A relative known youtuber called the primeagen has recently done a challenge sponsored by Cursor themselves where he and some friends would "vibe code" a game in a week. The results were pretty underwhelming. They would have been much faster not using generative Ai.
Compared what you see from game jams where sometimes solo devs create whole games in just a few days it was pretty trash.
It also tracks with my own experience. Yes, cursor quickly helps me get the first 80% done but then I spent so much time cleaning after it that I have barely saved any time in total.
For personal projects where you don't care about code quality I can see it as a great tool. If you actual have professional standards, no. (Except maybe for unit tests, I hate writing those by hand.)
Most of the current limitation CAN be solved by throwing even more compute at it. Absolutely. The question is will it economically make sense? Maybe if fusion becomes viable some day but currently with the end of fossil fuels and climate change? Is generative Ai worth destroying our planet for?
At some point the energy consumption of generative AI might get so high and expensive that you might be better off just letting humans do the work.
I feel most people drastically underestimate game dev. The programming aspect is only one tiny part of it and even there it goes so wide (from in-game logic to rendering to physics) that it's near impossible for people who are not really deep into it to have a clue what is happening. And even if you manage to vibe-code your way through it, your game will still suck unless you have good assets - which means textures, models, animations, sounds, FX... you get it. Developing a high quality game is sort of the ultimate test for AI and if it achieves it on a scale beyond game jams we might as well accept that we have reached artificial superintelligence.
To be fair, the whole "vibe coding" thing is really really new stuff. It will undoubtedly take some time to optimize how to actually effectively do it.
Recently, we've seen a lot of a shift in insight into not just diving straight into implementation, but actually spending time on careful specification, discussion and documentation either with or without an AI assistant before setting it loose to implement stuff.
For large, existing codebases, I sincerely believe that the biggest improvements lie in using MCP and proper instructions to connect the AI assistants to spec and documentation. For new projects I would put pretty much all of that directly into the repos.
> A relative known youtuber called the primeagen has recently done a challenge sponsored by Cursor themselves where he and some friends would "vibe code" a game in a week. The results were pretty underwhelming. They would have been much faster not using generative Ai.
I ended up watching maybe 10 minutes of these streams on two separate occasions, and he was writing code manually 90% of the time on both occasions, or yelling at LLM output.