I’m here for the games. Always was.

Couldn’t stop playing. Read the Doom Construction Kit. Built Doom mods. Shockingly, id Software never called. Picked up 3D because I wanted to know how things ended up on screen. Wanted to make them. Modeled them. Rigged them. Animated them. Never left.

Endless software cycles, a graveyard of dead engines, the same single goal: keep things on screen moving. Always picking up the next tool. AI is the same itch.

Tried programming early. Hated it. One typo and the whole file lights up red. I refused to walk back through eight hundred lines hunting for a missing semicolon. Left that to the masochists who consider a clean compile a viable substitute for serotonin.

Generalist. Animator. Lead animator. Peaked as a CG Supervisor. The chair above me kept emptying. Studio system is a meat grinder. From hands on the model to telling other people where to put theirs. Less ambition, more attrition. Surviving that pipeline taught me one useful skill: directing people who type better than I do.

Then the wall came down.

Code was the one barrier I never crossed. My entire career, I treated it like it was radioactive. Then the model showed up. Now AI writes the code. AI bakes the state machines. AI structures the logic. Describe the system. Read what comes back. Reject the garbage. Iterate. Same dynamic I had with pipeline programmers when I was CG Supervisor. Break down the logic, let them build the tool. Standups have one chair now, and the pipeline doesn’t ask for mental health days because the GPU is running hot.

Sat down on a Friday night, said fuck it, started prompting. Now I have games in development. Entire studio pipelines compressed into weekend projects. All of them driven by AI-generated code, AI-assisted pipelines, and synthetic heavy lifting. None are ship-ready yet. They exist because the barrier to entry was violently dismantled, and I didn’t hesitate to walk over the rubble.

Most of my circle hates this. Good.

Half the artists I came up with are still on social media making AI the villain of their personal arc. They pin ‘I am an artist, not a prompt monkey’ to their profiles and write essays about the ‘soul’ of art.

I have supervised these exact people long enough to know how the sausage is made. What they romanticize as the soul of art is usually a localized bottleneck. Inefficiency rebranded to justify an eight-hour invoice for a generic background barrel.

They aren’t defending art. They are obsolete gatekeepers mad that the machine can kitbash faster than they can.

If AI produced genuinely bad work, nobody would be mad. They fight AI because it’s getting good enough to expose how mechanical their magic always was.

Players don’t ask what tools made the game. They ask three questions: Is it fun? Is it broken? Is it worth my time? A pure, handcrafted, artisanal toolchain is not on the list. You think the audience cares if a human suffered to make their 3D goblin? Photoshop killed painters. Digital killed film. Video killed the radio star, and AI is killing the mediocre middleman. The audience never reads the manifesto. They just show up for the result.

I am not here to protect anyone’s feelings about the creative process. The prompt monkey is the only typist left.

If the games ship, I’ll send the purists postcards. If they don’t, you’ll know what to do with the URL.

òwó