most flash games were horrible too! You had to go through a load of crap to find games like boxhead, motherload, or bloons. I'm a big believer in volume here. You don't have to be an amazing programmer to be an amazing game designer, but before, the former was a prerequisite for even getting started. The beauty of AI tools applied to games is that you can just focus on the latter. Over time the gems will rise to the top
I’m not sure this can be assumed. Discovery was already one of the biggest hurdles when releases were bottlenecked by human output. Increasing output 10x is only going to make it worse.
Same as with Google, where they’ve lost the SEO war against AI spammers and valuable content has become close to impossible to find.
> You don't have to be an amazing programmer to be an amazing game designer
That has been true even without AI.
Solutions to create games with barely any programming knowledge have existed for a long time. You can create a full featured Unreal Engine game with just using its visual scripting language.
Lots of amazing games have absolute dogshit code. It doesn't matter. You can write super simple, procedural code without any fancy abstraction and just get the job done.
Programming is the easiest part of game dev.
Plus you don't have to be a solo dev. Sure, just being a game designer might be hard but if you bring artistic skills to the table as well then you are golden and can partner up or outsource the programming if needed. Honestly people with an artistic background often do much better than people from a software engineering background who are used to overcomplicate things.
So no, programming was never the hurdle and AI doesn't help here. It just helps people to produce more slop faster.
A man of culture! Motherload was great. There really were a ton of great flash games, both on corporate websites like Cartoon Network, on popular sites like Newgrounds, Armor Games, etc. all the way to the back alleys like Albino Blacksheep.
These communites established a generation of modern animators and game developers. Maybe we'll see the same from the youth of today who use these tools and create communities around it.
This presumes that people will have the time and the patience to wade through the slop and find the gems. Right now people do that with the tide of low quality human-authored games to find the gems but when there's 10x or 100x as many low quality games will people still have the patience? I hope so, but I don't know. We're already seeing a huge uptick in the number of games being released every year on Steam and most of them don't get more than a handful of reviews, positive or negative.
Not all the things that are good will rise to the top, but most of the things that rise to the top will be good. We've gotten pretty good at ranking systems as a species at this point, I'd say
- you mention proxying keys. One issue that we run into is that there are a bunch of tools that are really useful but require keys to be on disk (e.g. aws cli -- yes yes you can do IAM permissions but still). How do you guys think about those? (Especially since your setup onboarding is 'just install from npm or mise')
- poking around on the github, saw that you guys were at one point on fly.io. Did you guys end up switching off them? What motivated that if so?
- the CLI integration is cool! Is that actually teleporting remote sessions down to a local machine? Or is it more a window into the remote sandboxes?
would love to share notes! If you want to get in touch separately feel free at amol at noriagentic dot com.
Nori looks really cool, will set up sometime to exchange notes. But with regards to your questions:
- Proxying keys: We allow users to setup keys in the sandbox and use CLIs for some cases but we also support an egress gateway that intercepts and injects keys on the way out, which supports the major api integrations we offer.
- We still allow fly.io for deployments (so after a sandbox has a final app, you can deploy it and move out of the ephemeral sandbox). We never used them for sandboxing, but we will integrate into https://sprites.dev/ soon.
- For the CLI, we allow you to SSH into the remote sandox since a lot of workload add too much stress to local machines
Curious about what sandbox provider you use to power Nori and how you are handling the secrets/keys issue?
we're on fly, going to add modal support soon. I dont think our users care all that much, but we care for dev ergonomics.
keys are tricky. We don't have a great answer. I mean the proxy inject works well enough for mcp, but there is just such a long tail of tools that do something like 'read a key from disk and encrypt it before sending it out' which makes proxy management just a pain
I wish this fucking meme of "post the prompt" would die. Very little work is one-shotted, very little has a singular "the prompt", most is iterated until it's close to the vision of what the author actually set out to write.
Lots of people in the comments talking about how this is about training data, but surely this is actually about hiring competent people after the mass exodus/firing at xAI?
Whoever thinks the talent pool is this limited that it requires offering Cursor of all places $60B is pattern-matching so hard they might as well be a quilt.
The AI bubble music stops when one of these former-darling companies has a complete crashout rather than a "successful exit". The investors keep investing because even largely-failed products get acquihire paydays
Note that Meta paid ~16b for Alexandr Wang, and Google paid ~3b for the windsurf executive team. You are making a category error -- the talent pool isn't "ML researcher" it's "competent leader"
The acquihire angle is probably part of it, but I'd note that Cursor's team is small — around 50 people — and the $60B valuation makes it expensive per head even by AI acquihire standards. You don't pay that multiple for talent alone.
What you might pay for is market signal + model distribution. Grok needs a story for why enterprises should switch. "The model that powers the tool you already use every day" is a much easier enterprise sales pitch than "our LLM benchmarks slightly better." The $60B is at least partially buying the answer to the question: why should any company bet on xAI?
