Blow argues software development hasn't advanced much since the early 2000s. As a game developer, I want to offer a counter point.
In the last 3 years, there have been a lot more indie games of far higher quality than we used to get. I'm thinking of the RTS space right now. The Scouring for example. We went from having nobody but Blizzard able to make something that complex to several games with outstanding performance and complexity, often with their own custom game engines that are not only working but working better than I remember wc3/sc2 working at launch.
I don't know how much of a role AI is playing in those games, but I think the performance and complexity of indie games is shooting up and we are seeing very, very small teams make things that large teams struggled with in the past. Honestly, I think indie studios are outperforming AAA in most ways besides spend and length and art budget --and yet, it's the indies who are making their own game engines these days, isn't it?
(btw, we have to also admit that many of these game engine builders look to blow for inspiration (to carmack too), and their architectures are not what you'll find at typical saas companies. Game coding is complicated in a really fun way I didn't get doing plumbing on web projects, speaking for myself)
Yeah, the engines help a lot with rendering, physics, and scene/level building/making custom tooling, and a bunch of other things. They are honestly amazing tools.
AAA and indies now use the same engines for the most part
In game dev however, there's a lot fewer reliable open source tools around. You have a game engine, a small number of great plugins, and a lot of dodgy stuff. You have to/get to make a lot of things yourself.
The scope and complexity of indie games, even allowing for this, is still increasing staggeringly.
...and don't get me started on unreal engine physics and pathfinding issues, or rendering bugs in unity
Indie games didn't get THIS good because of Unity and Godot, if you think that you're deluding yourself.
I've done amateur and professional game-dev and Unity and Godot existing don't make making an FPS any easier than before, engines have existed for a long time.
A solo dev can create (from scratch) an FPS engine, assets, music, levels from scratch over a weekend now.
The video does actually answer its own title, which is refreshing.
And I agree, it’s because organizations and people haven’t changed (yet, if you’re being positive) what it is they’re optimizing for and how they do work. AI gives you more of what you want and gives it faster, that doesn’t on its own change the culture or goals of a company.
Coding was a huge bottleneck in my bottom dollar offshore contractor infested company, the point where it would have been faster for me to solo projects than work managing a team of them. Their organizations are unfortunately highly optimized to entrench themselves, and no VP’s want to take what from their perspective is a risk to hire expensive onshore contractors or just let someone internal give it a shot.
AI has been a huge disruption to that status quo though because it enables people like me that were stuck managing these bozos to just do the thing on a timeline that wasn’t feasible before. AI also removed any excuses these people could make for never getting anything done. It exposes clearly for anyone tangentially involved in these projects that the devs often can’t even begin to understand the problems they are trying to solve.
With the level of detail that I had to specify things for them to be productive, it’s easier and more effective to just give that (often much less detail tbh) to GitHub Copilot or Claude.
It has massively changed the game for me and helps me enjoy my job quite a bit more.
The communication skills to create the synchronized understandings necessary for teams of any moderate size to operate in concert is not there. Communications are everything when it comes to collaborations at any level, and we as an entire civilization are weak at this aspect. This effective communication necessity.
Also AI don’t seem to make communication better, worse if anything. I’m so sick of the whole team not understanding what is going on with Claude written docs and tickets
Just because there's a new bottleneck now doesn't mean coding was never the bottleneck. It was for many orgs, and now it's probably not the bottleneck anywhere
That also is dependent on the company and who works there. Some companies are meeting heavy. A meeting for every little decision. Some are not. Some are paperwork heavy and you need to fill out the form to do anything. Coding is like the 4th or 5th on the list of things that get done. Handed to the most jr of devs to 'just figure it out'. Some companies are just not software companies but they have enough of it that they needed but do not care about it. They only care enough to get their hardware out the door. AI in this case only changes when software is done and how. Not all of that other stuff. Such as have you checked in today during your standup and that your story is progressing?
bottlenecks constantly change. every time you fix one, a new one emerges. coding is and isnt the bottleneck depending on your organization at that snapshot in time. It often was, and often was not
I think it was indeed the bottleneck, however the assumption that "coding is the bottleneck" was baked into how organizations were measured, optimized, staffed for the last couple of decades.
