pouët.net

Anyway, why did I write that big thing? But just notice how badly AI has divided society into two camps. And rightly so.

I think the provocative thing was the "fun" part. And it was... but it really is (fun), and a lot of people will never know. But when re-reading I realize that if you read it quickly in anger you may miss the second part about not using it for demos, so my bad for that I guess. Oh well...

I read it. It's ok. I wasn't thinking you use it for demos. But we have to think how vastly accelerated AI hit so hard all of the communities, fields and society, and everybody is on arms. Like it's depressing. And I find myself arguing sometimes and them trolling about the five stages of grief.

Also about fun. It's very distant. In rare cases, I decided to ask it (and only free version, only Copilot as it was there with VS) on some of my retro project to do something or find a bug, and sometimes it's impressive. And it's a luring demon. Like it could have sucked me. But because of the bad taste in my mouth and many many other reasons I cannot have fun coding this way ever. Impressed by the technology yes, but not using it.

Sasq, I'm with you on this one.

AI is here to stay, and a lot of people are using it today. The question will soon be: "who will admit to using AI in a demo to speed up their development?"

Right now, I like mixing my own code with Claude's work. It's like having a coding buddy who stimulates me and writes more code than I ever could in my (small amount of) free time. So instead of having dead projects, I have some that actually get finished.
I won't take credit for the code I didn't write, only for the parts I did.

We are entering a new era. We will need new rules.

I stopped reading at this point.

(If you think this is an invitation to a debate, you’re wrong.)

There is no debate, this is a statement.

Exactly. I actually see the great variety of rules for current parties as a good thing. There is something for everybody.

My main hope is that this will not turn into a sharp divide. That the majority will appreciate that "with AI" and "without AI" is a false dichotomy when it comes to code.

I am still hoping we can find a way to have demo compos with at least limited AI use.
Sure it can be hard, but its hard in sports too. Take cycling, with its constant doping checks and tweaking of the rules...

Maybe for coding the rule could be "You have to type all code yourself". So you can ask AI for help, but you should not copy/paste but instead copy (or rephrase) by hand.

Then we could have 3 levels of competitions; "Anything goes" (Full AI), "Traditional" (no directly generated code) and "Hardcore" (Start from scratch in a room with no Internet :)

100%

The fundamental problem with that kind of categorization is that it assumes that all code was written "by hand" before AI, which is far from being the case. Specialized code generators and transformers (e.g. shader minification) have been standard practice in the Demoscene for decades.

If you wrote the code that generated the code, that's fine.
Demos produced with Demo-editors probably needs to go into "Anything Goes"
4K-Intros that uses frameworks developed over a long time... yeah, its hard.