Fact Check: AI Game Mods, Vibe Coding, and the Rise of AI-Generated Software

So, this is possible now. It seems like overnight the idea of mashing up games sort of came to fruition. Admittedly, I

thought this is a very cool idea and a technical marvel. How does one's game mechanics work in another one's when

translated almost one-to-one? I wanted to try it for myself and then I stopped cuz you see, so many of these came up in

such a short amount of time. Pumping out modifications that should have taken weeks, months, years even. How was this

all done? Surely we would have done it before if it was this simple, right? Well, like most things plaguing our

feeds, the answer lies in two simple letters. Okay, so what's the big deal?

I'm getting to that. >> [screaming] >> Regardless on whether you like AI or

not, the state of the internet has gotten so untrustworthy due to it. Everything now has to be combed through

with a magnifying glass in order to even see if it was actually human-made. Art for some reason was the first [music]

hyperfixation AI took a hold of, but now development of software has been gobbled up in its mouth. However, discourse

online has been more relaxed when it comes to usage of AI in this sort of sense. I've seen total hate for it. I've

seen total acceptance of it. But whether you do or you don't agree with it, there is a larger conversation to be had about

the ramifications of utilizing AI this way. It doesn't differ too much from how it hurts artists, but even with its

major advancements, you can always feel that lack of human touch. However, with programs, games, modifications, it's a

bit trickier to feel that differentiation. Look at this [ __ ] It just works. When running and playing

these mashups, it almost doesn't feel like it was at all vibe coded, the term used to identified what was coded with

AI. To someone like me who doesn't fully understand how these things work, any awkward setup or backwards method of

running these games is going to go over my head. I grew up in times where I had to scour my PC's insides just to find

the .minecraft folder to install mods. They make dedicated launchers for that now. The lazy way these mashups can be

done is by running both games at the same time. AI then processes both of those games and modifies the output

based on what you want. It is how Spider-Man and Arkham City works. The result is very clean-looking until you

do anything more than just simple traversing. It's taking Spider-Man and sort of haphazardly putting him over

Batman. So, Batman's [music] animations will translate to the Spider-Man game so he can do what he's supposed to do and

then the AI will take what is happening from that game and composite it over Batman to give this illusion that

Spider-Man exists within that world. >> Think of it like green screening. The background of the foreground layer is

removed to put it on a different background. That is what's happening here. Spider-Man wasn't implemented into

the code of Arkham City. He's still in Spider-Man. That's why both games have to be running. It's why Spider-Man walks

over the subtitles. It's why he looks like this when fighting enemies because in this scene in particular, there's too

much going on for the AI to keep up. So, Spidey's bones just turn into mush and it looks incredibly painful. Oh, lord.

Not every mod is like this, however. This is just the worst of the worst. The ones that actually do incorporate games

into each other are completely different and even might pave the way for more complex modifications.

>> But, that doesn't change the fact that these LLMs are being used to do most of the heavy lifting and therefore might

not be as well optimized as they could be. Um, why does a mod for a game need to be well optimized?

>> Because it's using up all my RAM. This shit's WORTH MORE THAN GOLD RIGHT NOW. >> Even if on the surface it's running

properly, under the hood your engine is screaming for relief. The more you stress out your PC with high-intense

graphics or workloads, the more it's going to break down and eventually stop working. This has always been the case

with AI in general. It takes up a lot of your computing power and when you're giving it a super complex task, well,

then you're making your rig work overtime. Now, maybe for modding games it's not the worst in the world. Most of

the time you're going to play for 10 minutes and then move on with your day. >> Regardless, it's a spit in the face to

any real developer. They slave away to make sure things like this work properly. But, for a while games were

optimized less due to hardware becoming more powerful at a cheaper cost. Now, we're not just getting unoptimized

games, we're also getting games that are barely functioning. >> This [ __ ] is the equivalent to putting a

band-aid over an open wound. We all made fun of Yan Berry Dev for his [ __ ] code, but what AI is doing here isn't really

much different. A lot of the time it will take the fastest way to compile something without thinking about if it's

necessarily the best way to be compiled. It can lead to things looking and feeling sort of jank. Now, big

modification for games can also have jank even when they're human-made, but there is a charm in knowing that the

person manages to get an insane idea working in a game they had no part in developing. The jank in a vibe-coded mod

just comes from the AI not understanding what bug testing is, and it's important to do that especially when you jump out

of modifying and go into the world of decompiling and recompiling already established games.

>> You get a PC port, and you get a PC port, and you get a PC port. By the way, they're all going to barely work.

>> I've talked about decompilations before, specifically Mario 64 and Sonic Unleashed. The way these were made were

different in their own right, but they achieved the same goal in offering a way to recompile the games on other

platforms. Decompilations can be a great way to preserve games. While emulation is very accessible as technology

advances, the emulators have to keep up. But, having a way to recompile a game from scratch with some sort of source

code would mean the game could always be accessible no matter what the device is. They are quite literally taking games

that ran on the Wii and shoving them onto the 3DS. It's all about accessibility, and while it's noble to

try and speed up that process, yeah, this ain't it, chief. >> AI can't get inspired, so if the code

looks one way, it's going to translate it that exact way in a different language when in reality more tweaking

would have to be done. >> Now, recompiling doesn't always mean having a one-to-one, but things like

physics or the timing of certain things have to be near identical, and that's where vibe coding these compilations

becomes an issue. If you are someone that doesn't know anything about coding, you are going to prompt the chatbot,

have it spit out something that is barely functioning, and then package it and ship it. Even if things are off,

prompting it over and over again isn't optimizing because it's going to make the same mistakes that it was making

when you first prompted it. Half these vibe code recoms are just overcomplicated emulated copies. It's

not native. It's just an emulator disguised as an executable. If you do know what you're doing, well, reviewing

and changing the code an AI made would yield in better results while benefiting from the time saved that AI provides.

