Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs

What I like about this post is that it highlights something a lot of devs gloss over: the coding part of game development was never really the bottleneck. A solo developer can crank out mechanics pretty quickly, with or without AI. The real grind is in all the invisible layers on top; balancing the loop, tuning difficulty, creating assets that don’t look uncanny, and building enough polish to hold someone’s attention for more than 5 minutes.

That’s why we’re not suddenly drowning in brilliant Steam releases post-LLMs. The tech has lowered one wall, but the taller walls remain. It’s like the rise of Unity in the 2010s: the engine democratized making games, but we didn’t see a proportional explosion of good game, just more attempts. LLMs are doing the same thing for code, and image models are starting to do it for art, but neither can tell you if your game is actually fun.

The interesting question to me is: what happens when AI can not only implement but also playtest -- running thousands of iterations of your loop, surfacing which mechanics keep simulated players engaged? That’s when we start moving beyond "AI as productivity hack" into "AI as collaborator in design." We’re not there yet, but this article feels like an early data point along that trajectory.

> What I like about this post is that it highlights something a lot of devs gloss over: the coding part of game development was never really the bottleneck. A solo developer can crank out mechanics pretty quickly, with or without AI.

This is not true at all. I have never worked on games and it will take me quite a while (even months) to write a "basic" game. While I know a lot of good practices about software development and decade+ of FAANG experience, I don't know the intricacies or even the basics of game development.

I recently experienced this for a different usecase. As an experienced backend developer, I wanted to automate some javascript/browser stuff. I tried on my own for 2-3 days and had couple of prototypes but nothing actually worked. I spent 2 hours with an AI and I had a working solution. We even iterated together quickly and solved some runtime issues and the solution is working for me seamlessly now.

So, I definitely see value of AI even for coding for experienced developers like myself.

> have never worked on games and it will take me quite a while (even months) to write a "basic" game.

You're contradicting yourself. I promise it wouldn't take you months, unless you're just a really bad developer.