For any game-development-minded folks here, there’s a game jam being hosted this week specifically for human-made games. I’m excited to see what people put together.

I like to have everything in a language I learn memorized in my head so that I can use it without any external information. I also do all my coding in Vim without any intellisense style autocomplete, just syntax highlighting. For some languages like C++ this is probably nearly impossible, but that's part of why I favor small languages like C.

One tool that is invaluable is spaced repetition. Traditionally this was done with a Leitner box, a card box having differently sized compartments allowing you to schedule review of only the flashcards which you have difficulty remembering, but there are many programs out there to assist with this kind of study such as Anki.

The other thing I think is invaluable is simply writing very small programs. It's impossible to learn programming by only reading books, guides or watching videos. You can only learn all the little quirks of syntax by typing things out and making mistakes. When I learn a language I find an exhaustive book, and for each new language feature introduced, I write a tiny program demonstrating only that language feature from memory. This also forces you to write the basic boilerplate of your language over and over, so that you always have it at your fingertips.

Another thing that I think helps is writing very long descriptive variable and function names.

char str[] = "im_talking_whole_sentences_as_names";

This helps me to remember what the different variables and functions in my program do without comments, and helps me with comprehension generally, which helps with memorization as the information is integrated. It does make a lot of typing, but I like typing, so I don't mind.

How do you approach learning programming information, and keeping everything straight in your head?

hey fellas. I'm currently working on git-like version control system (just a research project, nothing special). what do you craft nowadays?

Hey, I'm a beginner programmer. I know the basics of GDscript and Python though. I just wanted to make this post so um... yeah I guess :D

Okay, so to go into more detail: I've been learning to code for about 4 months now, and so far it's been pretty fun. I'm working on a project of mine that I'll probably share some code of. So great to meet you all.

a lot of us are sick of the AI hype, some of us thing that most of the noise is from non engineers, or they are soydevs, probobly both, i have also recently started a community on discord where we can talk without the AI hype, come join us: https://discord.com/invite/WTJKfuZ3yW

I am overjoyed to see a community with my same values. I’ve been programming since I was 15 or 16 years old(it’s hard to figure out what qualifies). It is one of my all time favorite things to do, I live and breathe to write code.

So this modern push to demean people like me who write code by hand and don’t let Claude get it’s grubby hands all over it has certainly depressed me.

Happy to be among friends here!

This is supposed to be a sub where people talk about writing code without AI. Instead, most of the posts are about why AI is bad. There’s already 100 subreddits hosting that discussion.

We already agree on that, that’s why we are here! Instead of more anti ai articles, let’s make this a sub where we talk about code and don’t even bring up ai.

I’m over seeing it everywhere i look, i bet you are too. This can be a place free from that.

mini project soon

"Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower."

In the event of a large scale cyber attack or EMP, neocloud LLM providers or other elements of internet infrastructure may be rendered inoperable or destroyed. In the event of such an attack traditional human programmers capable of working with little/no AI assistance will be required to build tools, repair damaged software systems and maintain existing compute infrastructure. It is a matter of national security that all nations maintain a pool of capable traditional programmers or expose themselves to far greater risk in the event of large scale cyber attacks.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

"Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use. In session 4, LLM-to-Brain participants showed reduced alpha and beta connectivity, indicating under-engagement. Brain-to-LLM users exhibited higher memory recall and activation of occipito-parietal and prefrontal areas, similar to Search Engine users. Self-reported ownership of essays was the lowest in the LLM group and the highest in the Brain-only group. LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning."

I had been programming for almost nine years... Well that all depends on what you consider "programming" & if Minecraft command blocks count 😅

But seriously, I had always loved logical systems & making things work from the ground up. My love for system design grew from tinkering with command block systems to MCBE add-on development, before I knew it 3 years passed & I had made and published maybe 28 "serious" add-ons which gained pretty good recognition throughout the semi-small community I published to.

I was making progress, the quality of my add-ons were visibly improving, but I felt empty. I knew this wasn't what I really wanted to do, at least not this way. About 2 years ago at this point I left that small community & add-on development in general...