I think composer has currently by far the best price to performance ratio for coding (not counting subsidized subscription cost by OpenAI and Anthropic).
It's based on Kimi K2, but I think it's fair to say, that their RL really sets it apart from the other open weight models.
I'm sorta suspicious. I don’t really think this is why they are moving to closed source. It’s true that there is more security risk, but that actually justifies being open source, because open source tooling can spend more tokens hardening itself against security vulns than closed source tooling (at least, that’s the theory). My strong hunch is they are moving to closed source because it is now trivial to copy a product with AI clean rooms. Which, tbf, is a totally valid reason to move closed source. But I'd want to see more adoption of something like the Ship of Theseus license (https://github.com/tilework-tech/nori-skillsets/pull/465/cha...) before giving up on open source entirely
> My strong hunch is they are moving to closed source because it is now trivial to copy a product with AI clean rooms. Which, tbf, is a totally valid reason to move closed source.
The "clean room" part of clean-room reverse engineering implies that there is no exposure to the original copyrighted code on the part of those doing the reimplementation, whether human developers or AI. Traditionally, if you're working of the source code itself, you have one party translate the source code back into a design document, specifying behavior, and then you have another party implement that design spec with original code.
If you already have a running copy of the software to model the behavior off of, then you don't need the original source code in the first place. So going closed source will have zero effect on the capacity of AI tools to be used for clean room reverse engineering: all you need is the runtime.
This license doesn't seem valid: a license can't redefine what qualifies as a derivative work. That's determined by copyright law itself, and if copyright law says that a clean-room reimplementation isn't a derivative work, then it isn't restricted by copyright, so doesn't need a license in the first place.
> My strong hunch is they are moving to closed source because it is now trivial to copy a product with AI clean rooms. Which, tbf, is a totally valid reason to move closed source.
Since such "clean room" implementations ostensibly do not see the source, it's arguably irrelevant whether such sources are open are not. Such implementations will happen regardless of whether the sources they're reimplementing are opened or closed.
At risk of self promotion, I think more people should adopt something like the Ship of Theseus license (https://github.com/tilework-tech/nori-skillsets/pull/465/cha...). It's not obvious if this will patch the clean room hole in licensing, but I'd rather see it play out in court than assume opensource is just fully dead
I am incredibly skeptical that license is legally meaningful. (but obligatory IANAL.)
Generally speaking it is very very difficult to have a license redefine legal terms. Either this theseus copy is legally a derivative work or it isn't, and text of a license is going to do at most very very little to change that.
> It's not obvious if this will patch the clean room hole in licensing, but I'd rather see it play out in court than assume opensource is just fully dead
IANAL, but I don't think there is any "clean room hole in licensing": licensing is downstream of copyright law, and clean-room reverse engineering, if done properly, results in products that do not infringe the copyright of the originating work to begin with, so the license therefore never applies to them.
The "Ship of Theseus" license you've linked to attempts to define for itself what constitutes a derivative work, but what is and is not a derivative work is determined by copyright law itself, and there's no concept of imposing licensing conditions on works that your copyright never extended to in the first place.
Simply put, if something isn't infringing your copyright under the criteria established by the law, then your permission was never needed to do it in the first place, so the conditions under which you would or would not be willing offer that permission are irrelevant.
If someone spends years using your software and they have learned a mental model of how your software works, they can build an exact replica and there is nothing you can do about that since there is no copy you can sue over. Said user is also allowed to use AI tools to aid in the process.
What you want is an EULA, which is a contract users explicitly have to agree with. A license file only grants access or the right to copy, it doesn't affect usage of your software.
The big issue with this approach is that it will destroy your sanity for things that are often a big bag of hype with nothing underneath. I often find HN to be better because things that get on the front page are vetted beyond 'someone on twitter hyped up a thing'
HN is still great but it’s in decline, I still hear about AI developments on r/LocalLlama and X sometimes weeks before they make it here if even at all.
And all the commentary here is negative, skeptical and mean. It’s like Slashdot when Apple started ascending and everyone was complaining that iPods will never catch on.
> things that get on the [HN] front page are vetted beyond 'someone on twitter hyped up a thing'
Interesting take. I'm not aware that anyone is doing vote rings or vote buying very successfully (considering that my own blog also makes it at an expected rate, and I know there isn't a group of friends voting that up) but I kinda assume that this is a thing for some of the bigger launches where they are hoping for conversions. Beyond a defined group coordinating their posts or votes, though, surely HN's front page can't be seen as vetted beyond "oh this looks trendy/hype"? People don't vote only after trying out the product or reading the full article. In many cases that would mean voting after it has already disappeared off of the front page for good
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