Ghost in the Machines

A couple weeks ago, the lead maintainer of a well-known game engine admitted to using LLM for development since 2021. While not vibecoded (the lead maintainer insisted that stringent procedure was put into place to heavily filter the output), this sent a ripple of shock across the developer communities, many of which opposed usage of LLM in creative fields and sought to distance themselves from the practice. While argument can be made for jumping off ship to another engine, this incident brings about a concerning trend. For many many years, proliferation of engine packages has lowered barrier to entry into game development. We stand on the shoulder of giants. While the early generations had to practically code from scratch, often tailored for a specific set of hardware, bedroom devs entering the field around early 2000s had plenty of options to play with, most notably the ever ubiquitous, much beloved and much maligned Flash. Flash was not free nor open source, but many other engines…