>directionally interesting but executed poorly

Yeah, that sums up a lot of my thoughts with AI c. 2026.

I do take some schedenfreude knowing that AI training also struggles with the utter lack of documentation here. That may be a win in and of itself if this paradigm forces the games industry to properly care for tech writing.

>Because the cost of generation is so cheap [0], it is trivial to try something out, experiment with variations, and then polish it up or discard it entirely.

Well, that's another thing I'm less confident about. The cost is low, for now. But we also know these companies are in loss leader mode. It'll probably always be cheap for a company to afford agents, but I fear reliance on these giant server models will quickly price out ICs and smaller work environments.

That might be something China beats us too. They seem to be focusing on optimizing models that works on local machines out of necessity, as opposed to running tens of billions of dollars of compute. My other big bias is wanting to properly own as much of my pipeline as possible (to the point where my eventual indie journey is planning around OS tools and engines, despite my experience in both Unity and UE), and current incentives for these companies don't want that.