“tHe PrOgReSs hAs bEeN iNsAnE”
Slopcoders are so egotistical main characters, believing they’ll beat anyone with more coding experience.
Rich kid uses parents’ money to hire a company to port the game
hire a company to port the game
That traditionally implies actual humans.
Anthropic is basically a SaaS provider, in this case selling access to their code generation tool. Like many large SaaS-providers, it’s deeply predatory, deceitful about the capabilities of their products, eager to sell promises it won’t keep to executives who won’t care in the hopes of locking them into using their mediocre platform and eventually charging enough to justify the insane amounts of debt they’re taking on.
So really, it’s more like the kid is using other people’s money to pay for a tool they don’t understand to do a job they’ve never worked in and gets hailed as a genius. They’ll make a great executive some day.
Sure, until next year or nexteryear or however long it takes to make or break a tradition
…or until the AI bubble pops…
hire a company to port the game
Management potential. If they have negotiated / found a clear legal path to at least distribution - if not profit, they’re operating on a higher level than a lot of traditional businesses.
They are using the plagiarism machine to plagiarize a commercial product owned by the most litigious media empire on earth. But whatever
Must be nice to have a rich parent.
Future dystopia: investing in your own skills is no longer valuable. That kid with rich parents will always be ahead of you.
Not so future tbh, that already is the case a lot more often than we’d like to admit. Rich parents and parents with good connections are the absolute jackpots you have to land as kid or you’ll be some kind of screwed unless you manage to be incredibly lucky later on.
Yeah, taking AI out of the context of tomato’s comment makes you think it’s not already the case, but it’s been the case since, like, wealth and connections and status became a thing, if not earlier.
Back on topic, I don’t think having real skills that you can leverage without AI is going to completely lock you out of a job or something. For now, it is pretty gloom, but I’m seeing more and more cases in my company where AI leads to nearly catastrophic failures because people use it mindlessly and generate too much busywork of others, who don’t bother checking it that thoroughly, leading to really bad consequences for everyone in a couple of weeks since the slopping commenced.
Of course, it’s happening because the upper-management has been pushing hard for everyone to use AI for everything.
Maybe companies turn away from AI because their average AI user does more harm than good with it. If I can’t have a world where all the tech that’s powering AI goes to something where it actually has benefits (which is a few scientific fields and applications like protein folding or some shit, if that hasn’t been proven wrong, too), I hope I can at least have a world where AI has disappointed the decision makers enough so that it becomes a niche expensive toy for morons with money that are ridiculed and shunned.
I’m not saying that rich people have never had an advantage. I’m saying that the only thing that gives lower income people a little bit of extra advantage is completely lost.
It doesn’t matter if you’re the best programmer in the world. You’re no match to what the rich brat can output.
And currently it doesn’t matter if you’re the best programmer in the world if you can’t find people willing to either work with you or employ you because say you’re poor and have a crappy personality. Or because you’re highly autistic and undiagnosed and people always tried to avoid you and all you ever learned was doing things on your own.
Or you could even possibly be the best programmer in the world if you actually could touch a computer in the first place, sucks that you have to spend your childhood on some cocoa fields.
All your (dormant) skills are nothing without opportunities to actually use them to their fullest and you can only go so far on your own. If you were born into the wrong family (as in wrong economic status) it’s very possible you don’t even have the chance to develop your amazing abilities in the first place, ai or not.
That’s the current dystopia, dawg.
Always has been 🔫 🧑🚀
Being rich is a cheatcode.
That’s not future dystopia. That’s just how it is and how it has always been since capitalism was invented
Thats the promise of AI. Take skills from people without money and give it to people with money.
Bro that’s just how it is to exist now. Though it’s not invaluable to invest in your own skills, but you’ll still always be behind wealthy nepo babies.
What future lol. That has been the case for thousands of years. Science, art, philosophy, writing and so on was the thing rich people did for thousands of years. Some peasant’s kid had to work in the fields as soon as he could while the rich people’s kid could get education. This is not something new. The last few hundred years or so is where this wasn’t the case as public education became a thing and people’s standards of living rose enough that kids were not just another pair of hands to help on the farm or around the house.
Hah hah good thing that’s a future problem. But seriously we need to rip this shit out the hands of the owning class.
“Michael Reeves here. Today we’re replacing the brain of this Tesla Cybertruck with a fly brain running on an XBox!”
It says “job and donations” so if we take that at face value it seems to be self-funded whaling.
Having had both, poor is better. Money turns people into monsters.
And a community who are ok with being beta testers
I wasn’t impressed even before that. 14-year-olds can code, some of them. And some are skilled in some ways. But there’s almost zero chance they have the situational awareness to lead serious projects. Just doesn’t happen.
