Fuck it, make it anyway

I kind of crashed out this week. Not in an explosive, dramatic way, but an
implosion, a collapsing of the self, my resolve and motivation crumbling into
the mush you get when you put tissue paper through the laundry.
I’m doing better now,
and I wanted to write down my thought process in case anyone else is going
through the same thing, especially, probably, sadly, future me.

The reason for this is, I guess, all too familiar for anyone in a creative
field: surprise, it’s generative AI. The ongoing devaluation of the work of
artists and makers, chewed up and regurgitated back to us like a mother feeding
a baby bird with a subscription model. I have some hope for my friends in other
artistic fields; AI art is shit, kind of by definition anti-art, embarrassing to
look at and cringe-inducing to be associated with. I hope that continues. On the
programming front, where I mostly live, things look a little dicier.

Every programmer I know has basically gone insane over the last couple of years.
This is the most turbulent time to be a software engineer I can remember. We’ve
had it relatively easy up until now, but there’s an increased feeling that the
whole craft is going through a huge shift and every individual needs to decide
how they respond to it, which is very hard without the benefit of hindsight. I
can’t really blame anyone who’s just gone along with things, despite the various
negative externalities – peer pressure is very real, and LLMs are genuinely
very capable at code generation now. Denying that is, I think, a race against a
moving finish line.

I’m not writing this to try and convince anyone of any particular position but
here’s mine: even disregarding all the environmental and societal issues, I
simply do not enjoy programming with a code assistant. It isn’t fun for me, the
output doesn’t feel like mine, and I take no pride in what it produces. For the
last couple of years it hasn’t been too hard to just stay in my lane, noodling
away at my little projects, but increasingly it feels like a lot of this craft
I’ve made a career and a hobby out of has vanished.

I love making doodads, little shell scripts, little helpers. I use my
interactive git branch switcher
every single day. I was very proud of that. Colleagues said nice things. Now
anyone can just order that tool or anything like it off a prompt. Nobody cares
about my doodads any more. It feels gauche to admit but I do actually need
those head pats from my peers to feel fulfilled.

This is happening in games, too. This week’s crashout was triggered by a thread
from Zach Gage about how
game making is moving to be more like music. I think
it’s a good insight but I found it utterly devastating. I’ve spent years
learning how to make games, and it’s been hard, and now it feels like that
might have been a waste of time? I was bereft. Then I had a chat with Shad.

Shad’s one of my faves. He’s a terrifically talented designer and engineer and
an all-round great person. His current project is Uncamera, a camera app for iOS
that uses raw sensor output with lookup tables – rather than a filter in post –
to produce photos that genuinely look like film. It’s a beautifully made thing
and I honestly think a contender
for an Apple Design Award when it’s fully done. You should check it out. Here
are some photos I took with it (I am not a good photographer).

It also happens to be developed entirely without generative AI. Shad’s reasons
for this are very similar to my own; a lack of joy or fulfilment in the making
of the thing. His anxieties are also similar. The difference is that Shad has
kept updating Uncamera in spite of those anxieties, while I wallowed in
self-pity.

Here’s the thing: I’m already doing everything the hard way. I decided to make
my own game engine, in C++ of all languages,
because I wanted to do it. If my
goal was to make games as quickly as possible, to be able to “compete”,
I’d be using Unity or Godot or Unreal. I wouldn’t be messing about trying to
produce a faux-3D renderer like in the header image of this post. I do things
the way I do because I enjoy doing it that way and because I learn a lot through
doing it.

Through chatting to Shad I came to realise there are only really three paths
open to me. I can start using generative AI to feel like I’m “keeping up” or
“competing”, but then I won’t enjoy the work. I could stop making things
entirely, but as any creative person will know that’s never really an option.
Or, I can keep making things the way I enjoy, keep learning, keep doing it the
hard way, for no real concrete reason other than I want to do it. That’s why we
make games. That’s why we make anything.