dignity, poor people's electricity rates going up and massive, massive amounts of cash set on fire

Such a deal.

There’s AI chat bots bolted into every app now, so there’s that

You can say that again. I have a recurring event in Outlook that has a reminder set. If I snooze that reminder, no matter the duration, it will never reappear.

This has been a core feature of Outlook for so long that it might as well be considered day-1 functionality. Why it breaks like this in 2026? Who knows...

This is now the second or third time that he retells his experiences with AI tools being 1) an excel script thing to export a csv or something and 2) predicting sales numbers of his game. I don't mean to discredit him based on that, but it would be much more interesting to hear about him throwing the most ambitious thing he could think of at a frontier model and how that turned out, rather than these ~2023 toy examples.

I mean, if I'm going to be honest, I think that was the most ambitious thing he could think of.

Blow is more renown for running his mouth and shitting on other people's work rather than any of his own work.

Chatgpt dropped in 2022, which means LLM based AI is like 4 years old. I think it's undeniably improving constantly, in some cases noticeably so. Sure there is argument to be made over the improvement velocity (is improvement slowing?).

So what argument is there to be bearish on it when it is in infancy? If you just want to go with "the quality sucks" well, sure, but it sucked a lot more two years ago, which means it sucks a lot less today, and in 2 more years, it will suck even less. I'd use different adjectives personally, cause I find it's pretty decent now (opus 5.5) and i'm pretty optimistic about what comes next.

He sometimes has no clue what he talks about, he spoke against Docker and other technology that makes my everyday life easier

Docker wouldn't be necessary if the OS beneath it wasn't so broken.

It's a solution to something that shouldn't be a problem in the first place, if the OS was designed better.

Jonathan Blow is one guy. He made a couple pretty good games. He's not particularly visionary when it comes to software development. Or perhaps he is visionary but it remains to be seen if his vision for technology is really material.

He regularly denies the use of new technology that is genuinely useful, and is a fairly conservative dude (I mean in the non-political sense. I do not know his politics. He may be a conservative politically as well, but that would be independent of the point I'm making.)

I've worked with many engineers at many different scopes. Big companies, indie darlings, web services, games. Games is always the last to adapt, always the last to think that anything they didn't invent is worth their time. Blow has experience in that domain, and is colored by working in it, but I don't think he knows what's happening on the bleeding edge very well.

A guy who made his own programming language because C++ sucks for game development but everyone was saying "eh, it does suck but it's the best we have", and then made a blockbuster by using said programming language, is not a software development visionary? What are you smoking?

"Blockbuster" is stretching it.

On steamdb.info, Order of the Sinking Star has 1830 players right now, 2404 over a 24 hour peak, and 8247 all-time peak last month which was when it was released.

It is just beating out Cuphead, which released in 2017.

It’s not the same , I’m sorry i literally used 20 usd subscription to build software services used to cost $10k+. Ask any sales Doing software sales perception of enterprise software also changed . From magic to “maybe we can vibe code it”

My software isn't the same. I recently built a Swift app: the screenshot annotation app of my dreams. I don't know Swift at all and that's fine because I saw 0 code during the build process.

And yet... the app works efficiently, has features like shape-smoothing for hand-drawn freeform annotations (I wouldn't even know where to start if I were tasked with this on macOS, for example), it's designed far more beautifully than I could have done, even after a decade of studying UI/UX, etc

Yes, AI solved coding... mostly. At least for indie devs.

I think the main reason you haven't seen a lot of changes on the surface is that corporations as currently constructed largely cannot use them efficiently.

I have a personal project where I am merging 100+ PRs a week and at work I would be lucky to merge 8. I spend 20x as much time trying to get PRs merged as I do actually doing the work.

I'm on a project with 4 other people working on 4 or 5 microservices and I would get more, better, work done if I were on a team alone managing all 4 or 5 microservices myself.

Yep, and we've known this since the Mythical Man Month, but the biggest slowdown is coordination overhead. However, if one person can do much more work, you need fewer people overall which means even lesser coordination between them, which is when broader organizational productivity gains will be unlocked.

So the answer to why we don't see AI productivity gains more broadly is, unfortunately, enough people have not been "re-orged" away.

If AI solved coding, why the hell is iOS 27 a dumpster fire? Slow AF

Because we're not using "enough" AI yet, obviously.

