I really like this game and have played it for years but I think it's popularity outgrew it's niche. It's a very niche game, the devs have made the ultimate space Lego kit, but I see lots of people complain about it being boring because there are no stakes, no challenge. I think they are trying to play the game they want it to be not the game it is. The overwhelming scale of the meme this game has become I think is the cause of that.

I don't see not having AI as a feature, but I'd prefer for them to take the approach of optional, easy to implement interfaces that increase the ability for the suite to be 'scripted' rather than implement AI directly. My motivation is that the field of AI is moving so fast I think its a better long term plan to make your software something that can be automated with AI than to try to fight the speed of that innovation curve. I get that even that can be difficult because of security concerns, but it seems more straightforward than implementing models directly into your application.

That is, in fact, exactly what they explain as their approach in the article, as well as their reasoning behind it.

It isn't that they disallowed AI, its that they just leave it up to plugins and have no native interface since it violates many of their principles around privacy and local data.

I absolutely see a lack of soulless clankers to be a feature.

I completely agree that focusing on "scripting" would be great. Clanker proxies can allow their clanker to use it while grumpy bastards like me can stick to Bash to automate it.

I am sure it will be fantastic for the whole 6 seconds before it blows my weekly usage cap.

In this case, the fully open source pipeline is probably as valuable or more so than the weights, so releasing early has some justification.

I know I am in the overwhelming minority and that most people will just continue to buy Sony's stuff anyway, but I decided a few years ago when all the ownership crap came up that I am just not buying stuff that I don't own. Sony's PS4 went to my local electronics recycler and I haven't bought a Sony product since. I can't realistically do it with everything, there are some products I have to buy rather I get to own them or not. But I am not putting up with it where I can and gaming is optional -- plus GOG has served me really well since.

GOG is better, but I still really don't like buying video games that I don't own (ie can't resell). Come to think of it, I've only ever digitally purchased one game above $5, Minecraft, and Microsoft ended up stealing that from me.

I'm keeping my ps4 as long as the hardware still runs because at least I can still buy discs for it. I have a nice collection of high-replay-value single player games. I know discs are just physical licenses at this point in time, not actual software on disc like the old school days.

But even with all this nonsense from Sony I don't think they'll cross the rubicon of terminating licenses that come on physical discs for their older consoles. If they do, I hear you can jailbreak ps4s :)

> I know discs are just physical licenses at this point in time, not actual software on disc like the old school days.

I don't understand why people keep repeating this meme when emulation exists, and discs remain the easiest legal format to grab data for emulators to play. You may need an exploit to get game data off a digital-only console.

I've worked with a number of clients that have lost senior engineers due to old age or retirement, and the impact is often very significant regardless of how sophisticated their knowledge management infrastructure is. Documentation can not fully replace the insight and situational awareness many of these experts posses and most of the time knowledge management still suffers from the 'not knowing what you don't know' issue. Only well structured 'apprenticeship' programs come close. I know some are going to point to AI, but I've worked in AI for over 2 decades and have extensive experience in Expert Systems and Knowledge Engineering from early in my career. It is not a complete solution. Given today's technology its trivial to replicate 'text book knowledge' but the difficult, expensive problems occur in the margins and its still hard to train AI on open ended / rare occurrences outside of domains that have specific advantages like software engineering. Talented and experienced people are still required. Maybe that will change soon, but AI isn't there yet.

I am guessing the developer took into account the fact that the younger generations these days don't have the patience for real time defragging.

I would imagine there is some obvious bias and that the AI backlash plays a role, in that many of those that would be buying the models are likely to be part of industries where we are seeing the most backlash against the technology. In another train of thought, how mind blowing is it that 4 years ago I could barely get 512px images out of models and just 4 years later there are legitimate arguments as to if AI generated 3D models are usable for production work?

It's not bias, the results are unusable

I think the attacks generated by Meta, Open AI and Anthropic prove that large corporations are not responsible enough to be trusted with advanced AI, so we should ban all commercial AI services and only allow open source models that are in the hands of hobbyists and individuals -- hobbyists and individuals that have so far proven to be much more trust worthy.

Not saying you’re wrong, but I think the bigger issue is how easy it seems to be for models to hack companies, even ones with generally ok security. Most tech companies are not doing continuous, deep security audits of their code and infrastructure. Dependencies are not updated quickly as RCEs are discovered. (And any org with a slow release process where it’s hard to be confident that an OS or package update won’t break something… is in even more trouble.)

The only reason more companies aren’t exploited is because human attackers don’t have the time and energy to waste on trying every play in the book, or attacking lower value targets.

They key lesson I've picked up from the past ~4 months is that models are now good enough that, if there's a security hole, they'll brute force their way into finding it.

The only solution that makes sense to me is for defenders to get to point these models at their own code to find the holes before the attackers do.

But that's hard, because how do you limit access to defenders and restrict access to attackers? Attackers aren't exactly honest people.

These attacks are also incredibly loud. Many attackers are motivated to operate very quietly. We haven't seen any tradecraft from these machines, it's all noisy and bombastic.

When we see them mount a quiet backdooring campaign, like the XZ-SSH attack, or something like Stuxnet, then we'll have real problems.

But part of the problem is if one actually does it quietly and it has already happened, then how would we know?

I agree, the whole 'developers don't code' AI defense was pretty ridiculous. I also concur that development is going to get a lot harder. Anyone that has successfully used AI coding tools knows that you can get massive productivity increases but now I have to figure out how to get a bunch of hyper active child like coding entities with memory deficiencies to build stuff without going off the rail and introducing massive security problems or building something completely mismatched to the requirements. If you can do it, yeah you can get 10x results. But now I am engineering harnesses, architecture specifications, agent structures, statistically sampling, and formal verification systems to guide the code instead of writing the code.

