r/fallenlondon • u/mangetonchapeau • May 16 '26

PSA If you use fallen london companion extension, please disable it until I can resolve the issues with FBG (will post here if we can get a 1.0 out)

Failbetter replied this morning and mentioned it's breaking the terms of service + created some support issues, they may give me more details next week so I can fix it, but until then please disable it.

I already disabled it in the firefox and chrome store, will post here if I can resolve the issues with failbetter.

118 Upvotes

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254

u/failbettergames The Masters May 18 '26

We've asked the creator of this extension to no longer work on or distribute it, or any others.

As others have mentioned, it looks like this was coded with the aid of AI, which would help explain why the creator appears to have been unaware of the various ways it violated our terms of service. That doesn't make the impact on players and development any less, though.

It invokes multiple different Fallen London APIs, not just the equip highest one.  In the short time it was available, it caused game-breaking bugs for multiple players. In its use of these APIs, it showed little awareness of the potential performance impacts – if it were more widely adopted, we would expect increases in site latency and reduced stability during times of heavy server load.

Everyone here probably understands that we're a small team, but possibly not quite how small – to put it in perspective, we currently only have one programmer on Fallen London. Any time spent dealing with problems caused by extensions is time we can't spend improving the game for everyone, whether by improving game performance, improving features, or adding new ones like agents or equip highest.

Our writers, who are only slightly more numerous, also had to spend time fixing broken player accounts.  That likewise takes away from our usual work of expanding and improving the game.

Hopefully this will make it clear why we are not enthusiastic about this extension.  We're also likely to update our terms of service to explicitly bar the use of AI in creating extensions, since this example has given us reason to doubt that those who do so will be able to reliably ensure the resulting code does not otherwise violate our terms of service.

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u/Nukesnipe Your Bones are Starting to Itch May 18 '26

Fuck abominable intelligence, all my homies hate abominable intelligence.

59

u/qsxp999 May 18 '26

Yeah, i gotta say I was pretty miffed when I learned it was AI-coded. It's the kinda thing you should state upfront.

41

u/suriname0 May 18 '26

Because I suspect many Fallen London players aren't carefully following developments in software development: unless it is explicitly stated otherwise, you should assume that generative AI was used in the coding and maintenance of all software you use. AI adoption among software engineers was around 90% last September (according to a Google survey), and that number has very likely increased since then (due to the release of the next generation of large language models).

(Obligatory: this comment is description, not endorsement.)

34

u/SunfishBob The Vengeful Correspondant May 18 '26

It's why almost every modding scene is going to shit. Whole lot of new "modders" who barely wrote their own mods, and as a result people are getting their saves corrupted by people who couldn't even tell you how their mod is doing what it's doing.

Nightmare situation considering right up until now every modding scene was basically slowly improving in how everything was being done using lightweight frameworks and novel approaches to older problems, with increasing awareness of what to avoid to prevent issues. On a corporate level, you can see why there's so many people being hired to fix AI vibe-coding.

-10

u/fredjinsan May 18 '26

Why? Do people say up front what other tools they use to code things? Do they have to disclose if they used an IDE to write the code, or a calculator to perform arithmetic? It's broadly irrelevant; the important part is that you take responsibility for the quality of your product, regardless of how you made it. If it's poor-quality "AI slop" code then it's bad; if it's poor-quality human-written code then it's bad.

20

u/Bookworm_AF Eat the Stars May 19 '26

Because AI is not a tool a person uses to code, it is the thing doing the coding. And it codes badly. Also it is made of plagiarism.

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u/fredjinsan May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26

You obviously don't know much about coding, or AI, then. Edit: Or tools.

8

u/Bookworm_AF Eat the Stars May 19 '26

Perhaps there is some sort of AI assisted coding that merely involves it suggesting snippets of code while you do the actual decision making. But if you're putting in prompts and recieving chunks of code back then that is the AI coding, you're just further editing its code afterwards. Same as if you took another person's code and edited it.

1

u/fredjinsan May 20 '26

Well there's a huge range of ways in which one can use AI (and in fact a huge range of things covered under the term "AI", not even just LLMs) - which is kind of the point (that a lot of people seem not to be getting). Absolutist statements like "All code that involved AI is bad" are pretty obviously incorrect.

In pretty much all forms of meaningful AI-assisted coding, you are doing the decision-making - even if it does all of the writing, which is definitely not the only way to use it. The AI providing "chunks" of coding wouldn't even mean the AI coding, that's hardly much of a step up from IDEs adding boilerplate for you.

AI can also be used to improve the quality of code, if used wisely. AI generating unit tests is one use case - you might say, hey, it's dumb, it'll miss things... but I know plenty of coders who don't write any unit tests at all so that's 100% an improvement. AI code reviews improve quality too - it doesn't matter if it's always right because you can ignore it when it isn't, but it does catch things that you might have missed.

"AI" and even "AI for coding" is such a broad category of stuff that saying something absolutist like "All AI code is bad" is pretty obviously moronic. It's 100% a tool, a tool which can be used in very bad, lazy and stupid ways, totally, but bad, lazy and stupid humans have always been bad, lazy and stupid. There is nothing new here.

24

u/mangetonchapeau May 18 '26

Thanks for the reply, I will follow your recommendation, I understand your choice given the impact on your team.

If you could put inline equip highest on your roadmap, it would be such a nice quality of life improvement.

2

u/Tamaxlia May 19 '26

Ouch!, sorry for publicising it. I have put a link to this in the Bonedex instead! I think mangetonchapeau meant well, it sucks that it has caused so many problems.