AI allows peope to care less about what they're selling. It used to be magic for the consumer, now the magic extends to the provider too. It lets those who are lazy, greedy and cheap get away with it even more easily. You care about quality? Sorry you're shit out of luck in this game.

It takes an entire business to publish a software product, not just engineers. It’s been a misdirection to blame engineering for productivity issues. If anything, the legal team contributes much more of the sloth, complexity and lethargy than the engineering team.

Legal has much more authority , and far less familiarity with the product, or even the customers. So they demand orthogonal, complicated and impractical requirements that are not even beneficial for risk mitigation. And they are slow at providing them – usually the bottleneck.

It’s not a simple LOC/day formula. If Southwest Airlines wanted to make major software improvements tomorrow, it certainly wouldn’t be the engineering team armed with Claude Code holding them back.

That's not every business though, but I do agree for businesses like airlines, banks etc...

tech is smothered by legal too.

The thing with Jonathan Blow is this, it's incredibly easy to tell ahead of time what he will think about any particular subject.

Anything that makes code more available to "normies" is something Jonathan Blow will absolutely hate. Why? Because Jonathan Blow HAS to be the smartest guy in the room, if he's somehow not the smartest guy in the room, there is something wrong with the room, nothing is ever wrong with Jonathan Blow.

So of course, Jonathan Blow thinks AI coding is terrible, only Jonathan Blow can be the best coder in the world, anyone who thinks otherwise is a total moron.

If you don't hand-roll your own programming language and game engine to make your own game, you're a moron. Hell, he even has a video where he basically says if you don't make your own version of JSON and associated parser, you're a fucking idiot.

What I'm saying is this, Jonathan Blow's ego only sustains itself on the idea that he is right about everything and the smartest person on any given topic. The idea that AI might be better at coding than him causes him to implode in a narcissistic rage.

Accurate evaluation. People like JB are hit the hardest by AI revolution imo. I also think that it is understated just how many people in academia or in other fields care only about their ego and that they might do something they are going to be remembered forever for aka have a legacy.

He was already arguing the same before the AI developments. His position has little to do with agentic evolution

You're not alone, I find him to be completely insufferable.

Funny, I independently arrived at the exact same conclusion. He's incredibly easy to read and predict because every single opinion he holds is based on his ego. Like for example, when people ask him why he developed his own engine for his games, he'll answer that it's because other devs take shortcuts and he doesn't. But dude, the entire point of not making your own engine or language is not because anyone's lazy, but because it allows you to focus your precious time on more important stuff like the actual gameplay, the story, etc. Maybe then it wouldn't take more than 10 years to release a video game.

If he was honest with himself, he would rightly say he did those things for his own edification. If you have the time and ability. As someone who also cares deeply about his craft and spends more effort than I probably should improving my personal tooling, I'm clearly all for it.

Is it strictly necessary? Most certainly not. I've met equally dedicated and talented individuals who are fine adapting to existing tooling and working around idiosyncrasies rather than improving the tooling. That personally drives me batshit, but I can stomach it if required.

And he likely spent a good portion of those 10 years making sure it had "most pzzles evar" as if the only difference between quantity and quality was spelling.

Having played his game with the "most pzzles evar" I do think many of them are also consistently high quality. That said 10 years for this game does seem excessive.

Imagination crisis. The people who understand how to architect software are spending their free time on social media saying "%%% IS INSANE" or something about "I one-shotted this %existing thing%".

The people who said building software wasn't the hard part before were right, you still need interesting problems to solve to find interesting things to build. Gotta get out of the tech bubble to find those. There aren't many interesting problems left to solve for other tech bros

Yeah, all of this power at our fingertips and all I see is "look I ported this 20 year old game to WebGL, and added Mario!" and other such unimaginative projects. There's very few actually novel / interesting things being built right now, as far as I can tell. For once I think you can blame our collective imagination rather than a lack of capability. Apparently creativity has not been solved yet, and being creative is still hard. And most people aren't up for it, which is the same state of affairs as before AI.

I would also argue we are becoming less creative, due to our over-consumption of AI generated content. So many startups look the same nowadays.

I find Jonathon Blow to be insufferable, but this is a good talk with good opinions.

Is it because he's not a leftist or some other reason/s? If the latter I would like to hear it.

The issue is not so much that he’s “not a leftist” as it is his arrogance. He thinks his knowledge extends well beyond his very real skill at game development (the witness is a great game!). One example is his very confident takes on “lab leak” that have not held up.

