“tHe PrOgReSs hAs bEeN iNsAnE”
Rich kid uses parents’ money to hire a company to port the game
A new way to look at vibe coding to point out that it isn’t coding.
It’s hiring a company. In the year 2012, you could email someone with a request for something you want made, and if you have money they’ll reply back over network the code you need.
AI companies just tightened that loop. You hired a company to write software for you. That doesn’t make you a developer or a programmer.
I have an entirely free LLM I regularly run locally on my SteamDeck. I didnt sign a contract for anything, I just downloaded it.
I could power the Deck running the LLM indefinately with maybe $300 worth of solar panels and a power station.
Now it ain’t nearly as fast, as hooking in to an LLM thats being run on a data center, but that’s tool use, not contracting an outside firm.
We can democratize this technology if we want to, we do not have to rely on environmentally destructive, oligarch enriching cloud computing.
It’s the difference between: wow this 14 year old developed a pc port for ocarina of time
Vs.
Wow this 14 year old spend money to develop a pc port for ocarina of time
For those of you who feel sorry for Nintendo with this situation, I blamed Nintendo. It’s come to the point where they have to realize that PC is a viable platform that they need to utilize instead of avoiding it. When they avoid it and don’t do an official release, this is what they get. Your games on PC are inevitable now with or without you. It’s a reality. Adopt.
It took piracy to make AI. It took piracy to make AI profitable.
AI isn’t even profitable
I am very confused. $9,000 in API costs, but also Claude Max subscription? Shouldn’t it be $100-200/mo?
I had thought its either/or, either you pay per token, or a fixed subscription.
I think the number is just what it would have cost in pure AI tokens if they weren’t using the subscription.
That’s what I assumed as well, like $1 million in drugs on the street about $3.50 to produce.
I wonder how far $9000 would have gone if it was donated to real people working on a port instead.
In either case I’ll never lower myself to voluntarily consume AI slop.
$9000?
At $45 per hour … call this a contract job with no taxes or health benefits or anything … thats 200 hours of dev time or 25 8-hour workdays.
You’d almost certainly need at least 3 months (probably more) to lay a solid foundation at get a base level, functional proof of concept, if you had only person, one pretty darn high skilled low level expert working on this.
So $9000 would produce nothing useable, just another call for fund raising.
And I’m sure you could find many programmers qualified and capable of this task who would call $45 an hour for doing this solo, lowballing them.
Doing a project like this with only humans is certainly possible, and likely would yield a higher quality result, but it would take substantially more time and money, orders of magnitude more.
Sorry, but just being entirely, blanket, always mad at AI/LLMs is stupid.
These things do actually have very sensible use cases, and reverse engineering a giant undocumented black box program is one of the most clear cut of these.
Its also possible to run these things locally… its slower than a cloud LLM service, but its still very usefully fast, and isn’t funding some corpo datacenter.
99% of the problems that are being caused by LLMs right now are due to idiot humans using them in very obviously stupid ways.
LLMs are tools, like hammers, guns, chainsaws, forklifts, etc. If you don’t know what you’re doing, ita very easy to cause a lot of damage.
This kind of use of an LLM, as a tool assisting in a very complex reverse engineering project, directed and overseen by actual human experts, not just trying to naievely one shot it with a novice in charge… is almost certainly the optimal or most reasonable way to balance the [fast, cheap, good] factors in approaching a project like this.
I’m not saying this random 14 yo is doing this in the best possible way, not even close, but I am saying that if you think just $9000 thrown at a or multiple humans could produce anything even comparable, then you do not understand anything about the actual realities of working in the computer software development field.
Its also possible to run these things locally… its slower than a cloud LLM service, but its still very usefully fast, and isn’t funding some corpo datacenter.
But it wasn’t done locally, which begs the question: can local models reverse engineer on any kind of reasonable time scale?
Answer: something that would’ve run much better on much lower end hardware and worked for more than one game, but would’ve taken much longer to produce (since actual human thought went into it) which is the only metric people seem to pay attention to.
Immediate convenience is the metric we’ve been trained to exclusively focus on. Bread and circuses and all that. It’s why I’ve been purposefully adding inconveniencea to my life to try to build up some of my patience and preservation again.
Lets say you get a dev working for 320 hours over the course of two month on the project for that money. I hate AI as the next person, but I honestly don’t think he would have achieved anything noteworthy to the Normies in those two month.
I think it was that easy, people would have done it already. People with a lot of knowledge spend a shit ton of money on mods and cracking games for free.
$9k won’t get you far in the US or most of Europe.
Given that he is almost certainly using a $100 or $200/month plan, he could probably only afford a 30-60 minute consultation.
🤷♀️
It would have to happen through donations to people already working on this stuff on a volunteer basis, not normal contract work. As the whole thing is based on IP theft anyway it would be a terrible idea to hire people for it in a normal way.
Must be nice to have a rich parent.
Future dystopia: investing in your own skills is no longer valuable. That kid with rich parents will always be ahead of you.
Not so future tbh, that already is the case a lot more often than we’d like to admit. Rich parents and parents with good connections are the absolute jackpots you have to land as kid or you’ll be some kind of screwed unless you manage to be incredibly lucky later on.
Yeah, taking AI out of the context of tomato’s comment makes you think it’s not already the case, but it’s been the case since, like, wealth and connections and status became a thing, if not earlier.
