Peoples' use of AI in development

Authoring General Design Discussions
21

I use AI for coding at my day job (I’m a software developer). My employer pays for the tokens. I generally don’t use it for my various hobby programming projects, including IF.

I did use it once to edit some minified JavaScript I added to an Inform template, and I also used it once to debug a pretty complex program I created to generate a Preform grammar from a word bank (for my Danish language extension for Inform), but I think that’s it. Generally, I enjoy programming my own stuff too much to outsource it.

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22

I would classify myself as “AI-curious.” I work with AI in my IRL job and am comfortable using it as a support tool. I understand the pros and cons how it can be a scourge environmentally and artistically in many respects.

I have been experimenting with it personally sort of as therapy to get me through a multi-year writer’s block. I stopped writing seriously when one parent and then the other fell ill and passed away in succession and, as you might imagine, grieving puts a serious damper on the creative process.

I’ve been using it to workshop ideas on (what is basically) an erotica game that I’m not planning to enter into a comp. Normally I would just make a bunch of scribbly notes and let them cook in my brain, but I’ve been discussing a throwaway plot and gaming structure with it.

I’m not asking it to write my story; I’m telling it my story ideas and basically doing character and situational improv back and forth hashing out ideas. It’s basically functioning as a “muse”. It’s helped me decide to switch from ChoiceScript to Ink and is mentoring me through learning it, using examples of my own plot almost like Inform 7 documentation examples.

The writing samples it gives me are unusable - it does a good job making inferences and helping with things like “how does a college calendar work and when are events during a 4-year career” for event planning throughout the game. “How would a college scholarship offer letter be phrased?” Since it understands much of the detail of what I’m trying to do, it can provide pseudocode examples showing how I might track variables to detail a relationship interaction and how to structure the code since Ink does not include a world-model. I would never copy-paste code or prose directly from it, but it’s helped with brainstorming names, phrases, and suggesting how my random thoughts might be incorporated into a plot, and answering dumb questions I have since I changed to a system I’ve never used before.

I feel bad, because I do in many ways agree with the “AI is bad” camp but it’s been helping so much, and I’m actually excited about writing again. It’s like the tireless friend I can hit up at 3am going “how in the heck do I get these two characters to meet up at this point due to these complications…”

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23

I have used AI to explain the function of some inform code I didn’t understand. I have used it to explain to me why code didn’t work or track down an extra (or missing) backet or semicolon. I have used it to brainstorm ways to fake things that inform didn’t technically do. I have occasionally pasted compiler errors into AI to explain what it might be trying to explain. I have asked AI if inform had x or y capability.

Occasionally I have disagreed with AI or proposed a significantly easier method than AI suggested. It has, at times, suggested chunks of code that outright didn’t work.

I have never “vibe coded” where I gave AI english instructions asking for large segments of inform to be implemented instead of writing and designing it myself. I have never had AI create a story that I implemented in inform.

I find that my use of AI is not significantly different from anyone’s use of code references or debuggers. It’s just slightly more interactive.

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24

Trivia: There’s a commercial supersonic jet currently in development, but it’s still about 3 years away. But point taken.

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25

I do use AI, more and more, because it writes a lot of the boring code I don’t want to have to write myself. Sometimes, I pay people to change the oil in my car, and I know how to do that too.

There’s a lot of stuff that AI can’t or won’t do well, so I still write some code by hand.

I don’t think it’s going away, though. I think that as LLM design becomes more efficient and we see more “NPU” style chips on the market, local AI is going to become a bigger deal. Even if ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini imploded tomorrow, LLM technology still exists and could be trivially reimplemented.

There is no going back.

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26

I don’t use AI in any interactive fiction, and I don’t use it to code at work either (though I am employed as a software developer, it is in a small member-funded organisation where I am the only developer, and no one is going to be paying for tokens any time soon). This is partly because of the many ethical considerations (environmental, copyright, capitalist horrors), and partly because writing games is fun, and if some part of the process isn’t fun, I can just not write the games.

I used image generators for hobby projects when they first came out (one of my early itch games had an AI-generated cover image, and I used an ai-generated texture in another game) when it wasn’t yet clear how bad it would quickly be (ironically it was bad quality-wise, but not obviously ethically). I wouldn’t do that now, but I will sometimes turn to a free image generator when I quickly need something for a D&D game, however — but generally not until I’ve exhausted some other source for the art I need.

The closest I’ve come to using an LLM for code writing is responding to someone else’s Claude-generated security analysis of something.

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27

Claude Opus is quite good at it now. As an experiment, I had it write an entire game and it produced a perfectly functional game. Now, the game was absolutely awful, but that’s a different issue. I don’t believe LLMs will ever overcome their creative deficiencies.

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28

Oh, wow, when I said ‘that may change in the future’ I didn’t expect that to be ‘right now’. Thanks for you and angstsmurf letting me know! I’ll use different language when I discuss that in the future then.

