The primary use case for House House’s use of LLMs was to research, via chatbots, issues we encountered with third-party code. If you’re technically-minded, and curious, here’s an example. We needed to cull shadow casters by distance from the camera, but Unity URP only allows culling shadow casters by distance in camera forwards, so shadow casters behind the player were being rendered at an infinite distance. This made our game run 50% slower for around 20 seconds at sunrise and sunset. We researched the problem extensively, and we looked at the URP code ourselves, but we couldn’t find a way. Then, we were able to speak directly to an engineer at Unity, who asked around and ultimately concluded that what we wanted wasn’t possible. Finally, we posed the question to an LLM chatbot. After a few dead ends, it suggested a possible fix, and while we had to modify the suggestion extensively, it worked. This fix represented about 10 lines of code inside URP.

asking a LLM for a fix that added about ten lines of code after heavily modifying the LLM output is exactly how AI should be used. They exhausted all other options and still had to tinker with the LLM code to make it work. if that's not real coding, idk what real coding is anymore

for those that don't approve of this, why? just curious, no hate 🙂

There are endless threads to discuss in this, but two really seem lost in this debate:

• The distinction between vibecoding, and lower levels of LLM tool usage.

• How widespread the latter already is in software development.

Basically, if you’re a dev coding for money… you’re already interacting with text models, somehow. You have been. Everyone reading this post is using code touched by them, up and down the stack.

Hence I don’t think people realize how impractical the “purist anti AI” stance really is. It’s like asking devs to avoid anything touched by Microsoft or Facebook: a good idea on the surface, but how on Earth would you actually do it?

I think what gamers really hate is higher levels of vibecoding and tool usage to make slop. As they should. As well as support for authoritarian entities backing them. But this just isn’t a practical debate without discussing where to draw the line, rather than an absolutist “LLMs or no LLMs” take, as the latter is going to catch basically every dev on the planet.

As a developer, I really think the reactionary response to AI is muddying the waters. Their stated use-case seems perfectly reasonable, as their options were "shit optimization with even the unity devs clueless" or fixing the bug. AI makes a great tool for some applications. No, it should not be used to vibecode entire apps alone, but it does have the power to search and aggregate sources far, far better than humans can. It will likely take some tweaking afterwards, because their output must not be trusted, but using AI as a research tool for solving esoteric dev problems seems perfectly reasonable to me. I would much prefer we not punish the people that are fully disclosing their (very limited) use, when many of the competitors simply aren't disclosing.

Developers House House told Aftermath via email that "LLMs were used sparingly by House House to help work through difficult technical challenges and bugs", and that they "estimate that well under 0.1% of Big Walk’s code had anything to do with this usage".

Meh, if that were enough to exclude a game from GotY awards, you'd end up with a very short list of mostly unknown games, half of which probably did use LLMs for those sorts of tasks and are just lying about it.

And honestly, if AI-debugging can replace having to spend days of horrible crunchtime fixing those bugs, I'm all for it! That's what AI should do, making people's lives easier and not replacing their creativity.

this sounds like they used it as a search engine rather than as an assistant. it's one of those weird gray areas that come up with how integrated it is now. like, if you try to find something with a search engine and you get the "ai result" thing, is that "ai use"? the tokens were used anyway, and you read it even if you then click a link.

i hope the otherwise great reception of big walk can help a bit with the debate here.

They don't have an Ai disclosure on the Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1478500/Big_Walk/ Isn't this against Steams rules?

Edit: I don't understand why people downvote a question. At the time I couldn't find the rules searching the web, as no news article linked to it. So I asked here...

hooray, insane witch hunts and even more insane mental gymnastics galore!

(Big Walk is awesome and you should play it)