So they need to be part of a team, and if they are, OK that’s cool, but don’t forget to be a kid, too.
And they are stepping on Nintendo’s toes, AND doing interviews, AND 100% have good enough opsec to not be tied to the project, AND receiving donations.
But they are a rich kid apparently so just gonna be some fines to pay…
If I did this I would go to jail for 70 years or some shit
Too many biographies: he was born into an influential family; he had money to explore a burgeoning science/industry; he committed an outrageous crime/stunt but was given a slap on the wrist; he was awarded a nobel for his work.
Some random 14yo kid has 9k dollars to spend on Claude code. Fuck my life.
Subscriptions cover vastly more than an equivalent amount of API cost. $9k is probably just a few months of the $200/mo sub
I didn’t have $200/mo at that age either
By 15 I could earn $200/mo after school saying “you want fries with that?” into a microphone and running a cash register for a drive-thru, and that was at $3.35/hr minimum wage. In Florida minimum wage is $15/hr now, so $200/month is less than 2 4 hour after school or one 8 hour weekend shift a week, even after taxes.
The $9K figure, as I read the summary, is total spent by all contributors to the project, and if they manage to develop a full commercial quality port for under $100K they’ve beat what the industry players would spend on developer time for the same job by a wide margin.
By develop I think you mean stole someone else’s project for under $100k. They haven’t developed anything.
Musicians learn in large part by playing “covers,” programming is really no different.
They are obviously talking about the AI usage, not the programming.
Okay
We added a child-sized crank to the orphan crushing machine so they can help participate younger than ever!
A new way to look at vibe coding to point out that it isn’t coding.
It’s hiring a company. In the year 2012, you could email someone with a request for something you want made, and if you have money they’ll reply back over network the code you need.
AI companies just tightened that loop. You hired a company to write software for you. That doesn’t make you a developer or a programmer.
It’s the difference between: wow this 14 year old developed a pc port for ocarina of time
Vs.
Wow this 14 year old spend money to develop a pc port for ocarina of time
Has he not heard of an emulator?
You can just play it on PC, no port needed
(Unless they mean the new one, in which case I’d say, don’t be a pussy and play the old version, getting soft locked in the water temple builds character)
Yeah it’s more like offshoring.
My team has been trying for years to get apps for internal use and we have waited for IT to either buy or make something. One day I just said, “fuck it” and started building the tools we need. I’m not anywhere near done, but the team has started using them, and it’s increasing productivity.
So someone thanked me for coding the tools, and I said, “I’m not really coding. I’m more acting as a product manager. I gathered the requirements from the users, brought it to the developer team, and act as the go between.” I think that’s the best analogy. And like a product manager, I have to take on faith that the devs are doing what I ask without being stupid.
I have an entirely free LLM I regularly run locally on my SteamDeck. I didnt sign a contract for anything, I just downloaded it.
I could power the Deck running the LLM indefinately with maybe $300 worth of solar panels and a camping grade power station.
Now it ain’t nearly as fast as hooking in to an LLM thats being run on a data center, but that’s tool use, not contracting an outside firm.
We can democratize this technology if we want to, we do not have to rely on environmentally destructive, oligarch enriching cloud computing.
Could I ask what model you use locally? I’ve got a bunch of computers and vijia cards and would love to experiment with a local model. I’ve never used the subscription models, but I’d love to play around with something secure and private!
Bazzite -> LM Studio (installed via BoldBrew)
Uh what… model am i on now lol… hold on…
Qwen 3.5 9B DeepSeek v4 Flash by ‘Jackrong’
But yeah generally, Qwen 3 / Qwen 3.5 type models, will work reasonably well and reasonably fast, at 4B or 2B. 9B works if you close basically everything other than LM Studio lol, or, this latest DeepSeek v4 Flash variant is considerably more performant than just standard Qwen 3.5 9B.
But yeah the way Bazzite does LM Studio via BoldBrew, it is at least theoretically reasonably containerized and isolated… not even gonna pretend I am competent enough to give any guarantees there, but also, I don’t think anyone is capable of saying anything LLM related is 100% certainly correctly understood.
Oh uh, yeah, you’re gonna wanna be docked/plugged in to a power source, if you want more than …idk, 0.5 to 1.5 hrs of battery life while the LLM is actively working on something.
Thank you so much for your detailed response! My user tag I don’t remember setting for you proves correct again!
I never ended up picking up a steam deck cuz I don’t leave the house, so I’ll be using a desktop with maybe a 1070 or 2070s maybe? I’ve never tried Bazzite but I’ve got a bunch of different distros on various machines at home. I’ll throw Bazzite on my Medicat drive. Thank you so much again!