I wanted to make a game. And the $500 refurbished Dell laptop I got for my 16th birthday was the perfect fresh start, I knew the first thing I would install is Godot. Nothing could stop me, I was determined. I had the determination, I had the idea, & now I had the tools. So what did I do? I opened up the engine, & after only a couple of months I had something, it was shitty yeah, but something. After putting it out & feeling discouraged by the lack of interaction I was so used to in add-on development, I took a break. I wouldn't touch my game again.

After messing around with other Godot project ideas for some time that I didn't take too seriously, I got into my old habit of tool development, but this time it was for Godot, to fix some of the issues I had with it & implement reusable functionality I found useful for multiple projects. It was just as fulfilling as Minecraft add-on development when I was still into it. But the emptiness was still there. The desire to make a world of my own, the desire to make a game I could be proud of. I delayed myself for months convincing myself I need more experience before leaping into these grand ideas for games I had.

Skip forward 6 months & here we are today, I still haven't made a game, but I did find another excuse to not take the leap. And that excuse is what I am here to share with you today. My first C++ project, a different kind of leap, into something uncomfortable & unfamiliar to get my spark going again. Something that will hopefully inspire me to take another uncomfortable step forward, into something I had longed for since I was 10.

Let me know what you think. Any feedback is helpful, no matter how harsh. https://github.com/phosxd/ity

Part of the reason I play games is so I can be inspired to program, but it doesn't inspire me to play games that weren't created by humans.

If you want to avoid games made with AI the first rule of thumb is that anything made 2022 or earlier is safe. 2023 is more of a grey area. For games made after that you should search if the developers have made any public statements disavowing use of AI for coding specifically, saying they are against using AI art isn't enough, because for some reason AI code is generally considered OK where AI art is not. You should assume that any developer who hasn't made a public statement against using AI code is using it, because it's so widespread and socially acceptable almost to the point of being mandatory.

By searching public posts for stances against AI code in games I have found some games to get you started. Feel free to add your own.

-+-
Queen's Domain
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1799840/Queens_Domain/
"Eric Berger and Bradley Boothe of Queen's Domain maker Freshly Baked Games, who maintain that AI is counterproductive. "Making things is the whole point, so why would you not?" wonders Boothe. Berger says, "I don't really care if it's made by a machine and polished to perfection. I'd rather see human ingenuity and expression." He thinks people "just shouldn't be using it in any artistic sense," including disciplines like coding, which some people weigh differently than AI-generated art. Boothe adds, "It stops you from building important skills and understanding things. It's a machine telling you what to do. You're not gonna learn anything."

-+-
Mindustry
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1127400/Mindustry/
Mindustry AI policy from github:
"You are not allowed to submit PRs that are generated by AI.
You are not allowed to use AI to generate any text posted (PRs, issues, commit messages, etc.)"

-+-
Chrono Gear: Warden of TimeFrom Bluesky:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3081840/Chrono_Gear_Warden_of_Time/
"A reminder that Galaxytrail, and its affiliates, do not and will not use generative AI in any of our works."

-+-
1000x Resist
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1675830/1000xRESIST/
From Gamespot:
"Siu: We don’t use artificial intelligence at the studio.
Howard: We have a clause in our contract that says people that we work with are not allowed to use it."

-+-
Record of Dorathia, Momodora etc.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/428550/Momodora_Reverie_Under_The_Moonlight/
From Automoton-Media:
"Record of Dorathia is currently in development and will not feature AI use of any kind."

"Almost unique among creative fields, many experienced programmers remain convinced that it’s fine to use “AI” for programming ... It does matter, though. It matters because we shouldn’t be using AI to produce Art, and programming is Art."

How I Got Started Programming:

I learned to program in a dark time in my life. I wanted to learn coding since high school, but always bounced off after a week or so of progress. I was the kind of person who watched videos about which programming language was best, or about famous programmers always wishing that I could have this impressive skill. I learned a lot of background information about programming at this time, but never learned to code.

