Nick Blow retweeted
I find it significant that the most AI-pilled people I know use AI for basically everything…except for writing
It’s remarkably consistent. Why? Because to write is to think. And outsourcing your critical thinking to AI is intellectual suicide
Occasionally I wonder what the first game I played with AI code in it. Or if I have played one yet?
My gut feel is that the resurgence in “classic” game revivals is heavily influenced by AI being able to navigate decades of spaghetti 🍝.
I’d assume every patch post let’s say 2025 has at least some AI code in it, but in terms of base game it’s a little harder to say as dev cycles can be long.
I do wonder what’s going to happen with public data with Reddit going logged-in only. There’s this weird tension between agents and sites not having easily usable, pay-per-use APIs. But again, the RoI for those might not be worth it or obvious for the big providers as agents are still niche and they also can’t view ads…
On a sales call today, and turns out they had used the product I built as CTO of a previous startup (Wakelet), so that's pretty cool!
Even better, they had good things to say about it 😅
Nick Blow retweeted
Few more observations on working with AI-enabled team:
1. One of the things that separates junior devs from senior is the ability to notice that a design is going wrong and trying another direction early. Juniors will push in a hopeless direction for way too long. AI makes it worse. Juniors feel like AI validated the approach, avoid talking to others (most hate it) and push in the weird direction for too long.
2. When it comes to code produced by seniors, reviewing code is rarely useful. Reviewing the intent of PRs and whether I agree with the intent is important. Are we fixing the correct problem? in the correct part of the code? In a way that is friendly to users, operators, the company?
3. Work now feels... lonely. Code reviews (and sometimes even design) are mostly comments from AI, fixed by AI. Engineers always saw any conversation as waste of time, when they could just produce more code. Now they can produce even more code, and it seems like a conversation with me adds less value than talking with AI, and perhaps even less pleasant. It isn't about being social at work. They are happy to talk about movies, news, etc. But I find conversations with engineers about engineering topics to be energizing, inspiring and motivating. And while I understand it isn't the job of my team to energize and inspire me, I deeply miss the interactions we used to have.
Quick thoughts from a few weeks of moderate production usage of decision models:
Jev is the best bang for your buck, still. It’s remarkably good and remarkably cheap.
OpenAI decision API is legit, cheaper than Luna while still performing very well. In my tests, this was the best decision model. More expensive than Jev, and slightly high etc latency.
Clef is sadly not great, all my evals had clef get false positive/negative on 30-40% of the options, whereas Jev and OpenAI were very close to 100% accurate. And it’s not cheap enough to bother ripping out Jev. Maybe if you are entirely locked into Cloudflare workers AI, but I suspect the OpenAI model will come there soon too…
Oh shit, this is sad. The first video game I ever completed was Knights of the Old Republic. I’d started many others but none had hooked me.
Mass Effect 1&2 are also genuinely two of the best games ever. They’ve had a series of duds, but damn.
I guess we’re never gonna see ME4.
BREAKING: Electronic Arts is cutting 400 jobs and shutting down BioWare, the legendary development studio behind Dragon Age and Mass Effect. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Nick Blow retweeted
Two things can be true at once, and I think the argument is because of people confusing the two.
1. AI has no creative taste and makes slop when asked
2. AI can do incredibly tedious work to make awesome things possible
For a really simple example: having AI write a novel would be terrible. AI translating a novel to a different language with human oversight is much less terrible.
Wish people would stop confusing the two
You don’t hear key changes a lot in songs any more – I only noticed this in Diet Pepsi when my wife put it on…
My wife signed up to beta read a book, and asked me to look at it too, because the prose wasn’t great and she asked if it was her being harsh.
Then I saw:
Unbent.
Unbowed.
Unbroken.
Then another rule of three like two paragraphs later.
Definitely not a new insight, but I'm really getting huge value from structured logging + oTel + session replay, and then every day just having an agent look for:
Bugs, user frustrations & performance issues.
They're really, really, good at this stuff.
I’m unconvinced that AI influencers will take off, a lot of content creation thrives on parasocial relationships and I just don’t think enough people will form relationships with an LLM vs a real human.
That said, 4o is a counter example…