YMMV with other hardware, I genuinely have no clue rofl!
Maybe start with 2B… try to work up from there?
Maybe Nvidia cards are just… better generally, due to generally better CUDA support for LLMs than ROCm?
I have no idea!
The Deck uses an AMD APU, RDNA 2, shared LPDDR5 RAM… so… yeah i have no idea how to translate that to a more standard PC set up, in terms of performance expectations. Tooooo many variables.
That sounds like a cool setup, what kinda stuff do you use it for?
See my reply to Rai’s comment!
=D
Slippity sloppity
People say shit like this all the time, and it always irritates me.
“We built a house down south.” No you didn’t, you hired a contractor to build a house for you.
AI has certainly made it worse, though. I keep having conversations with people where “I’m writing a novel” somehow turns into “I’m having ChatGPT write me a novel.”
I’ve worked with overseas coders since 2012 - Claude is much easier to communicate with, faster and more responsive.
But it’s also used by actual programmers with strong credentials who seem to actually use them intelligently (e.g Torvalds) which muddies the water a lot for the general public, and allows these people who are basically the programming version of a script kiddie (leveraging powerful tools they barely understand to accomplish things that look impressive on a surface level, and then misrepresenting the results).
So the developer is Anthropic 🤷♂️ If I order some specific pizza, am I the cheff who made it?
the developer is Anthropic
More like the developers are the people whose code Anthropic stole
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute
“The copyright belongs to no one” is a potential outcome.
I mean, if you’re ordering Pepperoni, no…
If you’re ordering a pumpkin curry with sweet corn on feta/pesto base, and your friends don’t vomit when they try it, you just might be the cheff.
If you think calling AI users “creators” is bad, then let me remind you it was normalized the moment people called
Steve Jobs the creator of Apple computers and the iPhoneEdison the creator of anything at all. Edison was the first archetypical techbro, and Steve Jobs was the first modern techbro.This has been going on for centuries. Scientists’ staff doing all the work of proving an idea. Same for physicians. Artists, also…a ton of people in their employ doing the actual art executing the artists’ ideas. The big name gets the glory while those under them hope to get noticed enough to go out on their own and repeat the process. These days it still happens, plus we have managers and CEO’s taking credit for the employees doing all the work of making something happen. Hell, I bet the guy that had the idea to build the Pyramids had hundreds of what constituted engineers and artisans of the day build the things and said “Look what I made!”
Very similar situation in science as well, most big name professors are actually managers of 20+ people groups and as far as I have seen, most ideas come from lower down the totem pole. Not saying that they don’t contribute, it takes a lot of time and effort to get from a new idea/discovery to fully developed concept but nontheless the payoff is much more in the professors favor.
Speaking of, if you ever get to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, make sure to check out the tombs of the craftsmen who actually built the tombs for the kings. They’re just outside the Valley of the Kings, arguably just as beautiful, and mostly ignored by tourists.
In my opinion, there is an important difference, though: The software that people “create” with Claude, ChatGPT or whatever could have been created by most competent and skilled software developers, i.e. nothing ground breaking or world changing has been created by people using Claude or ChatGPT (at least not as far as I know, please correct me if I am wrong). However, this is different with regards to the iPhone or the light bulb, they were truly historic and world changing “creations”.
As far as I am concerned, it doesn’t really matter if you were the true “creator” of a certain product, software or invention, as long as you manage to sort of market the product and convince other people of the value of said product or invention (and as long it holds actual value to people).
That’s a slippery slope, not crediting the actual creators of a new thing. Making something famous and getting recognition for doing that is fine if that’s what happened, but taking credit for the creation of something is a shitty thing to do if you took it from someone else. Its dishonest and should be discouraged
Sire but where was all this before AI? I don’t remember soaby PC ports and thebkne that where where slow. No its coming out within a week of title being released.
when Nintendo figures out where to send the lawsuit
I wonder how far $9000 would have gone if it was donated to real people working on a port instead.
In either case I’ll never lower myself to voluntarily consume AI slop.
Answer: something that would’ve run much better on much lower end hardware and worked for more than one game, but would’ve taken much longer to produce (since actual human thought went into it) which is the only metric people seem to pay attention to.
Immediate convenience is the metric we’ve been trained to exclusively focus on. Bread and circuses and all that. It’s why I’ve been purposefully adding inconveniencea to my life to try to build up some of my patience and preservation again.
Based.
Also more money. $9000 gets you one dev for what, 2, maybe 3 months?