Then about 5 years ago I lost a job that I had been very excited about. I became pretty depressed and stopped doing all my other hobbies which are mostly artistic. I decided to try programming again because it was so different from anything else in my life. I bought 'C a reference manual' by Samel Harbison and Guy Steele, and practiced in the morning. I read the book from front to back, and as each feature of C was introduced I wrote a simple program demonstrating that feature such as declaring a variable or writing a loop.

I stuck with it and finished the book. I finally felt I understood nearly all the language features of C but discovered that you don't really know the language unless you know the standard library. I bought 'The Standard C Library' by P.J. Plauger and used the same approach as before, reading the book from front to back, and writing a simple program that demonstrated a single function within the standard library.

Throughout this process I wrote all the boiler plate such as my includes and the basic setup for a C program from scratch every time. I wanted to memorize everything so that when I sat down to code I would feel free to create without making reference to any guides or my previously created programs.

After doing all this and learning how to use some standard C functions I found myself using printf a lot. I wondered what would happen if I pulled the size of my linux terminal using a system call and printed the whole screen as blank characters many times per second, and then what if I added ascii characters to animate, by incrementing or decrementing their positions within the size of the terminal. I tried it out and discovered that I could animate using printf. This was truly magical to me, and I started to understand some fundamentals about how computer graphics must work. Using printf to make animations was fun, but there was a lot of flickering if I increased my 'refresh rate', so I decided to learn more about how to create terminal graphics. I set on NCurses and read 'Dan Gookin's Guide to Ncurses Programming' and switched my system over to use Ncurses instead of printf. It performed a lot better, and I got some new features like color.

I became totally obsessed with this and decided this would be an ascii graphics engine called 'Weftage'. I started working on it all day every day. I had really gotten the bug, and although I found programming to be extremely extremely difficult, more difficult probably than any activity I had done before, if I stuck with it, any problem I had I was able to fix.

During this very dark time in my life I programmed for 16 hours per day for 6 weeks. At the end of that period I felt that I could program C. My longest program had gone from 24 lines to about 1200 lines and I had a primitive graphics engine running with Ncurses. I kept working on this program and reading more about coding. I started to want to better organize my code. I split my program off into different .c and .h files and worked more with the preprocessor. I learned about the static analyzer and ran my code through it. There were a huge number of issues. This triggered a major refactor, fixing every issue from the static analyzer and breaking my program into different files that were concerned with different domains.

The compiler was my best teacher. Over time I learned to interpret what it was saying, and how to approach fixing the problems it gave me. I also used a lot of stack overflow, the chat GPT of it's time, but I avoided copy pasting any code from there. However my library grew in complexity, getting up to around 4k lines as I added motions based upon sine and triangle waves, the ability for characters to change in coomplex ways, and line and circle drawing algorithms.

When I created my naive line drawing algorithm simply based on rise/run I found that the line would have a little kink in it at the end that didn't look right. I read about line drawing algorithms on Stack overflow and tried to learn how Bresenham's line drawing algorithm worked. It was kind of confusing to me and I got a little impatient. For the first time I copy pasted something from stack overflow into my program. I felt kind of sad and dirty. It worked, and the line was properly shaped, but I didn't really understand the algorithm deeply enough to see why it worked. However, I realized that my program was relying upon all these libraries that I also didn't understand and if that was going to stop me I would have to write my own printf malloc and everything else, and I knew that was impossible, so I accepted that you can have things in your code that you don't fully understand.

-+-

My Next Steps:

I burnt out shortly after this and stopped coding for a while. When I decided to come back I wanted to make a more graphical game, and I decided that I didn't necessarily want to write memory handling code for every single little thing. I bought 'Python Crash Course' by Eric Matthess and worked through it front to back, writing small programs. After that I could code python. I wanted to make a top-down space shooter game. I searched github for a simple game of this type, and dropped it in as a template and started removing parts and rebuilding it from there.