For some years I have been successfully using the following rule of thumb for scheduling a software task:
l/3 planning
l/6 coding
l/4 component test and early system test
l/4 system test, all components in hand.
The separation can be blurred if you follow an iterative approach (also explained in the book), but it aligned roughly with my experience. And whenever I helped a colleague in the past, coding was not the problem. It was either the lack of planning (no data modelling, no rough algorithm design), or no test setup (trial and error coding). It was never the coding part. Syntax errors is trivial to solve (with any good editor) and most libraries have good reference docs (not learning the library is an orthogonal matter).
Say what you want about reducible fractions but that's a pretty nonintuitive way to describe how you divvy up time. Weird to not use percentages or a common denominator...
I think it would be funny if the fractions summed to more than 1. Like the old joke: "the first 80% of the project takes 80% of the time, and the last 20% of the project also takes 80% of the time."
Good supporting evidence for this is that it is changing your software dramatically if you're making your own personalized software to replace subscription software. That works incredibly well. Also there are some examples of companies doing huge swings they wouldn't have done without it like the AWS emulator that just came out.
I think that's really the key for the most productive individuals I've met.
A lot of things that I've paid for subscription services in the past I've just replaced with personalized software for myself. It's not something I would ever release publicly for others to use because I'm sure there's a million edge cases that wouldn't work for a broader audience, but it's perfect for me and saves me a ton of money.
The most productive individuals were already doing that before, maybe they were "just" scripting, doing macros, going to training on how to extend their workflow. The most productive individuals didn't wait for AI to bother IT by explaining how THEIR very unique situation was special and they needed that one special tool nobody else wanted. They were already using FLOSS tools or heck even had a budget dedicated for a dev to help them precisely because they care. Nothing changed for them ... but for those who wanted to emulated them and never dared, maybe those do have now an excuse to try.
This is just like in woodworking and jig making. Sure you can buy a pre-made jig, but you can now just 3D print (vibe code) one that's good enough and is uniquely made for the way you work.
Does this mean that jig makers out there are out of business? Sort of, they need to sell jigs complex enough that you wouldn't want to / be capable of making.
I'm not sure if the software is really the same, but there are a lot of AI slop games, and also a lot of well-made AI games. The graphical improvement in recently successful indie games is astonishing. Realistically speaking, in the past there were many cases where people weren't good at shaders, but there are also many points where optimization has improved. At the art asset level, even if AI isn't used, there are many cases where the code is now far better optimized than before. When I decompile the recent code of indie games whose animation implementation was terrible in the past, I often find it genuinely impressive.
Realistically speaking, AI raised the average quality. Among today's AI slop games, there are many that would have been "at this level of quality, this game could succeed" in the past.
Realistically, that's how it is. So there will be many people telling bad-luck stories like "ever since AI came out, GitHub has stalled," but I think that's closer to the opposite — AI increased production so much that the supply chain itself can't keep up.
The thing is, I can't really agree with the claim that software is the same. I don't know about open source, but when I think about the state of code in code delivered to clients, I think there has been a dramatic rise. Separately from that, because products are pouring out, I think consumers' quality demands are rising far faster than production. Comparing early smartphone games with today's AI slop games makes this even more palpable.
The thing with Jonathan Blow is this, it's incredibly easy to tell ahead of time what he will think about any particular subject.
Anything that makes code more available to "normies" is Jonathan Blow will absolutely hate. Why? Because Jonathan Blow HAS to be the smartest guy in the room, if he's somehow not the smartest guy in the room, there is something wrong with the room, nothing is ever wrong with Jonathan Blow.
So of course, Jonathan Blow thinks AI coding is terrible, only Jonathan Blow can be the best coder in the world, anyone who thinks otherwise is a total moron.
If you don't hand-roll your own programming language and game engine to make your own game, you're a moron. Hell, he even has a video where he basically says if you don't make your own version of JSON and associated parser, you're a fucking idiot.