Try less than 1 month. LLMs are undeniably cheaper than human developers. That is, until the human developers all leave the industry and LLMs are able to name their price.
$9000?
At $45 per hour … call this a contract job with no taxes or health benefits or anything … thats 200 hours of dev time or 25 8-hour workdays.
You’d almost certainly need at least 3 months (probably more) to lay a solid foundation and get a base level, functional proof of concept, if you had only person, one pretty darn highly skilled low level expert working on this.
So $9000 would produce nothing useable, just another call for fund raising.
And I’m sure you could find many programmers qualified and capable of this task who would call $45 an hour for doing this solo, lowballing them.
Doing a project like this with only humans is certainly possible, and likely would yield a higher quality result, but it would take substantially more time and money, orders of magnitude more.
Sorry, but just being entirely, blanket, always mad at AI/LLMs is stupid.
These things do actually have very sensible use cases, and reverse engineering a giant undocumented black box program is one of the most clear cut of these.
Its also possible to run these things locally… its slower than a cloud LLM service, but its still very usefully fast, and isn’t funding some corpo datacenter.
99% of the problems that are being caused by LLMs right now are due to idiot humans using them in very obviously stupid ways.
LLMs are tools, like hammers, guns, chainsaws, forklifts, etc. If you don’t know what you’re doing, ita very easy to cause a lot of damage. Also like other human tools, you cannot uninvent them.
This kind of use of an LLM, as a tool assisting in a very complex reverse engineering project, directed and overseen by actual human experts, not just trying to naievely one shot it with a novice in charge… is almost certainly the optimal or most reasonable way to balance the [fast, cheap, good] factors in approaching a project like this.
I’m not saying this random 14 yo is doing this in the best possible way, not even close, but I am saying that if you think just $9000 thrown at a or multiple humans could produce anything even comparable, then you do not understand anything about the actual realities of working in the computer software development field.
Thank you for a nuanced take in the middle of this generated outrage.
Meanwhile, the persone above you with 24 upvotes advancing estimates with no other source than “trust my gut instinct bro.”
Its also possible to run these things locally… its slower than a cloud LLM service, but its still very usefully fast, and isn’t funding some corpo datacenter.
But it wasn’t done locally, which begs the question: can local models reverse engineer on any kind of reasonable time scale?
I don’t know, by my little ollama GPT OSS is pretty great at merging mods together for games and updating old mods to work with new game versions. under my guidance it’s been pretty effective, I also have been a Software Engineer since 2019.
But again this is under the category of not super difficult and basically tedious stuff I don’t feel like doing anymore (been modding games since Oblivion 2006) and I just want to say this is far more convienent.
Sure there are many bugs still, but I’d say the most useful feature isn’t making something new or reverse engineering it to be implemented different or something else. It’s just altering it enough to better fit my needs, but at the drop of text like during gaming. Usually via merging mods into mod packs and working through the bugs myself.
But I have never let it touch anything real or used for work.
Tedious stuff
This annoys me a lot with complaints about “vibe coding”. Like, I know how to do it, I just don’t feel like spending 5 hours building and debugging a script I am probably going to run once to convert a bunch of data. I just want the task done so I can move on and do actually enjoyable things.
I get all the arguments against AI “art” and “writing” and “music” etc, actual creative areas. But coding is just tedious boring nonsense 99% of the time. It’s not the same. Get the computer, to translate human words to computer words, and be done.
But coding is just tedious boring nonsense 99% of the time.
To anyone reading this far down, do not let people like this build the narrative that there is no joy in your hobby or profession. These are thieves trying to rob you of your enthusiasm for life.
I think the nuance is, having a computer write “hello world!” Is actually pretty cool when you think about it, and it’s only the beginning. When you get to the point of writing production solutions. Logging can seem pretty tedious, albeit useful.
I do write production solutions.
Look, I normally take a very combative tone in conversations like these, but I want to emphasize, I genuinely, really love writing software. I’ve written my own libraries, libraries that already exist elsewhere, because I want to learn. What AI is doing to my industry makes me very sad.
That is a genuinely good question!
Which I am currently investigating in my spare time, lol.
Local llms actually have a larger environmental impact than the data centers in power usage/hardware, since they optimize for LLMs. The models are also based off essentially DDOSing half the internet by constantly scraping sites, and being trained off GPL licensed code without permission. This is a “good” use of llm, but it’s more like if the hammer you’re using took 2kw of power and 200ml of water every swing, you’d probably want to avoid using that hammer even if it was very helpful.
$9k won’t get you far in the US or most of Europe.
Given that he is almost certainly using a $100 or $200/month plan, he could probably only afford a 30-60 minute consultation.