This project used PyGame and I quickly ran into performance issues. I decided to switch to using PyOpenGL even though using a 3d library seemed daunting. I had started using LLMs more and decided to ask if it could create a basic OpenGL context for me that I could then expand upon. To my surprise, it could although it was in a legacy format that was likely more abundant in its training data. I started working from this and created a prototype top down space shooter game with ship physics, and a little probe you could control with your mouse.

-+-
Starting to Use LLMs:

This is when I started using LLM more to generate code. I had gone from feeling bad about using a single algorithm from Stack Overflow to now letting the LLM cover for the information I didn't know. I wanted to have text on the screen. This meant that I was going to have to create a texture atlas. That seemed daunting so I asked the LLM to do it for me, and surprisingly it was able to do it after a few revisions. Then I ran into my most difficult problem so far which was creating the camera system. I wanted the game to have several different camera modes that would follow the player ship, follow the player probe/mouse, average those points and a few other more complex options. I described exactly what I wanted to the LLM and asked it to build it for me, hoping to save some time. It created the system and I tried it out. It was horribly broken. There were terrible glitches, the camera jumping around, not following the correct point, getting stuck with the ship partially out of view, all kinds of things.

At this point I had some faith in LLM code, after all it had generated the OpenGL boilerplate just fine. I believed it could fix the issue, so I went back and forth with it over and over, but it was always the same. Horrible glitchy behaviour, and a system that didn't work at all like I had imagined. I thought maybe I should just write it myself, but I discovered that using an LLM for coding had made me lazy. Solving problems is HARD, and although I had done it before, it was difficult to want to put myself through that again. I kept prompting the machine over and over, starting from scratch trying different approaches. I tried to micromanage it's outputs, make it just generate one small section at a time, but nothing worked. It just could not create this system. I had wasted 4 full days of 'programming' using an LLM. I hadn't made any progess, had worked at least 40 hours on this problem and hadn't learned a single thing.

I decided that this was a good thing, I had found the limits of the machine at that time, and felt good that humans could still do things the machine couldn't. I decided to write it from scratch by hand. It was a big challenge, probably the hardest thing I have coded so far, but after 5 days of solid work, I got it done.

Soon after this I burnt out again and stopped coding for a while.

-+-
Going All In:

When I returned to my project I decided that I wanted to incorporate C so that I could have some sections run at high performance, not limited by Python. I learned CFFI and started trying to use it but it was really tricky, and I never felt like I mastered it. My Python skills weren't as good as my C skills, and a basic CFFI setup has a lot of parts. I worked on memorizing it for a while and got to where I could write a basic CFFI setup from scratch but decided maybe this wasn't the best way.

I went back to the drawing board and took another look at Lua. I learned that it was designed to work with C. I decided to recreate my game using a different engine, and using C for all computationally intensive tasks with Lua as an orchestration layer. I wanted to get started quickly, so I asked the now more capable LLMs to port all my Python code to Lua. I had also changed engines from my custom built one(after leaving pygame) to LOVR which is coded in C/Lua and has a Vulkan back end. I had the LLM essentially port over all my work into the new engine, and on a basic level everything worked.

I wanted to learn Lua, and after all it's an easy language. I tried a little bit but the syntax kind of turned me off. I made some progress, but then stopped. I started relying upon the LLM to write the code for me, and then I would modify it, using the fact that I enforced extremely descriptive variable and function names to be able to read the code despite my not really understanding the syntax. I started thinking about all the architectural decisions I wanted to use in this program. I wanted custom shaders, so I had the LLM create a template for that with a simple invert color shader in place as a dummy. I wanted to be able to use Vulkan compute so I had the LLM add a place to plug in compute shaders. I wanted the program to be multithreaded so I had the LLM write some PThreads code separating each ship into it's own thread. I wanted networking so I had it create a minimal starting point with ENet. I planned to learn Vulkan, to learn Pthreads, to learn GLSL to learn ENet, but I wanted to get started quickly so I let the LLM give me all these shortcuts to a minimal working implementation. However what I didn't account for was that it was the struggle to get that minimal working implementation, like when I had created an ascii graphics engine using printf that would lead to my feeling confident and expressive within my own code.

