Code is a wedge and programmers are tools

I'm tired. I'm annoyed. Truth to be told, I'm furious. The genAI bullshit is getting to me and it's coming for my trade and I am pissed off. I wouldn't quite call myself a full-blown AI hater, not yet, but I'm getting there fast.

I'm working on something better, something more like a rallying call. Something that tries to find a way forward. But that takes time, and this feels urgent, so, here we go.

Code is being used as a wedge to make generative AI socially acceptable, notably in the world of videogame development, and I will not have it.

Games are software

Back in December 2025, a study by Quantic Foundry showed that gamers are overwhelmingly negative about generative AI usage in videogames. It asked questions about artwork, music, audio, narrative, dialogue, quests. Do you, maybe, notice something missing from that list?

Games are software.

Repeat after me. Games. Are. Software. Without programmers, without programming, you do not have a videogame. That's kind of a key part of the medium.

And yet, the intricacies of our craft are weirdly invisible in broader game conversations. We're chatty - extremely so - but we stick to our own circles. Sometimes that's for very good reasons, as Polygon showed a decade ago by painting targets on the head of everyone who laughed at a very basic technique being presented as an exceptional technical achievement.

Engineers make bad interviewees. We're nerdy, we're boring to the general public, we struggle to make our craft even vaguely understandable to outsiders. It's not that strange that this very fundamental fact - games are software - goes forgotten.

And right now, that's well on track to completely fuck us over.

You are being played (1)

You've seen CEOs backpedal on genAI hype once they got yelled at. Swen Vincke at Larian is the most famous recent example, promising a lack of GenAI art in Divinity. Note that word. "Art". Is code art? Does it count? For most people, it doesn't.

Did anybody ask how programmers at Larian work? Did anyone ask whether they are using Copilot, or whatever this "Claude" bullshit is? Did anyone find their CTO and ask whether "agentic" anything was on the menu?

Do you seriously think that Microsoft making AI use mandatory for employees did not include game programmers?

Software engineering as a trade is especially vulnerable to the genAI hype. For one, we started it. Generative AI is software and so it comes from us, right? So there are techies, not just investors, who are excited about this, just like there were techies excited about blockchain technology and about NFTs. I don't think we have too many of those in games. (We do have a few. They're annoying.)

Another reason we are vulnerable is that we are, on average, novelty-hungry centrists without so much as a hint of a spine. Tech does harbor raging anarchists (hi), people with strong principles, those who believe in our gut that the original promise of the internet is worth something, that tech literacy is a path to freedom. We're not the majority. The majority is softer, sometimes for the best, sometimes for the worst. We collectively lean liberal, ish, but that's it.

Faced with a new toy that promises to make some of the daily drudgery go away and is inherently sycophantic, many simply cannot resist the siren's song.

Where did best practices go?

Every self-respecting software engineer knows that writing code is easier than reviewing or auditing existing code. That's one reason why getting a professional audit done is so bloody expensive. But somehow, "generated code is fine, you just need to review it carefully" is painted as time-saving. Wat?

Every self-respecting software engineer knows that deleting code is better than adding code. But somehow, "I can write more code faster with this" is a perk now. The fuck?

Every self-respecting software engineer resents iterations times that aren't instant and dreads systems that only offer indirect control. But apparently guiding an unreliable chatbot via responses counted in seconds is a good workflow. What's wrong with you?

Every self-respecting software engineer knows that if you constantly need to write boilerplate then your API sucks and you need to fix it. You do not feed an entire forest to a machine so it can produce the boilerplate for you, jesus fucking christ on a pogostick what are you even DOING?

Every self-respecting software engineer knows that juniors need to be fostered. Our craft takes time and practice to hone. By favoring "collaboration" with a machine, we cut out opportunities to help the next generation grow into their careers. And we're shit at that in games to begin with so it's only going to get worse.

It's like we took decades of software engineering best practices and threw them into the bin for what? Producing more shitty code that nobody will have time to maintain?

Look I know you guys suck at consent, but

On an ethical level this is as horrifying as it is unsurprising. I started my career in 2012 and I was already a grumpy feminist. I dodged the sexual harassment - the genderfuckery was probably already oozing off me and I was ever unfuckable - but not the misogyny. Therefore, I never expected the following arguments to be heard but am still really fucking pissed about all of them.

