It is absolutely wild seeing people who do not know how to code building and shipping computer games.

This kind of language is fascinating/terrifying:

> I assume doing all this computationally is more processor-intensive than using pre-rendered monsters, but it’s very smooth for me on both desktop and phone, so it must not be too intensive. I guess I’ll hear from people if it’s choppy on their device.

I think the nature of our profession as coders is in process of shifting very rapidly, from "write code to do something useful" to "write code to do something useful, better than I could vibe code myself".

Feels like the painful transition when professional photographers started having to differentiate themselves from whatever people could do with their own phone.

On the other hand, as someone who can code in certain domains (web, maps), I could definitely see myself vibe coding as a way to quickly create something in a domain where I have no expertise (eg, Unity).

We already had to beat "I made a spreadsheet", which continues to be pretty damn hard even for large teams of experienced engineers - ask your finance team sometime how many custom spreadsheets they use regularly.

A) Lots of useful apps aren't a great fit for a spreadsheet. AI seems to be opening many of those up the same way.

B) Lots of spreadsheets have bugs which cause then to give wildly inaccurate results, which are relied on to make crucial decisions. AI is also repeating this part of the pattern.

If you need it to work correctly all the time, there's still no substitute for expertise - but looking at the state of computing, clearly many people are willing to use things that have obvious, serious bugs.

In theory, I'm a fan of it. I think getting a working mock-up as a demonstration of an idea is far better than building something from a few napkin sketches and then iterating while we close in on the original vision.

As for my own work, I just spent a couple hours this afternoon in a back and forth discussion with claude code, asking it to mock up a UI for me before "we" start building it tomorrow. It was just a mock-up, so I didn't require precision, but I was impressed with some tidbits that came along for the ride.

Some things it did without me asking

* Mock data for the lists and pages in json format, so I could easily add records to it for different scenarios

* Working navigation between pages, including modals

* Working progress bars and timers

* Working list sorts and filters

* Toasts for functionality that was beyond the scope of the mock-up ("sending email to author of post" or "banning user")

* Not-half-bad animations and transitions between pages, screens, modals, etc

* A responsive layout that worked better than expected on mobile and desktop

* Some ideas I hadn't considered, that we then expanded upon

I would have mocked this up for a client, but not for myself. It's quite nice to have a working html / javascript / css mockup to play with while I flesh out my own ideas - with a benefit that I actually fully understand the output and can tweak it myself as needed.

> It is absolutely wild seeing people who do not know how to code building and shipping computer games.

It existed with adobe flash. As much as programmers hated flash, it allowed artists with little technical skills to create awesome mini games.

>Feels like the painful transition when professional photographers started having to differentiate themselves from whatever people could do with their own phone.

Hmm, do we have statistics about that? Like, did the profession collapsed?

I wouldn't equal the photo I do (not much) with anything close to a pro. Not even to a good amateur level actually. But that's just me. :D

The "nature of the profession" might already be quite diverse, but that's an interesting remark.

The Photographerizationing of software engineering has come.

The upside is clear - vibe coding to test the market, get an MVP defined etc. The downside is that sometimes non-technical business owners decide that something is good enough to launch with non-existent security guardrails, and then a bunch of unsuspecting people get their private data stolen (like happened recently with that dating app).

I know this is not the case here and the game is very cool, I was primarily replying to the comment about the new trend.

The number of monsters on the screen doesn't seem to affect playing speed for me, but when the wall of fire appears it slows down the game very noticeably. (Using Firefox on desktop.)