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 galkk on Saturday November 14, 2026 @03:53AM (#50495300)

Please don't. I worked on databases, and elitism of gamedev folks often makes me smile.

People there will cheat every way possible to get their framerate/performance/cpy cycles. Yes, it's often amusing to read about really clever and interesting approaches, hacks or even framings of the problem. Like even one of Blow's presentations, where he was explaning how Braid did time reversal. Naive intuition tells: "make everything deterministic", Blow's answer: "how about just tracking state of everything".

But gamedev is not "orders of magnitude complex than any other software". State of the art databases need to be fast and correct. Even that alone makes them far more complex than "state of the art games".

And I'm sure there are many other areas who will look at databases and also rightfully tell that they are even more complex.

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Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by Stevvo on Saturday November 14, 2026 @04:19AM (#50495428)

[delayed]

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Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by mungaihaha on Saturday November 14, 2026 @09:26AM (#50497261)

> State of the art databases need to be fast and correct

SOTA games need that too. Games need to deal with physics, audio, rendering, networking, anti-cheat etc. at the same time. All very performance sensitive

Do you think Postgres is more 'complex' than a triple A game like GTA 6?

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Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by tstack on Saturday November 14, 2026 @01:26PM (#50499433)

I just can't let this pass... what happens if there is a bug in a game? Nothing of consequence. What happens if there is a bug in a database? Real-world consequences. A rendering glitch or an object behaving oddly in some cases is not a big deal. A database losing a record or computing something incorrectly... BIG F'ING DEAL! I cannot understand how you can even suggest these are equivalent.

> Do you think Postgres is more 'complex' than a triple A game like GTA 6?

Yes, absolutely. The postgres codebase has been around a long time and continues to be changed and accumulate functionality that all needs to work together. Just look at the details in the recent stories about all the issues that were found and the need to slip the schedule.

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Re:Jonathan Blow – If AI Solved Coding, Why Is My Software S... by ModernMech on Saturday November 14, 2026 @11:40AM (#50498384)

> And I'm sure there are many other areas who will look at databases and also rightfully tell that they are even more complex.

Robotics! Take all the problems of games and databases and put them on wheels.

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