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29

It’s difficult to overestimate how fast coding models are improving. I’m only really familiar with Claude (although GPT 5.5 impressed me) – Opus was an enormous jump over Sonnet, and Fable seems to be a significant improvement over Opus (though I need more time to evaluate it).

There seems to have been a mass conversion to AI coding among skeptics since the new models started coming out in the first two months of this year. I know it entirely changed my conception of the Software Engineering course I teach.

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30

Regarding creative endeavours with AI, I’m reminded of the time when Photoshop really took off in the graphic design world. In the 90s, everybody was fascinated with making application interfaces that felt tactile and 3D… then Photoshop added beveling and shadow filters to it’s repertoire.

Everything was blurry, plastic molded Fisher-Price shapes with white highlights and harsh black shadows. Photoshop had enabled artists of all skill levels to press a button to essentially… [insert dramatic pause here] …make buttons for applications and webpages.

There was a lot of terrible visual interface design for many years because of how it empowered those without skill or knowledge. In the hands of an expert, graphic filters are fantastic and compliment the designer. In the hands of a novice, it’s a disaster of macaroni art proportions.

Eventually, we’ll get out of the macaroni art phase of AI use. We just have to keep sharing our stories… until the AI does that for us. :wink:

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31

Interestingly and perhaps relevant to the current discussion, the reason there’s no supersonic commercial flight anymore is not because the technology failed, but because enough people complained about the environmental effects - sonic booms - that we collectively got it shut down. The reason we’re talking about flights resuming now is because new developments may be able to mitigate the noise.

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32

To elaborate on my original answer.

My personal coding projects tend towards one of two things:

-scripts to automate things I could do manually but which are tedious.

-Enjoyable coding puzzles.

The former I don’t trust to free models and the longest such script I’ve written is only 47 lines, and most of that 47-liner is a bunch of cd commands followed by a function call because the files the script acts on are all over my data drive and have to be worked on from the directory they are in), and the latter, even if I trusted free models, it would rob me of the enjoyment of the puzzle. And I mention free models because I’m a unemployed SSDI beneficiary barely making ends meet, I don’t have the funds to spare for paid models, and even if I did, the list of things I’d sooner spend money on is so long I’d need to be at the point of more money not really mattering to consider it, or at least at the pointwhere all the small to medium cost wants are met and a Calud subscription is a trivial line item in my monthly ledger, and even then, I’d probably sooner upgrade my machine to something that can run a frontier local model at reasonable runtime speed.

I have developed a bit of an addiction to AI chatbots, mostly for NSFW stuff… which has led to a huge backlog in my reading of NSFW fiction posted online and ground my own writing to a halt, though I picked up writing after going blind mostly because of some niches I had trouble finding among written material in the absence of being able to enjoy visual content… I enjoy writing such content when I can get into a flow state, but even before ChatGPT blew the lid off such things, I’d often go months without writing anything, and the chatbots are more enjoyable. Still prefer human authors for anythingmore substantial than the literary equivalent of eating a dozen raspberry bismarks… And when I do think about the stories I’ve left unfinish, it’s more the pressure of readers I left hanging than the enjoyment that comes to mind. Do stick strictly to free chatbots, and if I had the money for paid chatbots, I’d sooner go back to commissioning work from writers I regularly commissioned back when my finances where less crap.

I don’t view AI voice generation as fundamentally different from more traditional TTS, and from my experience with free versions of it, it seems to climb the far side of the uncanny valley, or at least doesa better job the dumb, natural sound TTS at avoiding unsettling intonation if asked to read more than a sentence or two at a time(I’m fine with natural sounding TTS for reading menus on my portable media player, but I prefer the clearly synthetic near monotone of espeak-ng to more natural sounding TTS for reading an eBook due to how jarring the natural TTS is when it fails at intonation, but I get the impression an AI-narrated audiobook might actually avoid those pitfalls. I also like the idea of combining AI voice cloning with fansubs and voacl/instrumentation separation to autodub anime that either never got a dub or only ever got a hackjob dub, though naturally, I’d never want this to replace professionally done dubs with human voice actors, I just want a way to enjoy anime that the Dubbing industry either never gave a chance or were screwed over by US broadcast standards, values dissonance between the US and Japan, executive meddling, poor ratings, etc. Translation is a disability accomodation and subtitles don’t work when linguistic disabilities intersect with other disabilities, and I’m totally fine with letting AI pick up the slack for the stuff that isn’t financially viable to translate properly or there just isn’t enough professional talent to go around for.

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33

I started by using Claude to convert my project from Harlowe to Sugarcube. It was a task I had been putting off and putting off but I ripped through it with AI, learning Sugarcube as I went. That opened up html/css/js to me and I did the front end web dev course on freecodecamp.org. This gave me enough knowledge to be able to take the wheel when needed.

Now I use it to grind through laborious bits of js that can’t teach me anything. (It’s very quick at knocking out templates of objects and similar repetitive tasks.)