🤷♀️
It would have to happen through donations to people already working on this stuff on a volunteer basis, not normal contract work. As the whole thing is based on IP theft anyway it would be a terrible idea to hire people for it in a normal way.
Rant: People these days are largely illiterate about IP laws, unfortunately.
It’s only copyright violation if the law says it is. There are plenty of exceptions already.
Also: Theft in all laws I know requires depriving “someone” of the original. ie. photocopying a page isn’t theft, but it may or may not be copyright infringement depending on local laws.
Copyright is a legal construct and not a natural right: nowadays it heavily favours large copyright holders (eg. Music labels, Disney) and their law firms to the disadvantage of the average joe. US Inc has forced their own IP laws upon the world, and IMHO the world would be much better with significantly shorter copyright terms, and much narrower patent categories.
Lets say you get a dev working for 320 hours over the course of two month on the project for that money. I hate AI as the next person, but I honestly don’t think he would have achieved anything noteworthy to the Normies in those two month.
I think it was that easy, people would have done it already. People with a lot of knowledge spend a shit ton of money on mods and cracking games for free.
14 year olds waste money on all kinds of stupid shit. If he wasn’t spending on this it still wouldn’t have been donated to a homeless shelter or something like that.
I never blew $9000 when I was 14.
I never even saw that much money at one time until I was in my 20s.
Neither did this kid. The article doesn’t say how much he spent, but most likely it was $200/month
I think my allowance was like $20/week.
That’s about 80$ per month, which probably is over 200$ in today’s money ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So he is not a developer at all, just a slopmachine prompt writer.
A sloperator
To be fair, the kid is mostly likely tech savy.
The test is in the results - are people happy playing the port? If it “works for them” then, yeah, the kiddiez have done something worthwhile, at least to the happy players.
Does it matter if they wrote it in Rust, or C++, or Assembly, or english language prompts?
i just called out another “developer” for saying they made a program, and then said they had claude code it for them and all they did was “test” it. not a fucking developer if you didn’t write the fucking code. it’s like saying i just came back from a trip to Hawaii and all you did was look at pictures of Hawaii from google image search on your phone
My profile picture was commissioned. I gave the artist instructions, and I paid for their time. I’m still not a fucking artist. I am happy about the picture but I am under no delusions that I made it.
Slopbros are the complete opposite. They feel like they made something because they prompted it into existence. It’s sad, really. Everyone has the capacity to create things, yet people choose to outsource it to pattern completion models because thinking is too hard.
Thinking and experimenting how to best solve a problem is my favorite part about development. My proudest moments are from iterations on previous less-optimal solutions.
I once sat on a small team implementing a project start to finish. The initial work was really rushed, they wanted a functional MVP real fast, and in conjunction with that we got scope creep. What was initially planned to be a simple viewing application turned into us having to implement a data synchronisation system that would organise sync across hundreds of devices, various platforms, both in offices and several hundred metres underground, both on cellular and wifi.
It was a disaster. The initial sync priority system was hardcoded. I later revised it to automatically figure out the dependencies, and then a colleague optimised that algorithm.
My biggest triumph though was when trying to fix the size of each batch of data. Every so often some bit of data would be way too large and the system would shit itself. It was also woefully slow when someone sat on a 10 year old Samsung phone 800m underground. Production blockingly slow.
We came up with the idea to switch over to gRPC. Looking over the hastily thrown together API, I realised that they all did more or less the same thing. The data processing was different, but all the fetching worked the same way.
So I made it generic for real, and reduced 26 different APIs into ~6 lines of code.
See this is where I’m like. For $9,000, you could have just purchased a Switch and a legit copy of OOT. Heck, you could get a vintage N64, old cart, and a CRT TV for less. What is this kid doon??
Becoming famous and feeling cool for the first time in his short life. Whether that will br a fun memory in retrospect is yet to be seen.
You can grab it off minerva and play it in an emulator pretty easily, which is the second most authentic way to experience it in my opinion. The first is of course on original hardware. I’m not sure what the point of a slop PC port is and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.
The port is of the new remake, which can be run on an emulator, but is more demanding than a native port.
Reverse engineering and porting software to other platforms is legal and should be encouraged, not shat upon. It only takes one person to port it and then everyone can reap the benefits.
Why should we make and buy more hardware that will end up in ewaste when we have perfectly good hardware already? Why can’t we install whatever software we like on devices that we supposedly own?
They aren’t shitting on them for reverse engineering and porting software
They are shitting on them for spending 9k on AI to half-ass it for them.
You talk about ewaste but ignore the impact AI has
Spending people’s money for clout.
Showing the capitalists that we can and will use their tools against them.