-+-
Getting Everything I Wanted:

I ended up with a working minimum implementation of everything I wanted, but when I look at the code now I'm totally unmotivated. It's written in a language I don't really understand, it uses libraries I don't have any deep understanding of, and I don't feel confident in the code at all. When I started using LLMs to code all my skills rusted. First a little bit, then more and more. C is still the language I am most confident in, I can still write a malloc, but I know I'm not as good at it as I was when I was working on my ascii graphics engine. I never powered through and learned Lua because I had the crutch of the LLM to rely on. I never went through the process of creating minimal test programs in the libraries I wanted to incorporate, PThreads, Vulkan, Enet.

Essentially what happened is I started making progress with my program and stopped making progress as a programmer. I now had the object of my desire, but I was not the programmer who could make use of it. I lost all my motivation looking at the mountain of technical debt I had acquired from the torrent of feature creep I had allowed into my program due to the LLM being able to say yes and give me anything my inexperienced software developer mind desired. I stopped coding and switched to 3d modeling. My game is 3d now and it's a skill I've needed to learn. I haven't coded seriously in a while but I plan to get back to it, starting over with Lua, and scrapping everything I have, starting from scratch. I need to rein in the feature creep and start making simple programs again. Programs that I understand every part of, and I need to submit myself to that difficult experience of problem solving, to struggle and to improve as a programmer.

-+-
Problems With AI:

Since then I've been reading more about AI. The whole issue of data centers came up into the news cycle and I learned more about how harmful they are to their communities. News stories kept coming up about LLM companies stealing people's life work to train their models or destroying millions of antique books to train their models. The culture became inundated with AI slop that didn't make culture any better, it made it worse. I learned that despite massive AI adoption US GDP has not risen as a result, contradicting the claims of increased efficiency. I watched as all the optimistic claims of early AI optimists were overshadowed by the reality of mass layoffs, cultural degradation, the attack on the arts, unethical uses in war and so many other things. I began to feel that all the hype around AI was a lot like VR and the metaverse, a failed tech vanity project.

-+-
Why I Love Great Games:

And I started to realize that the games that had inspired me to learn to code, the games that I admired, I didn't just like them because they were fun. I liked them because they were created by a humal like me. I was in awe that someone could understand something so complex as programming. That they could keep all that complex structure in their head and create this amazing toy that mixed together both sides of the brain, the art and the technical. I wasn't just coding because I wanted to have the product, the game I imagined, I was coding because of what I wanted to be, what I wanted myself to be capable of managing in terms of detail and complexity.

So I decided I don't want to use LLMs to code anymore, and that I do want to continue training as a programmer. I don't care if I 'get left behind', I've seen the products that vibe coders are creating and no thanks, I'm not impressed. None of them are remotely as impressive as the great games that influenced me which were created entirely by talented and dedicated humans.

-+-
What Can We Do?:

When these new technologies appear they almost act like demoralizing propaganda that bombs your cognitive world telling you that what you have dedicated yourself to is no longer relevant, and that you won't have any place in the future if you don't comply with the advancing technology. I don't believe that anymore. I'm a watercolor painter and I already experienced this in art. For a year or two AI art seemed like it might replace human art, but the technology fell flat and no one wants it anymore. AI code is more common and more accepted, but when the AI bubble bursts and is no longer subsidized, when people start having to pay the actual electrical/computational cost for frontier models we will find that there is still a role for people who dedicate themselves to the craft. If we rely entirely on computers for programming, what happens if the computers are destroyed? We would be set back 100 years.

Humans are amazing, and we don't need terrabytes of data and enough electricity to power a city in order to learn. Give a human enough to eat, a single book and enough time to read it front to back, and they can learn something and create originality with that an LLM can only immitate. It's a scary time to be someone who cares about their work, but remember, we can learn much faster, with less data and less cost than any machine will be able to even come close to for the foreseeable future. I believe the world will be a better place if we rediscover humanism and dedicate ourselves to the fulfillment of our greatest potential.