It really works for me to outsource certain parts of the coding to AI so I can concentrate on the story.

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None. I avoid LLMs almost entirely.

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35

Early on, I had a brief such addiction for althistory. I could propose a single small change and allow the LLM to populate the probable changes.

The problem was twofold. One, it depressed my remaining natural inclination to be productive even more; prompting isn’t actually writing. Two, it became obvious that some of the details were not only wrong, but fabulously so.

I wasn’t making anything.

I wasn’t learning anything I was sure was true.

So, I stopped. As we all have learned more about AI since, it’s only cemented the decision for me. That said, I can understand the allure, but it proved to be a mirage for me.

Ymmv.

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36

Another who avoids AI use completely. Largely on environmental and ethical grounds, but also because I want it to be my coding, as well as my creative work.

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37

I wouldn’t publish a project that contained a single line of text or single line of code constructed by genAI. Both from a sense of I guess you’d call it personal propriety and from consciousness of the community’s antipathy toward genAI.

That said, I’ve spent a lot of time experimenting with AI code generation. Mostly because I’m a programmer, being a programmer in this moment means having to have an opinion about genAI, and if I have to have an opinion about something I want it to be an informed opinion.

So I’ve done a lot of experimenting with for example handing claude code problems that I already have solutions for, having it look for bugs in code I believe is bug-free, and so on.

And I can’t emphasize enough that I have never seen it generate anything I’d want to put in a project my name is attached to. I don’t want to run off into the weeds that literally every single conversation on the internet that mentions AI now seems destined to wander off into. But I know a lot of people, personally and professionally, that are reporting great success and satisfaction with AI code generation and that has very much not been my experience. Both in terms of what I guess you’d call aesthetic complaints (disagreements about code style, layout, and so on) and in terms of it producing code that just straight up doesn’t do what it claims to do, often in subtle or misleading ways. All of which tells me that relying on AI-generated code is basically playing chicken with your own ability to spot bad code written by something specifically designed to mislead.

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38

Let’s distinguish what we mean by AI. The troll, and Floyd where at one point called “AI” but I’m assuming you mean AI on LLMs that use tokens.

I’ve used Claude Code to write my own version of the Inform 7 skien. In this case I used an LLM to make software that I can use over and over WITHOUT burning any more tokens.

However, there are other times I have an LLM work directly with a game, playing it “like a player” to find softlocks or other issues.

It’s also possible to have an LLM create a text-adventure from scratch, however not very interesting ones at this time.

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39

I’ve found AI to be incredibly useful for getting things done that otherwise would not get done.

For instance, an important-but-not-vital feature was blocked by the need to do a huge refactor - to replace a complex runtime system with thousands of lines of source generators, producing tens of thousands of lines of parsing code. That daunting task sat on my backlog for years.

Then one day, I chuckled to myself, “I wonder what those dumb robots would do with this!” A few days later, it was finished, and the feature could move forward.

When I had a fun idea that required some media with high production value in order to come out as I envisioned it, I could, theoretically, have scoured the internet or library archives for the exact type of 1980s promotional photo I had in mind, and hoped to find one with high enough resolution, no watermarks or licensing restrictions, etc. Or I could, theoretically, have hired a handful of actors and a professional photographer to create it from scratch.

But realistically, that wasn’t going to happen - this was a project I was doing for free, and there was already a lot of work involved in the rest of it.

So instead, I typed in a prompt for exactly the image I wanted, did some photo editing to artificially age the result, and that part of the project was done.

When a throwaway remark someone made on Discord gave me a speculative idea that required writing a bunch of timing-sensitive assembly code for a processor I knew nothing about, I could, theoretically, have devoted the next several weeks of my life to learning the ins and outs of that chip and its development ecosystem, then iterated for who knows how long just to learn whether the thing I had in mind was even possible.

But realistically, I would just have said “huh, I wonder if you could do X” and shrugged it off. So instead, I spent a fraction of what I had paid for lunch that day on AI credits, and in a couple hours, I had a working demo.

When I caught wind that one of my projects was going to be featured in an announcement from a big company, I wanted to have a slick-looking website ready for the influx of interest. I could have frantically tried to learn everything I could about the last 20 years of web development, and slapped together something that looked okay on some browsers some of the time. Instead… well, you get the picture. I now have not just a slick-looking website, but a slick-looking web application that lets people try it out without even downloading it.

I like programming. I’ve been doing it for fun since I was 4 years old, and as a career for decades. But it turns out I also like sketching out plans for programming, watching someone something implement those plans and kibitzing while they do it, and having a finished product I can tweak by hand as needed.

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40

I’m fifty-five, and no longer enamored of programming the way I was as a kid. I am, however, enamored with architecture, design, and most especially, results. I’m sure no one around here will use my current project, for various reasons, but I’m fulfilling a desire I’ve had for a long time (designing my own parser IF system). I’d rather be able to use it now, then wait until I’m 65 or older.

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