I’ll never not be amazed that we can type some words and get those results back out.

However I do agree that the results are much worse when you try to use them. They look great in screenshots and video clips which makes them perfect for content farmers.

All of the LLM generated games I’ve played have been really bad to play, though. I even tried my hand at a simple game, thinking I could iterate on it with prompts to fix some rough edges. After the initial productivity burst every change turned into a slog of tokens with one thing changing and something else breaking it. I would try to use my remaining weekly token budget across Anthropic and OpenAI to refine it at the end of every week but after a couple weeks it felt like I wouldn’t be getting anywhere without scrapping it and going back to having the LLM build it one step at a time with my careful instruction.

Which, in retrospect, is the only way I can get usable output of an LLM for anything complicated, so it’s not surprising. It’s a fun reality check project though.

I think it’s interesting to watch that we all have to sort of fine tune our own expectations and build the mental model for how impressive this is.

On the one hand I think most of us are incredibly impressed because we know, that quick demo would have taken us months of work to build in the before times.

On the other hand the promise is a cure for cancer and the end of all work.

So when everyone is telling you “skill issue is why you can’t one shot WoW”. It’s hard to know how you’re supposed to feel about Karpathy advertising one shot custom virtual worlds but giving you slop. Incredibly impressive slop when compared to how long it would take to create it just 3 years ago, not so much compared to Elon saying - “by the end of this year, grok will create a version of the odyssey that competes with Nolan’s”