Heck, maybe you're writing it all on your own, but use AI to handle the more tedious task that you still check before

shipping. >> That is use of AI as a tool, which is what AI is supposed to be, a tool, not a

means to replace a person or replace your reason for learning. Everything AI has automated can be learned, and it

should be learned [music] because that way when it's automated, you can go back and fix things with no problem because

you will have done it before. And without that knowledge, you're kind of left in the dark when things go wrong.

And that is what makes all of this so scary. AI is making people lazier. I'm not even going to sugarcoat this because

it genuinely is something that I fear. >> Not being replaced, but having people work on things that they aren't

qualified to do and then getting worse products out of it. We've seen it with AI generative ads. Storytelling is lost,

[music] and it makes that item less appealing because of it. People are putting this vibe coded version of Adobe

products on a pedestal [music] because what it's doing is very important for consumers. It offers a free open-source

alternative to the Adobe [music] Creative Suite, allowing the use of the products almost unchanged without the

high price tag and without all the blow. The Photoshop one is leagues smaller in size and makes it a much snappier

program to use. But now, what if through this a company [music] is made and more products are put out on the market

that's not made by a single developer? How are you going to keep it functioning in the future if you don't know what

you're doing? >> Well, no company has actually laid off [music] developers in hopes of replacing

their entire development team with AI, right? >> Tim Sweeney is the biggest manchild of

the gaming industry. I'm not normally so vulgar when it comes to these things, but I am tired of acting like him as a

person is okay. He'll complain that Steam is a monopoly, but will fire thousands of developers, force the ones

already there to vibe code nonsense under extreme deadlines, and what do we get out of it? A worse product. They're

trying to use this as a gotcha. Literally, in the official announcement, they bragged that their vibe coded

launcher is faster than Steam's, but at the same time, it's broken. So many examples of it just

being a mess with so many bugs and overall dysfunctionality with it. And yet, the top dollar guy, Tim crybaby

Sweeney, excuses this with programming is hard. [ __ ] YOU LAID OFF THE PEOPLE WHO DID THE PROGRAMMING. You are

so incompetent at developing in a developer-centric industry that you have to ask your AI chatbot to do the work

that your company is based on. How is this the same company that built Unreal Engine? It's a technical marvel, but the

next one's probably going to be vibe coded because baby needs to have his way. Literally [ __ ] on Steam.

Meanwhile, they use Proton for compatibility on Linux. AKA, the thing that is made by Steam to run Windows

games on Linux. You're using your competitors' tools to do the things you can't do, and when you don't want to use

them for the things that you can do, you still decide to use the thing that is killing our brain cells to improve your

product. But hey, guess what? Steam actually smoked your ass without vibe coding and didn't need to brag about it,

you [ __ ] weasel. Never mind that, and huge emphasis on this, that it's barely functioning right here and now. But if

you are vibe coding without checking what it's doing, how are you going to keep maintaining it so it's functioning

in the future? Because if everything is built on AI-made code, eventually AI is going to start [music] stealing from

itself. Again, it doesn't create, it only copies. So if development becomes all AI-based, how long will it take

until nothing works? On the one hand, using this as a tool to replace shitty corporations, like how they are trying

to replace employees, is something that I find to be very funny. I'm not sure if something similar could have been done

without AI, and that is an argument that I've heard. And people are using AI to reverse engineer the software to create

their own versions. It's similar to how people are putting out decomps and yeah, playing with the Photoshop one, it just

kind of works. And that creates a problem of people not knowing how the food is made, but giving it a pass

because it just tastes good. With the mixing of games, I did wonder if it was possible at all for this to be made

without the use of AI. And that was quickly proven to me that it could. YouTuber Swirly has this excellent

breakdown video showing that this sort of thing [music] is very much possible. He put a lot of time into it and breaks

down how it works on a level that I can understand as someone who doesn't develop. It's a showcase that yeah, AI

can make these super complex processes a little bit more simple, but where's the heart of it? Where's the breakdown

explaining all of it? How can you tell me what's going on here because that is just as interesting as the modification

itself, if not more so. The care and love put into this is unlike anything other and there's a level of polish here

that you don't see in Vibe Coded nonsense. The SkyCraft mod is doing the compositing thing with Minecraft and

Skyrim. It blends well enough, but Swirly recreated Minecraft in another coding language and it's near identical

because Minecraft consists of math that can be translated to other coding languages. If anything, it makes Vibe

Coding look pathetic because with a basic understanding of development, you could achieve very similar things. Will

it take more time? Absolutely. But a better product comes out of it and it actually works without much hassle.

Every time there's [music] a debate about the usage of AI in these sort of things, there are people that try to act

better than the ones who know what they are doing. And it just kind of comes off as jealousy to me. Break the pencil.

Video editors are dead. Developers aren't needed. Are just sad excuses of people who don't want to invest the time

[music] to learn a new skill. I say, let them have their fun while it last because AI is not going to stick around

forever. And when people are needed to have a hand in things again, they'll be the first to ask for your help. Your

contribution as a human will always overtake anything an AI prompt could ever make.