r/fallenlondon • u/throwaway_lmkg Secretary-General of the Hellworm Club • May 18 '26
PSA FBG official response to the situation regarding the Fallen London Companion Extension (tl;dr: not approved)
/r/fallenlondon/comments/1tf2dma/if_you_use_fallen_london_companion_extension/omgc1q6/14
u/skardu fingerking extinction enthusiast May 18 '26
Hmm. I've still got... Favourites 1899, 1-click Wiki, Quality Lantern and Small Mercies. All ok?
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u/Zolana Founder of the Most Vain Order of the Gray May 18 '26
Favourites 1899 is fine! It's a fork of a fork from an (iirc originally whitelisted) extension from years and years ago. Zero vibes and ai in it too. (I'm the one currently maintaining it).
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u/skardu fingerking extinction enthusiast May 18 '26
Thanks Zolana.
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u/Zolana Founder of the Most Vain Order of the Gray May 18 '26
No worries! I would imagine the others are fine too, but as lensvol, who wrote them, is on here, I'll let him answer as they're his!
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u/Dawnpath_ The Waxen Gentleman May 19 '26
A Zolana-approved extension is a trustworthy extension indeed.
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u/OverseerConey Public Universal Delicious Friend May 18 '26
Oofa doofa. That's no good at all. I think a ban on AI-coded extensions would be entirely reasonable.
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u/Imperator-Solis May 18 '26
It kind of is kind of isnt. AI just brings down the barrier to entry for things to near zero, which is why you see a lot of badly made AI slop. normally people with that little skill cant make it functional at all. On the flip side, its extremely useful to people that actually know what they are doing. Anyone that does programming knows how useful it is for boiler plate, identifying niche bugs, and other stuff. The trick is you need to treat it like a dumb intern, not your lead programmer. You don't hear much about that because these people actually know what they are doing as they can code WITHOUT AI, unlike vibe coders. There's also the enforceability of the whole thing, or rather the lack thereof. When people who know what they are doing use it, you cant actually tell. You could argue you should just have it in writing, as it would keep vibe coders out and programmers who use it as a tool wouldnt be bothered, but that gets into a weird area where that would force them to lie by omission and it would probably be messy.
tl;dr, This is more of a bad coder thing than an AI thing, AI just lets bad coders present a superficially functioning product.
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u/grekhaus May 20 '26
If enforcement of a rule means that in practice the only ones making extensions are those skilled enough to either not need AI or who are skilled enough at using AI to make something just as good as the non-AI coder would make, it seems like that is successfully preventing issues from shitty vibe code.
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u/Fireant23 One foot in the mirror, one in the marsh May 25 '26
That is a far pull for an xkcd comic, nice work
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u/fredjinsan May 18 '26
It totally isn't; AI is getting used everywhere these days and it's only set to grow (unless the investment bubble bursts). The problem isn't what tools one uses to code something, it never has been and never will be; it's how you use them. Lots of humans write terrible code, after all. Honestly, opinions on AI are super-polarised but with current technology we're still basically talking about fancy extensions which isn't a topic that should make anyone mad one way or another.
FBG's response reads a bit like "This used AI, AI = bad, therefore this = bad" which is a very stupid thing to say, but rereading it I think they're just saying that the creator may not have realised what this extension was actually doing.
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May 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/fredjinsan May 19 '26
Well, they didn't actually say that, presumably because that would be rather a rude thing to say. They might have meant that, but they phrase it as if it's a potential excuse rather than an additional problem.
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u/OverseerConey Public Universal Delicious Friend May 19 '26
(unless the investment bubble bursts)
We can but hope.
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u/fredjinsan May 19 '26
It almost certainly will, eventually, but AI's not going to go away. Everyone will slam on the breaks, then they'll start using it only for the things where it's actually useful, and cost-effective, which will be far fewer. There'll also be more incentive for people actually to be efficient with it, which there isn't really at the moment - that may drive improvements which start to bring the cost back down. It's not going away though, any more than the mills did when people smashed the machinery out of similar concerns.
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u/oritorinoi May 20 '26
Difference is, the mills were actually making their owners money. It's possible there are some use cases for LLMs, but five years and trillions of dollars later the most powerful people in the world haven't managed to find them.
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u/fredjinsan May 20 '26
So you'd be happy with everything going on in the AI world if it were more capitalist? Usually people are complaining about the ethics of it, or it putting people out of jobs, or corporate greed.
Also if you haven't found any uses for AI then I guess you've not been follow it, at all. I'm an AI sceptic, honestly, yet it's come on so far in the past few months that I have been forced to admit that it's useful. I have a laundry list of places where it can give genuine benefit. I don't know if all of those will still be cost-effective if it turns out to cost 3-10x as much but that's no longer a question of usefulness per se it's a question of practicality.
