This one isn’t about code. If you’re building anything with AI right now, you might have felt it too.

I use AI for pretty much all the heavy lifting here. Not “I asked it a question once.” It reads the decompiled game code next to me and a lot of the time I’m just the guy watching it happen. The server work that’s coming will be the same.

And there’s a wee bit of shame under that. Like I outsourced the thinking.

So…. “don’t use it then.”… No chance. Watching it chew through 15 MB of compiled bytecode in an afternoon, work that would have cost me weeks, I’m not handing that back. So the real question is what’s left for me to do, and whether that part still matters.

The worry

The mathematician Terence Tao has a line about this I picked up from a Youtube video. “Using AI is like taking a helicopter to the summit instead of hiking up. You get the view, you get the photo, but you skipped the climb, and the climb was where you’d have gotten fitter and learned the mountain. Next peak over, you still can’t make it on your own.”

That’s a real worry. But it assumes there’s one summit and everyone knows where it is. This project isn’t one mountain. Nobody has revived Fury. The helicopter is fast, but it doesn’t know where to fly. Someone has to read the terrain and point, and someone has to notice when the pilot says “summit’s right there” with total confidence and is aimed at a cloud. That part is me, and it turns out there’s a lot of it.

What lets me relax about it

AI is unreasonably good at anything with a checkable answer. Does the client connect? Does the file format decode? Does the code compile and run? Ask it, try it, move on.

It’s much weaker at the stuff with no right answer. What combat should feel like. Which dead end is worth walking into next. Which feature would actually make a player grin. None of that has a unit test.

So the split sorts itself out. AI does the archaeology and the plumbing. I own the features, the mechanics, and the feel of the game. I don’t spend any energy guarding that line, because AI can’t cross it on its own.

That’s the whole point, really. If a project is deep enough, it doesn’t much matter how much AI you use, because there’s still no version of it getting finished without you. This one seems deep enough to me.