Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software Still the Same? [video]

Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by corysama on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:22PM (#50487577)

As far as the coding user experience that I have personally observed, game programming peaked with the team developing NBA Inside Drive 2004 for the Xbox.

Their workflow was:

1) Arrive at work. Get coffee. Fetch latest code from Visual Source Safe.

2) Turn on Xbox. Hit F5 to build, deploy and start debugging on target.

3) Edit and Continue C++ in debugger IDE all day on target without ever bothering to stop the game. (Yes, this took some coding discipline to maintain.)

4) Turn off Xbox and go home.

Between the Visual Studio debugger and the Whole Tomato coding assistance, it was easy to understand the code and the runtime behavior. For anything GPU-related, Microsoft Pix for Xbox gave you a scrubbable timeline of every action, every pixel, every register change in the GPU while drawing a frame.

The hardware capabilities, available libraries, and artist tools have increased tremendously since then. But, the coding experience has not. 20 years later, I'm outside of gaming and I find most people using re-run-and-printf debugging for professional development. Even locally. I don't know how anyone gets anything done.

The only significant improvements I've seen in 20 years (besides the occasional memory tracker or profiler tool) has been AI agents and reversible debuggers. Otherwise, it's all been downhill since 2004.

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Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by armchairhacker on Friday November 13, 2026 @02:04PM (#50488202)

Live coding is making a comeback. I predict it for 2027. LLMs can and have made hot code loaders for any existing language, and make trivial the nasty bugs that used to plague JIT developers (like broken stack frames).

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Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by LugosFergus on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:25PM (#50489145)

I haven’t used it personally, but I always heard that VSS was a complete train wreck.

Gamedev programming probably hit a low point for me when XBox One and WiiU came around. Those were some truly awful experiences.

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Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by barbariangrunge on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:28PM (#50489191)

how so?

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Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by LugosFergus on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:46PM (#50489403)

The biggest issue with XB1 is that it felt like a massive regression compared to 360 development. We were forced to use this Windows 8 stack that came with all sorts of warts: “managed” C++/CLI, confusing manifest files, complicated app lifetime rules, only push deployment initially, limited threading control.

For WiiU, Nintendo used the Green Hills compiler. Their entire toolchain was simply clunky and unstable. You had to use this MULTI debugger which often didn’t work. My favorite line from their dev docs was “c++ not fully supported”. Well, that’s an issue since we used that extensively. It wasn’t even clear what actually wasn’t supported.

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Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by corysama on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:13PM (#50490729)

Visual Source Safe was definitely an unserious source control system. That part was kindof a joke... It technically got the job done for a small local team. But, it would be laughed out of town if it was made today.

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Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by skydhash on Friday November 13, 2026 @03:26PM (#50489159)

I like REPL, but you can be quite fast with a Edit-Compile-Run cycle. But that require settings a test harness and have the run phase be a test run. It's not as fast and experimental as an REPL, but can be quite nice if you know the test cases for your code.

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