What I'm saying is this, Jonathan Blow's ego only sustains itself on the idea that he is right about everything and the smartest person on any given topic. The idea that AI might be better at coding than him causes him to implode in a narcissistic rage.
Accurate evaluation. People like JB are hit the hardest by AI revolution imo. I also think that it is understated just how many people in academia or in other fields care only about their ego and that they might do something they are going to be remembered forever for aka have a legacy.
Imagination crisis. The people who understand how to architect software are spending their free time on social media saying "%%% IS INSANE" or something about "I one-shotted this %existing thing%".
The people who said building software wasn't the hard part before were right, you still need interesting problems to solve to find interesting things to build. Gotta get out of the tech bubble to find those. There aren't many interesting problems left to solve for other tech bros
Yeah, all of this power at our fingertips and all I see is "look I ported this 20 year old game to WebGL, and added Mario!" and other such unimaginative projects. There's very few actually novel / interesting things being built right now, as far as I can tell. For once I think you can blame our collective imagination rather than a lack of capability. Apparently creativity has not been solved yet, and being creative is still hard. And most people aren't up for it, which is the same state of affairs as before AI.
I was talking to my friend yesterday about what exactly has AI changed for us. Our lives are still the same( actually worse from job loss anxiety). If this tech is so revolutionary how come nothing in my life has changed positively.
My friend is in managment at faang and he said ai has changed how tech coders now behave at work. he is enjoying the fact that "their tails have been cut by AI". Made his management job infinitely easier.
I think that has more to do with the job market than "AI". All my coworkers have become yes-men due to perceived job insecurity. Not sure this is a positive thing even if it's superficially appealing to a middle-manager.
Because improvement in human QoL is not a requirement for a revolutionary technology. Nuclear weapons come to mind.
We're talking about something that speculatively invalidates all digital data. All code created prior is seen with lesser value to the point of commodification because of its existence. We are past the slow erosion of trust of the photoshop or Wikipedia era. You can't trust anything digital anymore. Encryption is our last hope, and companies now join governments in the race to break it.
Perhaps a bit of a leap but based on their phrasing, I'd be very critical of a viewpoint in management who believes themselves immune from what's occurring to specialized talent across the board. We are intergalactially far away from IBM's "never let a computer make a management decision." A concerningly large number of people submit their data, thinking, and agency to these tools. The impact is real even if not personally felt or in your backyard.
> My friend is in managment at faang and he said ai has changed how tech coders now behave at work. he is enjoying the fact that "their tails have been cut by AI". Made his management job infinitely easier
Yeah, I see this attitude a lot. People seem gleeful that software devs are getting kicked in the teeth, but honestly the business practices in software already have been kicking my ass my entire career. I've never felt like a respected, valued individual at any company I've worked for. I've only ever felt like an assembly line worker and accountability sink for my bosses. Someone to pile shit on, and then blame if stuff goes wrong.
My career has been full of overtime, evenings and weekends, overnight deployments, crunch time, layoffs, and for most of it I wasn't even making lots of money. It's only a couple of years ago I started making more than six figures, and now I'm laid off again and wondering if I'm even going to manage to get another job at all, nevermind one that pays as well.
I made the wrong choice in careers twenty years ago, tell you that much. Now I don't know what to do, but people are happy my tail has been cut, as if they haven't already been kicking my ass for ages. :/
>If this tech is so revolutionary how come nothing in my life has changed positively.
That's a bit of a myopic view. Imagine someone asking the same question a few years after the invention of the printing press.
It's not hard to find examples of how AI is changing things. To take just one example, look at how it's revolutionizing research in science and mathematics. I wouldn't expect this to change the average person's life overnight, but there are absolutely going to be huge breakthroughs in the next few decades.
It’s not the same , I’m sorry i literally used 20 usd subscription to build software services used to cost $10k+.
Ask any sales
Doing software sales perception of enterprise software also changed .
