As most of us, I spend lately considerable amount of time researching and talking about AI implications (for coding and beyond).

It’s a big subject. The technology offers us various applications, and various new ways for misuse too.

I think the following statement manages to summarize my hopes + concerns best: When working to solve the problem, we should be gaining understanding, not losing it. So use AI to get smarter / faster, not to loose understanding / decrease code maintainability.

1. I have updated our AI usage guidelines with this and many other statements — both positive usage of AI (e.g. “review my uncommitted changes”) and warning about negative (trusting the AI designs, which may go in unmaintainable direction without supervision).
   • I think we can use these tools carefully (understanding AI proposals, and correcting / filtering out bad ideas) to our benefit, and I was experimenting with doing it on many projects now (including our engine).

   • Being careful is certainly warranted. Committing code that “looks good on the surface”, but fails to scale, fails to be maintainable, or is not understood -> that’s a road to being unable to develop the software in the future (both with AI and with your own brain).

2. Additional reading material:

   You all likely have read a ton of AI things on the Internet lately 🙂 There is a lot of noise, over-hype (no, AI is not a replacement for human developers, and I don’t think it will ever be, though our role may change; remember there is no “production” app vibe-coded as of now) and hate too. And some hate I agree with (AI companies made a huge copyright theft on unprecedented scale; they suck) but it doesn’t mean that AI is useless as a tool.

   Some of the references I agree with:

   • Kurzgesagt video warning about AI slop. There is a real problem of welcoming hallucinations into our knowledge base (Internet).

   • I do think that one answer is we need search engines trying to “filter out” AI slop (not amplify it), and I’m a happy user of Kagi and agree with their POV about LLMs.

   • Recent article from Addy Osmani “The 80% Problem in Agentic Coding” is a balanced viewpoint I agree with — highlighting both the hope and the dangers of AI agents in coding.

   • Interview with Pi devs has lots of valid observations about AI and coding. (Thanks Szymon for the reference!)

   • Links to example situations in the context of Castle Game Engine how AI hallucinations make bad code/docs, here.

3. I have committed CLAUDE.md into the engine repository — it contains a number of instructions to steer Claude Code into following our practices.

4. Finally, something you’ve been waiting for:) I have tested “vibe coding” an application using Castle Game Engine. Even if I explicitly don’t think it’s a good way to make a game, it was a fun thing to try!

   • Head on to https://github.com/michaliskambi/castle-vibes/ for the complete code and data, screenshots, and a long README with observations.

   • Builds (Linux, Windows, web) are available.

   • It is maybe the worst game I ever made/played, but it is playable, which is impressive in itself. You can walk around a winter scenery with a 3D castle, fog, falling snow, some forest, minimap. You can get a quest to slain 6 goblins, and do it, and at the end you get the reward – trophy appears.

   • Observe many things that AI did correctly, but also many done wrong. Various bugs, generating UI using Pascal code, generating models using Python, unoptimal (but still looking cool for this demo!) snowflakes.

   • It’s not a game I designed or control. It’s a random game. Features, look, details (placement, quests) of everything -> is an outcome of a random process, as you can only specify so much in ~15 paragraphs in English. We can speculate how much the quality will improve “out of the box” with better AI agents in upcoming months/years, but ultimately if I want to control over the game -> I will need to put much more work into spec/prompting or “get my hands dirty” and just edit the code/data myself. At some points, “just edit the code/data myself” will be more efficient, at the end we’ve made the engine to be easy to use. Pascal code is the most precise “spec” 🙂 So I don’t see the future as “just vibe code me this app”. The real applications will be a result of iteration on the solution with both AI and manual work.

   • Oh it’s such a mixture of good and bad feelings 🙂 Please read the full README with observations.

Have fun using our engine and please support the humans behind the engine 🙂.