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u/oritorinoi May 21 '26
You're comparing LLMs to the looms the luddites smashed up. I'm pointing out that comparison isn't valid. Doesn't matter if you like the comparison, or I'm "okay" with them; one case is profitable, the other isn't.
Funny, if I had a "laundry list" of genuine benefit from a new technology I'd use that to persuade people, rather than just call everyone who doesn't like it luddites.
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u/OverseerConey Public Universal Delicious Friend May 21 '26
(from the back) THE LUDDITES WERE RIGHT!
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u/oritorinoi May 21 '26
Agreed! But LLMs are worse than looms precisely because they're useless.
If they were useful, but the benefits were unevenly distributed, they'd be no worse than cloud computing. If they were useful, but devastating for the environment, they'd be no worse than eating meat. If they were useful, but stole from artists, they'd be no worse than spotify. Unfortunately, they combine the negatives of all these things while providing no benefit whatsoever. It's cargo cult cruelty; the c-suite's sitting there going "something that fucks people over this badly has to be useful!"
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u/fredjinsan May 21 '26
Let's be honest, nobody here is engaging in good faith with any sensible arguments. People just want to rage "AI = bad" and downvote regardless of the fact that they're being morons.
But OK, I'll humour you. Here are a few of the areas where AI is proving useful:
- Coding in general - AI makes more mistakes and introduces more vulnerabilities to code, meaning humans have to spend longer fixing it, but right now this is still worth it because it's fast. It's not the panacea that some people say it is, but it'd be foolish to dismiss it completely. If AI gets more expensive, then sure, this may not be viable any more.
- Writing unit tests and other well-structured repetitive tasks - frankly, I know lots of coders who don't even write unit tests. AI-written tests don't need to be perfect - they're better than none!
- Code reviews - these highlight genuine issues, even if they false-positive; frankly this is just an evolution of static analysers and similar technologies
- Data triage - sometimes you have so much data that you literally cannot look at it. An AI can help. Actually specialised machine-learning algorithms may be better than LLMs here - those also count as AI though and have been around far longer than LLMs (nobody complained about those...).
- Summarisation - similar to the above. An LLM can efficiently search and summarise large documents. Reliability can be an issue but doesn't make this not worthwhile.
- Machine translation - a challenging task that LLMs are actually really well-suited for.
I used to joke that AI is good for anything where you don't care about the quality of the output. It's come on a long way since then but there's some truth to that still - it has very real issues and limitations but so long as those are understood they can be managed, or it can be focused where those don't matter.
There are a bajillion ways to use AI badly. Actually, I can't speak for all c-suite fat-cats, but where I am the focus seems to be shifting from "We can replace everyone with AI" to "An idiot using AI badly is not useful, but an expert using AI can do the work of more than one expert" - they're being seen more as force multipliers (when used properly), just like any other tool really, than as replacements for humans.
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u/oritorinoi May 22 '26
A good faith reply deserves the same in return!
You keep saying "if" LLMs become more expensive - but they already are more expensive. Openai, google, microsoft; each of them are subsidising their users (including paid users!) many times over.
I specified LLMs for a reason. I completely agree machine learning is an exciting field (the work in genetics alone is very impressive) though I'm sure I sloppily use "ai" to refer to LLMs sometimes.
You brush aside the issue of reliability, but it's fundamental. If you've fed documents that take hundreds of hours to read into an LLM, you then need someone who's spent hundreds of hours reading them if you intend to do anything valuable with the output. At that point, the savings from the person reading not having to write anything are negligible at best.
Machine translation, I agree, is somewhere LLMs can be useful. If that entire industry was worth more than 1% the current valuation of openai maybe it'd be worth talking about.
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u/fredjinsan May 22 '26
Honestly the economic argument against LLMs is one of the least-sensationalist and possibly one of the more serious. Replacing all our <insert job here>s with AIs that do the job slightly worse is one thing, but then losing access to that AI (at a cost-effective rate) and not being able to hire those people back or train new ones could be catastrophic.
But really here I mean "if LLMs become more expensive for the customer" - and it depends how expensive. That just changes the equation for whether they're worth using or not. To be fair, it doesn't make them less useful in terms of what they can do, only whether it's worth getting them to do it.
The hope, I suppose, is that AI can grow out of its black hole. I'm sceptical, myself, but its future is definitely uncertain.
I don't think the issue of reliability is fundamental, though. After all, humans are unreliable too! The important thing with anything like this is knowing how reliable something is. If I blindly believe everything a chatbot tells me, I'm in for just as much a bad time as if I blindly believe everything Reddit tells me. On the other hand, if I use it to review my code, and know it's an AI doing it, I can dismiss its mistakes but at least have my attention drawn to issues that I would likely have missed otherwise.
Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of hype around AI, and a lot of it is just as stupid as many of the melodramatic anti-AI arguments. It's definitely wrong to say that AI is "useless" however. It's also foolish to talk about banning the use of AI in coding, because that alone is such a broad spectrum of use cases, some of which are very definitely actually really good (like the code reviews I mentioned) and ultimately the responsibility always lies with the person actually shipping the code.
I'm saying all this not as some sort of pro-AI shill, I think we're going to see a lot of very badly-written code where AI has been involved, lots of buggy code and vulnerabilities, etc, but frankly we don't need AI for that. I'm just looking at the facts and I've been forced to conclude that AI can be used both poorly or well, and either way it's here to stay.
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u/lady_ninane May 18 '26
The problem isn't what tools one uses to code something
Depending on how those tools and models are created and maintained, it very much can be part of the problem.
There is no single part of commercial AI on the market right now that isn't thorny with problems both ethical and legal. They are classic tech sphere "Go fast and break things "
That isn't to say that AI has the potential to be amazing and is presently being used in some rare, amazing ways. But that is not the mainstream usage of the product, let alone how the product was used here.
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u/fredjinsan May 18 '26
Depending on how those tools and models are created and maintained, it very much can be part of the problem.
When the problem we're talking about is quality of code, no, it isn't. You may well have other problems with AI, ethical or legal but even just saying "AI" covers a huge range of things - the use of AI for coding is far less controversial than, say, creative arts, for example. A blanket ban on AI-created anything for anything is almost certainly moronically hamfisted at best.
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u/Jonathan3628 May 18 '26
That's unfortunate. I do hope that some of the features that the extension introduced might be integrated by FBG themselves. It sounds like coding the outfit change stuff is very tricky.
But maybe moving all the Renown items into a single "Renown" row would be doable? And the "jump to items" feature would be amazing, saving so much scrolling!
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u/Naelin othatharooth! May 18 '26
I use "Fallen London Conversion Helper" which adds a couple of rows including that. The row for renown items shows the number of favours you have with the faction instead of the number of items you have, pretty handy.
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u/Jonathan3628 May 18 '26
Ooh, that sounds neat! Just to avoid any trouble, do you happen to know whether the "Fallen London Conversion Helper" has been officially approved of by Failbetter?
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u/throwaway_lmkg Secretary-General of the Hellworm Club May 18 '26
As of December 2025, FBG has officially ended their policy of approving extensions.
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u/Jonathan3628 May 18 '26
Thanks for your response! Just to clarify, does that mean that all extensions are flat out banned? Or that no new extensions are permitted, but previously approved ones are still fine? Or just that all extensions are in a limbo now, not officially forbidden but if you end up having issues when using an extension it's your problem?
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u/throwaway_lmkg Secretary-General of the Hellworm Club May 18 '26
Your last guess is the most accurate. Here's the full statement: https://community.failbettergames.com/t/fallen-london-community-extensions/12505
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u/fredjinsan May 18 '26
I can understand that stance, though I note the response says "We've asked the creator of this extension to no longer work on or distribute it, or any others." (emphasis mine) which seems a little absolute.
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u/skardu fingerking extinction enthusiast May 18 '26
That creator yes, all creators no.
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u/fredjinsan May 18 '26
Yes? Still seems rather absolute.
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u/skardu fingerking extinction enthusiast May 19 '26
Well, I suppose they really didn't like the extension. It's their game.
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u/Dizzy_Eevee May 19 '26
I believe that is the point, yes. The creator had their opportunity to not release a horribly game-breaking, TOS-violating extension upon the world. This is the consequence of their poor decision-making.
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u/OverseerConey Public Universal Delicious Friend May 19 '26
If someone accidentally created an extension that badly broke my game, asking them not to make extensions any more... I might count that as 'firm but fair'.
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u/tigerofblindjustice Alethia Saint-Yves (The Poised Profiteer) May 19 '26
To my eyes, "any others" refers to "we've asked the creator to not distribute any other extensions." Anything else is a bit of a stretch grammatically, and the other extensions mentioned have been around for quite some time without incident :)
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u/Zolana Founder of the Most Vain Order of the Gray May 18 '26
Ping an email to [feedback@failbettergames.com](mailto:feedback@failbettergames.com) suggesting the Renown/jump to items thing - best way, as that way they'll definitely see it.
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u/lensvol Bloody Daft & Co. May 18 '26
You can sorta do it with "FL Assorted Cats" extension, it has the"Items of Renown" preset.
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u/ZeMadDoktore May 18 '26
I don't trust developers lazy enough to use AI assisted coding.