From magic to “maybe we can vibe code it”
The issue is not so much that he’s “not a leftist” as it is his arrogance. He thinks his knowledge extends well beyond his very real skill at game development (the witness is a great game!). One example is his very confident takes on “lab leak” that have not held up.
(HN is also a very big fan of this hypothesis, without realizing it has gotten weaker with time. In their defense, I don’t think anyone wants to think about COVID anymore)
People say that failure tests your character, but I think success is the bigger test. Jonathan thinks that because he made some genuinely excellent games, we should also listen up when he has some new renegade opinion. We shouldn’t!
In the last 3 years, there have been a lot more indie games of far higher quality than we used to get. I'm thinking of the RTS space right now. The Scouring for example. We went from having nobody but Blizzard able to make something that complex to several games with outstanding performance and complexity, often with their own custom game engines that are not only working but working better than I remember wc3/sc2 working at launch.
I don't know how much of a role AI is playing in those games, but I think the performance and complexity of indie games is shooting up and we are seeing very, very small teams make things that large teams struggled with in the past. Honestly, I think indie studios are outperforming AAA in most ways besides spend and length and art budget --and yet, it's the indies who are making their own game engines these days, isn't it?
(btw, we have to also admit that many of these game engine builders look to blow for inspiration (to carmack too), and their architectures are not what you'll find at typical saas companies. Game coding is complicated in a really fun way I didn't get doing plumbing on web projects, speaking for myself)
AAA and indies now use the same engines for the most part
In game dev however, there's a lot fewer reliable open source tools around. You have a game engine, a small number of great plugins, and a lot of dodgy stuff. You have to/get to make a lot of things yourself.
The scope and complexity of indie games, even allowing for this, is still increasing staggeringly.
...and don't get me started on unreal engine physics and pathfinding issues, or rendering bugs in unity
Indie games didn't get THIS good because of Unity and Godot, if you think that you're deluding yourself.
I've done amateur and professional game-dev and Unity and Godot existing don't make making an FPS any easier than before, engines have existed for a long time.
A solo dev can create (from scratch) an FPS engine, assets, music, levels from scratch over a weekend now.
This is only possible with AI.
And when they do, this is what we get:
https://i.imgur.com/w25SmDR.jpeg
And I agree, it’s because organizations and people haven’t changed (yet, if you’re being positive) what it is they’re optimizing for and how they do work. AI gives you more of what you want and gives it faster, that doesn’t on its own change the culture or goals of a company.
AI has been a huge disruption to that status quo though because it enables people like me that were stuck managing these bozos to just do the thing on a timeline that wasn’t feasible before. AI also removed any excuses these people could make for never getting anything done. It exposes clearly for anyone tangentially involved in these projects that the devs often can’t even begin to understand the problems they are trying to solve.
With the level of detail that I had to specify things for them to be productive, it’s easier and more effective to just give that (often much less detail tbh) to GitHub Copilot or Claude.
It has massively changed the game for me and helps me enjoy my job quite a bit more.
but when you have requirements,
why not render the code to fulfil them?
The ancients knew it all along!
What utter twaddle.
I’m old enough to remember pre AI programming and it very very much was the bottleneck.
So old enough the remember the ancient times back in 2023?
A lot of things that I've paid for subscription services in the past I've just replaced with personalized software for myself. It's not something I would ever release publicly for others to use because I'm sure there's a million edge cases that wouldn't work for a broader audience, but it's perfect for me and saves me a ton of money.
Does this mean that jig makers out there are out of business? Sort of, they need to sell jigs complex enough that you wouldn't want to / be capable of making.
I'm doing truly astounding - stupefying - levels of work. Others on my team are actively resistant to my advice but the C Suite isn't.
The numbers are shooting up and to the right but people don't want to get on board. It's too much too fast.
Edit. Consider your own reaction to my statement if down voting.
If you keep doing the black box approach you will be deskilled in the medium term and your input less valuable.
If you are reading the code, explain how you can do the claimed amount of work, since whenever I review output it's a huge bottleneck
It also wasn't functional before-a-days [=
Realistically speaking, AI raised the average quality. Among today's AI slop games, there are many that would have been "at this level of quality, this game could succeed" in the past.