Back on topic, I don’t think having real skills that you can leverage without AI is going to completely lock you out of a job or something. For now, it is pretty gloom, but I’m seeing more and more cases in my company where AI leads to nearly catastrophic failures because people use it mindlessly and generate too much busywork of others, who don’t bother checking it that thoroughly, leading to really bad consequences for everyone in a couple of weeks since the slopping commenced.
Of course, it’s happening because the upper-management has been pushing hard for everyone to use AI for everything.
Maybe companies turn away from AI because their average AI user does more harm than good with it. If I can’t have a world where all the tech that’s powering AI goes to something where it actually has benefits (which is a few scientific fields and applications like protein folding or some shit, if that hasn’t been proven wrong, too), I hope I can at least have a world where AI has disappointed the decision makers enough so that it becomes a niche expensive toy for morons with money that are ridiculed and shunned.
I’m not saying that rich people have never had an advantage. I’m saying that the only thing that gives lower income people a little bit of extra advantage is completely lost.
It doesn’t matter if you’re the best programmer in the world. You’re no match to what the rich brat can output.
And currently it doesn’t matter if you’re the best programmer in the world if you can’t find people willing to either work with you or employ you because say you’re poor and have a crappy personality. Or because you’re highly autistic and undiagnosed and people always tried to avoid you and all you ever learned was doing things on your own.
Or you could even possibly be the best programmer in the world if you actually could touch a computer in the first place, sucks that you have to spend your childhood on some cocoa fields.
All your (dormant) skills are nothing without opportunities to actually use them to their fullest and you can only go so far on your own. If you were born into the wrong family (as in wrong economic status) it’s very possible you don’t even have the chance to develop your amazing abilities in the first place, ai or not.
That’s the current dystopia, dawg.
Always has been 🔫 🧑🚀
Being rich is a cheatcode.
That’s not future dystopia. That’s just how it is and how it has always been since capitalism was invented
What future lol. That has been the case for thousands of years. Science, art, philosophy, writing and so on was the thing rich people did for thousands of years. Some peasant’s kid had to work in the fields as soon as he could while the rich people’s kid could get education. This is not something new. The last few hundred years or so is where this wasn’t the case as public education became a thing and people’s standards of living rose enough that kids were not just another pair of hands to help on the farm or around the house.
“Michael Reeves here. Today we’re replacing the brain of this Tesla Cybertruck with a fly brain running on an XBox!”
It says “job and donations” so if we take that at face value it seems to be self-funded whaling.
And a community who are ok with being beta testers
Can’t wait for the shoe to drop and horror stories of the “hEaD dEv” have their computer wiped because the generative AI agent did something it wasn’t tasked to do. That’s always the hope so that way we can laugh at their punishment.
That, or in the case of generative AI, I am willing to side with the capitalist cthulu cult leaders since I hate the generattive AI cthulu beast “we” are creating even more. In other words, for once would absolutely side with sintendo if they sued the kid into taking down “their” “work” all because of the usage of generative AI.
Hell, maybe the parents, or more likely some 3rd party paid by the parents if the kid is constantly going through accounts and can afford to do it, would then step in and teach that kid a lesson. I’d hope it’s a lesson on being a decent human and not using generative AI for anything, but if they’re a rich enough family, you know there won’t be any serious life lesson.
Makes more sense to sue Anthropic for producing the code rather than using the kid. I’m all for consequences but I can’t imagine a 14 year old has the money to fight such a lawsuit and even if the parents do, it’s very likely that Nintendo wouldn’t get much out of them if they won. And it’s not going to disencentivize others from trying the same thing while the medium to do it still exists.
when Nintendo figures out where to send the lawsuit
Of course there are now whales in Open Source, lol
I’ve gotten in the habit of looking at all software for LLM commits on their Github page.
Check out the SlopScan extension
I will, thanks.
Edit:
Brave gets an F with 47 Claude or Copilot commits.
Cake Wallet gets and A+ with 48 Claude commits.
Notesnook is in S tier with 8 commits from Copilot.
Not a fan of how they score.
I legit started to cheer for Sony and Nintendo recently lol. I hate how people act like this is a good thing.
No, AI bros being shit doesn’t make Sony and Nintendo good. They are massive companies that will take advantage of you whenever they think that they will get away with it. They don’t deserve your sympathy.
The issue lies with knowing what the code does that AI produces, if you don’t have a clue and still use it that is when you are a vibe coder in my book.
If you just use it to increase productivity and improve code then I don’t see any issue with that and it does not make you any less of a developer. Times have changed, Stack Overflow is from the past.
I program longer than that kid lives.
If I slop out code, I still see it as a piece of crap. It doesn’t matter whether I understand it or proof-read it. If I ever do that, I stop being a programmer.
You don’t see any advantage to having code auto written to spec and then being able to tweak the result? Just simply as a time saving/efficiency hack?
Honestly curious, not baiting here.
Aside from the part where they’re giving money to Anthropic this is a pretty good use of AI tbh.
This is the thing; I feel like AI isnt the issue so much as politics, like ownership and such, idk tho
And apart from environmental impacts, and apart from societal impact, and apart from economical impact, and apart from all the intelectual theft… I’m just glad we have AI to port a game
Yeah honestly, even though it’s “just” prompting an AI, they’ve actually done well to get this far at all.
We’re talking about a current gen (not even that old) console game running natively on PC days after it was released. That is completely unheard of and the fact that a kid in his bedroom helped put that together is still impressive, regardless of the tools being used.
You could give 100 people unlimited access to any AI of their choosing and not get the same result.
Bemoan AI all you like, but leave the kid alone.
