Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

The original Harley Benton/ABM Slider lap steel was outstanding and I was stupid not to get one.

But I also think this is an extreme example of a much more general problem of provenance.

There are a lot of people vibe-coding apps who lack the “basic” skills needed to do this due diligence at even the coarsest level that we arguably see here (not making any comment either way on this specific author).

Does that get them off the hook? I don’t think so. They’ve created a thing and they are naturally responsible for whether or not that thing involves theft or appropriation of IP from other sources.

It’s an “ignorance is not an excuse” kind of thing.

This scales all the way up to agentic development in large organisations, but it also becomes much more granular and subtle, which is perhaps where it becomes more interesting - and certainly a lot more challenging. Where has that chunk of code come from? How do you know where it’s come from? Is there even a feasible way of finding out?

If you give a description of the app you want, and it matches another persons Open Source app. Then why wouldn't Claude do what it does every other time and pull from it's corpus of knowledge?

Now I would expect the human-in-the-chain to verify what is going on and ultimately they are responsible for any output they lay claim to.

In this case, AI assisted or not, it is a dick move. TFA claims they are backing out of this space completely - which is the correct thing to do.

But as with all "my punch simply slipped!" apologies their reputation is tarnished and they will need to demonstrate they are better in future - not simply say so.

This mentality is exactly why most modern AAA games are so generic and uninteresting. Great games are more than just their gameplay; they're complete, coherent experiences assembled by people who care about every part of them, not just the parts they deem to be "the important ones". Someone who doesn't care at all what their game's settings menu looks like probably doesn't truly care about any other part of the game, either - it suggests their primary concern is not the quality of the game, but how quickly and cheaply it can be made.

Games having menus and HUD interfaces that fit the rest of their aesthetic was once the standard, before the current trend of minimalism took over. Why do you think that is? Was it just because the developers of yesteryear were all idiots wasting time and budget on things that didn't matter instead of maximizing shareholder value? Or was it because they were focused on making a high quality, coherent game first, and making it "efficiently" second?

> Do you also rail against game engines which provide all of this stuff in a generic way?

Yes, every other game being made in Unreal Engine nowadays is one of the biggest contributing factors to them all feeling so samey (and running badly). Developers who don't care about the quality of the game and just want to get it out the door with the minimum effort possible gravitate towards Unreal Engine, because it's made for them, and this is reflected in the end product.

> I can keep coming up with ways that AI can make a game better.

No, you can come up with ways that AI can make the game easier and cheaper to make at the cost of craftsmanship. It's not the same thing. Adding more side quests won't make the game better if they're not made by people who care about the game as a whole and all its little details. Whatever improvements or optimizations your AI can come up with, a skilled human developer could come up with, too, the difference being that the human demands a living wage in exchange for his work, and that's just awful, isn't it? It's simply not possible for the entirety of the game to be crafted with care without going over budget (let's ignore all the past examples of games that did exactly this, with much smaller budgets, before unappealing ultra realistic graphics became the standard).