But like, I do like coding, I just have an incredibly hard time thinking in any language other than English because my brain is essentially defective.

Writing code entirely manually inevitably ends with me incredibly frustrated for hours because despite thinking I’ve done something correctly, and even knowing ‘no, I know this is how it’s supposed to work so why isn’t it?’ All because I’ve made a couple of typographical errors that I’m too stupid to parse out from a debugger.

And because I don’t have any friends with even a passing interest I don’t have anyone to turn to for advice there. Nor do I work in the field or went to school for it. My only human options are on the internet but replies often take hours and you have to sift through nine people calling you stupid before finding someone being nice let alone actually helping.

Thank you

thanks for the thoughtful reply. I’m in the first boat of just wanting to make games and other small, self driven projects. I think its mostly the feeling of being excluded from participating in things like game jams and the larger game development community because I use a specific tool.

In an effort to clarify what i think is an example of something like a middle ground between no AI code gen period and as you put it “do the thinking for me” let me see if i can put it in similar terms. Instead of “do it for me” its very much so a back and forth of “i want this behavior when these conditions are met for this function and expect these types of outcomes.” Copilot then generates code referencing the rest of the codebase as reference and i then usually manually copy and paste chunks over to the working files and then compile & run from there for testing.

I definitely agree that over reliance on tools as a means of masking a real understanding of a subject is a genuine problem. And I too hope it doesnt end up having the same kind of effect algorithmic social media has had on society as a whole. But i think i do have hope that it will enable a subset of people like me who struggle with the wrote memorization aspects of computer programming but still desires the thrill of putting some pieces together and watching it work.

I know you’re replying to a reply here, but do people think I mean just putting in a prompt and then running the output and calling that something I made?

I’ve spent years trying to teach myself how to code but always inevitably would lose track of some part or get stuck on some bug or issue I alone couldn’t get past. I went to theatre school for chrissakes and I just wanna make games and silly little projects. I don’t have any friends in this field and pestering random people in discords or on stack overflow can be really annoying for those people.

So why is using an ai assistant I can berate with as many terse questions I want to iterate code that’d I’d normally spend hours struggling just to remember and string together, such a big stick people are putting up their butts?

Grumpy fucks sure love pullin that ladder up behind ‘em.

If you learned math with a calculator you didn’t learn math.

This feels discouraging as someone who struggled with learning programming for a very long time and only with the aid of copilot have I finally crossed the hurdles I was facing and felt like I was actually learning and progressing again.

Yes I’m still interacting with and manually adjusting and even writing sections of code. But a lot of what copilot does for me is interpret my natural language understanding of how I want to manipulate the data and translating it into actual code which I then work with and combine with the rest of the project.

But I’ve stopped looking to join any game jams because it seems even when they don’t have an explicit ban against all AI, the sentiment I get is that people feel like it’s cheating and look down on someone in my situation. I get that submitting ai slop whole sale is just garbage. But it feels like putting these blanket ‘no ai content’ stamps and badges on things excludes a lot of people.

Edit:

Is this slop? https://lemjukes.itch.io/ascii-farmer-alpha https://github.com/LemJukes/ASCII-Farmer

Like I know it isn’t good code but I’m entirely self taught and it seems to work(and more importantly I mostly understand how it works) so what’s the fucking difference? How am I supposed to learn without iterating? If anyone human wants to look at my code and tell me why it’s shit, that’d actually be really helpful and I’d genuinely be thankful.

*except whoever actually said that in the comment reply’s. I blocked you so I won’t see any more from you anyways and also piss off.

GET BACK IN YOUR HOVEL RICHARD