Ghost 🥽

The hate toward @TimSweeneyEpic over AI is so FORCED. 😭 I spent $10,000+ in my second year building a team. My entire first year went into mastering Verse, Fortnite’s programming language. Then watched AI vaporize the barriers I’d sacrificed those two years and all that money to overcome. Here’s my take as a young entrepreneur, game developer, and programmer who sacrificed a LOT to learn his ecosystem, his engine, and his language. AI didn’t just make those barriers easier to overcome. It made so much of what I’d fought to learn accessible to EVERYBODY—including people who never learned the skills, never put in the time, or simply couldn’t be bothered. So trust me, I understand the frustration. You took the initiative, invested in yourself, and did the things nobody wanted to do. Now someone who never put in that work can match or even surpass results you spent years learning to produce. The skills you refined, the code you wrote and optimized—things that were difficult and earned you well-deserved respect—suddenly don’t give you the same advantage. Yeah, that’s a tough pill to swallow. While people were making hundreds of thousands from dumb games with zero code, I chose to pass up those short-term gains and invest in the future. Invest in myself. Learn to build whatever the hell I wanted. Verse was my FIRST programming language. Barely any learning material, limited documentation, and things constantly changing. I watched EVERYTHING I could find. Read EVERYTHING I could find. Spent months and months in Discord learning from other developers. Paid for mentorship. Went the extra mile. My social life, health, education—everything took a hit. I was working 16-hour days, and I still am lol. Finally, I could build the games I wanted. RPGs, tycoons, simulators, roguelikes, whatever. Then, just as I reached the level I’d spent that hellish year obsessing over, Opus dropped AI started doing the work I’d sacrificed so much to learn. 😬 Can’t catch a break lol. Guess what? You can’t undo that. Put your head down and keep building. The goal was always games. Then the bottleneck became running a team and managing people. Same story, except now it required serious money and depended on other people delivering too. I was still legally a minor when I started building the team lol. Zero business experience. I spent thousands learning through mistakes. I had to learn how to hire, communicate, organize work, handle delays, structure, and build a workflow. Trello, Docs, Miro, Notion—all of it was new to me. I invested $10,000+ into strong people, specialists, and a production pipeline. A lot of that was an investment in their potential and what we could build together in the future, beyond the work I needed that day. And just when we finally started producing work at a quality and pace I was seriously proud of, AI made so much of that structure unnecessary too 😂😂😬😬😭😭💀💀 Work that had needed several specialists, thousands of dollars, and weeks or months of coordination became something I could take on myself in days. Some tasks, even hours. At a fraction of the cost. Both times, I made the best decisions I could with the knowledge and tools available. Put me back in those situations without knowing what came next, and I’d make those decisions again. They made sense at the time. Yet now are deemed necessary. Nobody knows the future. So what am I going to do? Same answer: put my head down, adapt, and build. The goal was always games. ☕ Here’s my advice: stop making decisions around protecting the effort you already spent. Make them around what gives you the best chance from here. “I sacrificed so much.” “I went the extra mile.” “I put in the hours.” “I did what nobody else would.” Me too. Two years of it. Now someone starting today can access technical capabilities I had to fight to develop. The barrier to producing something has dropped massively. You can be frustrated about that. Just don’t let the frustration decide how you work. The programming, the team, the pipeline—all of it served a goal. If reaching that goal now takes fewer resources, less time, and a different process, use that. Those tools are available to you too. I’ve had to bite the bullet on two years of sacrifice and thousands of dollars. But the upside is real: better margins, faster production, more room to experiment, and more games I can actually finish. Fewer handoffs, less coordination, and more time spent building. Coming full circle to @TimSweeneyEpic : huge props for the big **** energy of not giving a crap about the backlash and doing the logical thing—adapting to the changes while keeping the end goal in mind: the final product. The games. I fully support him on that. Whether we like it or not, the answer’s the same. Adapt. Put your head down and build. The goal was always games. ☕ #robloxdev #UEFN #FortniteCreative #gamedev