Consent, first. Open-source code is not food for your shitty machine. Even if you "legally" can, that doesn't make it okay. You shouldn't stop at "no means no", that's a bit dated. I am not saying that genAI is rape culture. I am saying that it showcases a similar disregard for the agency and integrity of others, in a way that is all-too-common with tech.

Consent, second. Forcing your workers to use specific tools is shitty. "Softly" forcing your workers to use specific tools by manufacturing consent, leaving out vital problems with the tech, and getting conversations bogged down in endless nuance is shitty. Let me say no and leave me the fuck alone.

Ecology, literal. These technologies are energy-hungry. "We can fix any problem it currently has with more compute" is an aberration as we barrel towards extinction by way of climate collapse. That is the exact attitude that got us in the current mess. At the very, very, VERY least, it should mean the technology cannot reasonably be deployed at scale until it is a lot more efficient. Doing this math is supposed to be our fucking job.

Ecology, metaphorical. This stuff is killing the very open source software it needs to exist. By enabling it rather than refusing and denouncing it, we are sawing off the branch we are sitting on. We are making the software world a worse place.

Basic respect. One common argument is that it lets you work outside your core expertise. Speaking as a career-long UI programmer who routinely had to fend off graphics nerds who think my job is easy until they actually try to do it for real: go take a long hike off a short pier. Much like an open source project does not want your garbage PRs, I do not want your ill-informed changes with no domain knowledge.

Legalese. Have you not seen the lawsuits? Do you want to get us sued out of existence? Do you really want cash-strapped game studios to set legal precedents for whether open-source licenses are compatible with this nonsense? This probably doesn't apply to Electronic "Don't fuck with EA Legal" Arts or similar, but for smaller companies it should very much be a concern.

FOMO YOLO

The argument I would expect to be heard, especially by CTOs, is that those companies are not remotely commercially viable. Ed Zitron's latest apparently includes numbers about Anthropic's Claude that show it spending ten dollars' worth of "tokens", whatever the fuck that even means, for every dollar of subscription money. I haven't read the whole Hater's guide to Anthropic because I have better shit to do with my life.

Again, we are making videogames. We're in a bit of a crisis right now, I'm told? Why would you get in bed with a vendor who's probably going to blow up or jack up their prices big time by the end of 2026? I'm just a lowly individual contributor, please explain it to me like I'm five but without using "competitivity" or "left behind" so you have to actually try.

Despite all that, though, it's working. Stuff I'm not allowed to talk about. A blog post that ends with "and this was faster thanks to AI". A reference article that used LLMs to summarize GPU specs (and trusted them to respect NDAs? My dude). "Careful experiments" and "just to generate tests" and "only for checking the boring parts of a code review".

That's all the narrow end of the wedge. Using it for busywork is still using it. It means you've got the subscription active, that you've done the setup, that you have now learned the vocabulary as a user rather than a critic. You are not immune to propaganda. You've given it a finger. What makes you believe it will not take the arm?

You are getting played (2)

Put all this together. Programmers are using genAI for game development, that's a fact. Coverage, studies, disclosure are not concerned with code. Programmers are invisible in the games press and in much of games crit.

Our craft is the wedge, and nobody cares that we are such complete tools despite how much power we pack. If genAI becomes normalized in game code, we're fucked.

For one, it'll enable plenty of the broader damage that the companies do simply by existing. There's a ton of money in enterprise software: that's what keeps AWS (Amazon) and Azure (Microsoft) this rich. We're not the biggest clients by far, but we're not just a speck of dust on the balance sheet either.

Most importantly, if we let this fly, then generative AI becomes acceptable. It becomes acceptable so long as it's not seen, so long as it's not "affecting the result", so long as it's just helping with the boring work. You can draw a line from that right to using it for concept art that gets heavily modified, for audio stems that get remixed, for idea generation that surely will not poison the writing in any way.

If you are refusing genAI in games, you need to refuse it from us too. You need to pressure the C-suite on how code is being written. You need to interview programmers. You need to refuse to cede even an inch of ground. You need to grab your hammer, and knock that wedge right back out.