Realistically, that's how it is. So there will be many people telling bad-luck stories like "ever since AI came out, GitHub has stalled," but I think that's closer to the opposite — AI increased production so much that the supply chain itself can't keep up.
The thing is, I can't really agree with the claim that software is the same. I don't know about open source, but when I think about the state of code in code delivered to clients, I think there has been a dramatic rise. Separately from that, because products are pouring out, I think consumers' quality demands are rising far faster than production. Comparing early smartphone games with today's AI slop games makes this even more palpable.
Anything that makes code more available to "normies" is Jonathan Blow will absolutely hate. Why? Because Jonathan Blow HAS to be the smartest guy in the room, if he's somehow not the smartest guy in the room, there is something wrong with the room, nothing is ever wrong with Jonathan Blow.
So of course, Jonathan Blow thinks AI coding is terrible, only Jonathan Blow can be the best coder in the world, anyone who thinks otherwise is a total moron.
If you don't hand-roll your own programming language and game engine to make your own game, you're a moron. Hell, he even has a video where he basically says if you don't make your own version of JSON and associated parser, you're a fucking idiot.
What I'm saying is this, Jonathan Blow's ego only sustains itself on the idea that he is right about everything and the smartest person on any given topic. The idea that AI might be better at coding than him causes him to implode in a narcissistic rage.
The people who said building software wasn't the hard part before were right, you still need interesting problems to solve to find interesting things to build. Gotta get out of the tech bubble to find those. There aren't many interesting problems left to solve for other tech bros
My friend is in managment at faang and he said ai has changed how tech coders now behave at work. he is enjoying the fact that "their tails have been cut by AI". Made his management job infinitely easier.
why is this downvoted?
Manager. FAANG. Enjoys the misfortune of the people he manages. Your friend sounds like a prick to me.
We're talking about something that speculatively invalidates all digital data. All code created prior is seen with lesser value to the point of commodification because of its existence. We are past the slow erosion of trust of the photoshop or Wikipedia era. You can't trust anything digital anymore. Encryption is our last hope, and companies now join governments in the race to break it.
Perhaps a bit of a leap but based on their phrasing, I'd be very critical of a viewpoint in management who believes themselves immune from what's occurring to specialized talent across the board. We are intergalactially far away from IBM's "never let a computer make a management decision." A concerningly large number of people submit their data, thinking, and agency to these tools. The impact is real even if not personally felt or in your backyard.
Yeah, I see this attitude a lot. People seem gleeful that software devs are getting kicked in the teeth, but honestly the business practices in software already have been kicking my ass my entire career. I've never felt like a respected, valued individual at any company I've worked for. I've only ever felt like an assembly line worker and accountability sink for my bosses. Someone to pile shit on, and then blame if stuff goes wrong.
My career has been full of overtime, evenings and weekends, overnight deployments, crunch time, layoffs, and for most of it I wasn't even making lots of money. It's only a couple of years ago I started making more than six figures, and now I'm laid off again and wondering if I'm even going to manage to get another job at all, nevermind one that pays as well.
I made the wrong choice in careers twenty years ago, tell you that much. Now I don't know what to do, but people are happy my tail has been cut, as if they haven't already been kicking my ass for ages. :/
Hard to feel anything but resentment anymore
That's a bit of a myopic view. Imagine someone asking the same question a few years after the invention of the printing press.
It's not hard to find examples of how AI is changing things. To take just one example, look at how it's revolutionizing research in science and mathematics. I wouldn't expect this to change the average person's life overnight, but there are absolutely going to be huge breakthroughs in the next few decades.
(HN is also a very big fan of this hypothesis, without realizing it has gotten weaker with time. In their defense, I don’t think anyone wants to think about COVID anymore)
He thinks he's the foremost expert on basically any topic, from literature to politics, to science, to videogames etc.
Something about the lone programmer off goat-skinning every aspect of the tech stack, while telling you how you are writing software wrong...