(HN is also a very big fan of this hypothesis, without realizing it has gotten weaker with time. In their defense, I don’t think anyone wants to think about COVID anymore)

He's possibly the most arrogant person I've ever encountered in real life.

He thinks he's the foremost expert on basically any topic, from literature to politics, to science, to videogames etc.

Elaborate on this real life encounter! I am curious.

You do not talk about Fight Club..

Does he have game development skill? Or did he get lucky with Braid?

Because the Witness is a tedious slog, as is Order of the Tediously Long Title.

The hardest part of the Witness is the fact you aren’t told the rules of the line-drawing puzzle you’re presented. But often, they’re not that hard to discover. It’s not half as clever as Blow thinks it is. It’s essentially “what number am I thinking of”? Then being called a fool when you didn’t guess 12,859,155. Cool.

The Witness & Order of the Sinking Star are great games, the fact that you personally do not like them does not take away anything skill-wise from him.

They are not great games.

Especially in The Witness where there are times where failure of a puzzle forces you to re-input previous puzzles. Or there are a couple of dozen of the same puzzle with only minor variation with the same rule. "Yes, I can draw an L", "Yes, I can draw it backwards", "Yes, I can draw it and a cube, truly a masterfully built puzzle".

Tell me you haven’t played a game without actually telling me you haven’t played it.

Respectfully disagree! I really enjoyed discovering the rules in each biome. even if it led to some tedious trial and error now and then

What you're calling the hardest part is precisely what makes Blow's games so amazing: The Eureka moment of understanding the concepts behind a puzzle is incredibly satisfying.

Why would you want to be told how a puzzle works if you can discover it yourself? Tutorials are boring, discovery through trial and error is exciting.

This doesn't just apply on the level of raw puzzles, but also on a meta level where you start understanding the ideas and concepts behind the puzzles, and then the absolute best part when you understand how these ideas and concepts interconnect (or are related or mirror each other, no pun intended).

Also, I find that his games aren't tedious at all. Sure, you might get stuck on a puzzle occasionally. But then you just go somewhere else and come back later. Or you go to sleep, gain the critical insight in your dreams, and then solve the puzzle. (I'm not kidding about that! It works wonders to sleep over a puzzle.)

I have not experienced any other games that's are as enjoyable as Blow's, not even close. But of course different people have different preferences.

If you don't enjoy the thinking and figuring things out, then maybe these games aren't for you. But every curious individual who loves playing with and enhancing one's mental understanding of abstract ideas, should absolutely play Blow's games.

I found his tech opinions pretty insufferable well before he started mixing politics in.

Something about the lone programmer off goat-skinning every aspect of the tech stack, while telling you how you are writing software wrong...

So, I generally like Jon, but he can be an ignorant blowhard and this typically does not diminish his supreme self-confidence or rudeness (see e.g. https://x.com/stylewarning/status/2028976562544988476). I don't think this is the only instance where he blocked someone who politely pointed out a technical error either.

People say that failure tests your character, but I think success is the bigger test. Jonathan thinks that because he made some genuinely excellent games, we should also listen up when he has some new renegade opinion. We shouldn’t!

Alright, let's listen to all the people who have never successfully shipped a product instead! /s

Track record isn't everything, especially for people early in their career, but when somebody ships successful products as consistently as Jonathan has for decades, that can no longer be ascribed to luck or anything like that. There must be some far-above-average skills involved.

I was talking to my friend yesterday about what exactly has AI changed for us. Our lives are still the same( actually worse from job loss anxiety). If this tech is so revolutionary how come nothing in my life has changed positively.

My friend is in managment at faang and he said ai has changed how tech coders now behave at work. he is enjoying the fact that "their tails have been cut by AI". Made his management job infinitely easier.

why is this downvoted?

I think that has more to do with the job market than "AI". All my coworkers have become yes-men due to perceived job insecurity. Not sure this is a positive thing even if it's superficially appealing to a middle-manager.

So your friend's life is not still the same?

>If this tech is so revolutionary how come nothing in my life has changed positively.

That's a bit of a myopic view. Imagine someone asking the same question a few years after the invention of the printing press.

It's not hard to find examples of how AI is changing things. To take just one example, look at how it's revolutionizing research in science and mathematics. I wouldn't expect this to change the average person's life overnight, but there are absolutely going to be huge breakthroughs in the next few decades.

Because improvement in human QoL is not a requirement for a revolutionary technology. Nuclear weapons come to mind.