No one seems to mind the quality drop though. The buyers of this stuff could never discern.

I'm definitely noticing, I imagine the populace at large will soon too. I'm not even talking about random software either, the company I work for has more and more fired that need to be put out because people are spamming out ai-generated code that was at best rubber stamped.

Not even just the customer-facing stuff either, the internal tooling is on fire more and more often. It's not sustainable in the slightest

It took a while before the MBA hivemind woke up to this happening because of outsourcing two decades ago.

In the meantime their slowness should be our opportunity. Indie gaming displaced AAA when AAA started making the same franchiseslop games every year.

Are you the buyer of the stuff?

I suspect the massive shitshow of Windows 11 and all of its failings is a result of large quantities of vibe code being merged into the OS. People are noticing.

Windows 11 was released before vibe coding was viable. And the shit show seems to be that they push ads and bloatware on people, not that it doesn't work reliably. Windows 11 IoT LTSC has been absolutely rock solid for me on both machines I have it on. Waaay more stable and reliable than Linux, and even a bit better than Mac (which is also way better than Linux).

If they are vibe coding anything, it hasn't had any bad consequences yet. The ads and bloat are human decisions!

In the last two years Windows 11 has shipped with increasingly serious bugs. Many of my co-workers report needing to reboot a few times a day because issues just compound.

I regularly have major issues with Teams and Outlook. Crashes, not showing messages until hours later, calls dropping every few minutes, and the app just never opening. Just Friday afternoon I could not close Teams from the Task Manager

It's not just "ads" and "bloatware". Recent updates have broken notepad and calculator.

And when exactly did Windows 11 release?

Just because some of Windows 11 was released before Claude Code doesn’t mean that the really shitty stuff from the last year wasn’t vibe-coded garbage.

They didn't need AI to write slop is my point.

They do. Most economically viable software already exists today, most people's job is to make .1% improvements, and features on top. For this work it's obviously pivotal that any change should not worsen the existing software, as that instantly nullifies the value of improvements.

Another kind of highly valuable software is a new design which digitizes some process, like the ticket management of a rail company. If you don't follow the internal processes and workings of the firm exactly, or you do not interface with existing systems 100% accurately, your software very soon becomes worthless.

Figuring out how to create a piece of code that solves the exact problem the customer has, while not breaking anything, and fitting into existing operations seems to be a big head scratcher still, and something humans still need to do, at least that was my experience so far with LLMs.

You forgot "as long as"

... as long as the buyers could never discern

The sad reality is that the vast majority of customers (whoever you are writing software for: clients, management, or end users) simply don't care as much about quality. If you give them the "time, cost, and quality" pick-two choice, 99.9% of customers are going to ask for fast+cheap. It's not the world I wish we were living in.

This isn't true. I don't think you or me would want a car/TV/smartphone that's cheap and flashy but breaks every two weeks. Sometimes people are strapped for cash that's why they cheap out on stuff, or really are enthusiastic about it, so they tolerate it breaking all the time, but for everything else, reliability is king.

Nobody _wants_ it, but in practice if all cars/TVs/smartphones break every two weeks, what choice do people have?

In tech, the era of competing based on quality is long gone. The winning strategy is to get a monopoly/oligopoly and then you can let the quality decay to zero and people will have no choice but to keep paying you money (or to your handful of equally-mediocre competitors).

> Nobody _wants_ it, but in practice if all cars/TVs/smartphones break every two week.

Certainly not true for me. One example is Linux. I've been sticking with Ubuntu LTS, and delaying upgrades for as long as I can get away with for any system that's connected with earning or at least not losing money.

For the packages whose versions I care about, I compile them from source/use a PPA, and accept the consequences, but I really don't care for shiny features, if the price is random stuff breaking and having to be troubleshooted in the latest version.

There is a minimum but beyond that people don't care. Asian brands like Toyotas are the most reliable yet the Ford F150 is the best selling vehicle in the world.

This is why I believe true engineering art comes in actually marrying all three: build great quality quickly at reasonable (small) cost!

If you need it to work for at least a month or two (instead of one and done, which some demoware is like). Following a few rules early on will ensure you can keep evolving it — even if it's MVP/demoware/whatever — as long as you know you need to evolve it soon after you build it!

The most important result of quality in software is that it's faster to produce and cheaper. How are people defining quality? We're not building tables with the finest wood.

Low quality ends up taking longer to build over the long run. It gets harder and harder to add or change features.

The Linux desktop just exceeded 10% because Microsoft is such shit.

Code is the written representation of your idea how to solve a problem.

Now you tell someone else your idea and have to hope they get it. Otherwise you have to argue, rephrase, start all over again.

We are back to the tree-swing project management, but we added another layer

>get a bunch of hyper active child like coding entities with memory deficiencies to build stuff without going off the rail and introducing massive security problems or building something completely mismatched to the requirements

Development is essentially becoming management.

I see this comparison a lot, but I’m not sure I agree. At least not semantically. The list of what an engineer using agents is responsible for, largely hasn’t changed. Engineering managers haven’t changed responsibilities either.

Even with wrangling agents, you’re really just making them right the “correct code”. Something EMs don’t do, or at least the good ones don’t do with their ICs.

It is quite similar to architecture work when others in the team do the actual coding, and lead devs / architects only have time to try out prototypes.

Only now instead of local or offshore devs, it is agents.

I was mainly doing architectural work as a coder long before LLMs came along.

So was everyone else who wasnt slopping out boilerplate.

Do you have a source for that claim?

Why wouldn't they be working on better harnesses? Every feature that has gotten popular has gotten integrated so far, and their product managers aren't stupid.