Make It Anyway

Joel Auterson says he had a rough week, the kind where motivation doesn’t just dip but folds in on itself. He wrote it down, partly for anyone else feeling the same pull, and partly for his own future self. The trigger, unsurprisingly, was generative AI and the way it has started to chew up creative work and spit it back out as a subscription product.

He’s harsher on AI art than on coding tools. In his view, AI art is ugly, embarrassing, and basically anti-art. Programming is messier. Large language models are now genuinely good at generating code, and the pressure to use them is real. People want to keep up. People want not to lose.

But Auterson says that even setting aside the environmental and social arguments, he simply doesn’t enjoy coding with an assistant. The output doesn’t feel like his. He doesn’t feel proud of it. The small things he likes making — shell scripts, helpers, little tools — are exactly the sort of work that now gets flattened into something anyone can prompt for. He mentions his own interactive git branch switcher, which he used daily and was proud of, and says that kind of peer recognition matters more than it sounds.

The same fear has spilled into games. A thread from Zach Gage, about game making becoming more like music, sent him into what he calls a crashout. Then he talked to Shad, a designer and engineer he clearly admires, who is building Uncamera for iOS without generative AI. The app uses raw sensor output and lookup tables to make photos look like film, and Auterson thinks it could even be an Apple Design Award contender once it’s finished.

That conversation snapped him out of it. He already chooses the hard path anyway: his own game engine, in C++, and a faux-3D renderer because he wants to learn by doing. So he says the choice is really between using AI to feel competitive while hating the process, quitting entirely, or carrying on the way he likes. He picked the last one. For him, that’s the whole point of making games, and making anything.