We're talking about something that speculatively invalidates all digital data. All code created prior is seen with lesser value to the point of commodification because of its existence. We are past the slow erosion of trust of the photoshop or Wikipedia era. You can't trust anything digital anymore. Encryption is our last hope, and companies now join governments in the race to break it.

Perhaps a bit of a leap but based on their phrasing, I'd be very critical of a viewpoint in management who believes themselves immune from what's occurring to specialized talent across the board. We are intergalactially far away from IBM's "never let a computer make a management decision." A concerningly large number of people submit their data, thinking, and agency to these tools. The impact is real even if not personally felt or in your backyard.

> he is enjoying the fact that "their tails have been cut by AI"

Manager. FAANG. Enjoys the misfortune of the people he manages. Your friend sounds like a prick to me.

> My friend is in managment at faang and he said ai has changed how tech coders now behave at work. he is enjoying the fact that "their tails have been cut by AI". Made his management job infinitely easier

Yeah, I see this attitude a lot. People seem gleeful that software devs are getting kicked in the teeth, but honestly the business practices in software already have been kicking my ass my entire career. I've never felt like a respected, valued individual at any company I've worked for. I've only ever felt like an assembly line worker and accountability sink for my bosses. Someone to pile shit on, and then blame if stuff goes wrong.

My career has been full of overtime, evenings and weekends, overnight deployments, crunch time, layoffs, and for most of it I wasn't even making lots of money. It's only a couple of years ago I started making more than six figures, and now I'm laid off again and wondering if I'm even going to manage to get another job at all, nevermind one that pays as well.

I made the wrong choice in careers twenty years ago, tell you that much. Now I don't know what to do, but people are happy my tail has been cut, as if they haven't already been kicking my ass for ages. :/

Hard to feel anything but resentment anymore

Agree. And this is the change I more or less expected. Living to the full potential of anxiety, job loss, further loss of autonomy at work for code types like me.

The direction was clear for last 2 decades with every little feature broken into dozens upon dozens of tickets for better management . And now with AI each JIRA story can have its own design doc, testing doc, usage guide and so on. And management does seem happy by increasing number of artifacts which implied quality work done.

I'm not sure if the software is really the same, but there are a lot of AI slop games, and also a lot of well-made AI games. The graphical improvement in recently successful indie games is astonishing. Realistically speaking, in the past there were many cases where people weren't good at shaders, but there are also many points where optimization has improved. At the art asset level, even if AI isn't used, there are many cases where the code is now far better optimized than before. When I decompile the recent code of indie games whose animation implementation was terrible in the past, I often find it genuinely impressive.

Realistically speaking, AI raised the average quality. Among today's AI slop games, there are many that would have been "at this level of quality, this game could succeed" in the past.

Realistically, that's how it is. So there will be many people telling bad-luck stories like "ever since AI came out, GitHub has stalled," but I think that's closer to the opposite — AI increased production so much that the supply chain itself can't keep up.

The thing is, I can't really agree with the claim that software is the same. I don't know about open source, but when I think about the state of code in code delivered to clients, I think there has been a dramatic rise. Separately from that, because products are pouring out, I think consumers' quality demands are rising far faster than production. Comparing early smartphone games with today's AI slop games makes this even more palpable.

We did have 30 years of software advancement; LLM are the next step. I would argue what we didn't have was 30 years of hardware advancement as everyone bought x86_64

Blow and coders have a hammer so all they see is nails; it didn't "solve coding" AI solved "machine state management". Totally different; human tagging/coding will still exist just at the presentation layer cause we don't need a bunch of syntax like:

def sumAllCustomerAccounts() { Some desired physical state of machine based on mathematical axioms }

AI solved naming that function (the coding with human context part) with

f() { generate a function to add all customer balances}

We moving on from 1960s and 70s machine state management, pushing context coding to the presentation layer

Blow is just doing that thing humans do where they wrap their entire identity up in who they were 30 years ago and still think that's who they are today and will be tomorrow; rotary phone companies, bowling alley equipment manufacturers... new generations are superseding them... circle of life Simba

Not really gonna put Blow and Carmack on a pedestal; they never invented computers or software dev. They came along in the middle of the hype. The read the manual for old machines. We're just moving on to new kinds of machines.

People flipped out over the printing press too. Nothing to see here; it's just the upper bound of the middle age generation having a mid-life crisis

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