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I struggle with the "good guys vs bad guys" framing here.

Is a small indie dev "dodgy" if they use AI to unblock a tricky C# problem so they can actually finish their game? Yarn Spinner seems to conflate "Enterprise Scale Replacement" (firing 500 support staff) with "assistive tooling" (a solo dev using GenAI for texture variants).

By drawing such a hard line, they might be signaling virtue to their base, but they are also ignoring the nuance that AI -- like the spellcheckers and compilers before it -- can be a force multiplier for the very creatives they want to protect.

Personally, I do agree that there are many problems with companies behind major LLMs today, as well as big tech companies C-levels who don't understand why AI can't replace engineers. But this post, as much as written in a nice tone, doesn't frame the problem correctly in my mind.

One could probably think of dozens of reasonable arguments for avoiding LLM use, but this one is awful. If LLMs actually are able to get more work done with fewer people aka "firing people" that would be wonderful for humankind. If you disagree and like getting less work done with more people, you are welcome to forego tractors, dishwashers, the steam engine, and all the rest.

> This comment pops up a few times, often from programmers. Unfortunately, because of how messy the term AI now is, the same concerns still apply. Your adoption helps promote the companies making these tools. People see you using it and force it onto others at the studio, or at other workplaces entirely. From what we’ve seen, this is followed by people getting fired and overworked. If it isn’t happening to you and your colleagues, great. But you’re still helping it happen elsewhere. And as we said, even if you fixed the labour concerns tomorrow, there are still many other issues. There’s more than just being fired to worry about.

What other people and companies do because I happen to use something correctly (as an assistive technology), is not my responsibility. If someone happens to misuse it or enforce it use in a dysfunctional work environment, that is their doing and not mine.

If a workplace is this dysfunctional, there are likely many other issues that already exist that are making people miserable. AI isn't the root cause of the issue, it is the workplace culture that existed before the presence of AI.

> AI is now a tool for firing people

In essence we have an ownership problem. If I own the AI, I can do my work in couple of hours and then some and then have rest of the day off to enjoy things I like. If the company owns AI - I'm out of work. The difference between a world of plenty and beauty vs the world of misery for many of us - is who owns the AI.

When IDEs entered the market, they were the talk of the town. Improve your programming speed. Blazingly fast refactoring. A graphical debugger and logging information. Intellisense, inline documentation and the whole nine yards.

Many developers never bothered with IDEs. We were happy using Vim, Emacs and many of us continue to do so today.

It's not surprising the first "innovation" was agentic programming with a modified IDE.

I'm sure many people will enjoy their new IDEs. I don't enjoy it. I enjoy doing things a different way.

It's like saying we won't use compilers because it puts all the people who would manually create punch cards out of a job

I wish. I have just witnessed a engineer on our (small) team push a 4k line change to prod at the middle of the night. His message was: "lets merge and check it after". AI can help good team become better, but for sure it will make bad teams worse.

I sorry friends, I think imma quit to farming :$

I wonder if the title of this post will someday be a certification?

I'd be more concerned when AI companies decide its time to make a profit. The more effective its supposed to be, the more they can justify charging for it.

I didn't either but I have now realised yes it uses a lot of energy and yes it can be a total waste of energy, but if you are doing good with it, then it is worth the cost.

I have decided I can only use AI that has a benefit to society at all. Say lower energy use apps for eink devices.

“You’ll get left behind if you don’t learn AI”

Left behind where? We all live in the same world, anyone can pick up AI at any moment, it’s not hard, an idiot can do it (and they do).

If you’re not willing to risk being “left behind”, you won’t be able to spot the next rising trend quickly enough and jump on it, you’ll be too distracted by the current shiny thing.

programming is just turning calories/energy into text. some of you are just not that efficient at it, some of you produce garbage when you do. it's only been three years, there is still low hanging fruit on the new branches.

I’d love to work for a company like this, but when you said, “by the time we finished our doctorates,” I knew you were way out of my league.

Didn't know yarn spinner was used to make so many cool games. Norco is a favorite from the last few years.

The anti-ai stance just makes em even cooler.

If the people developing and supporting chat- and c0rn-bots are anxious about the future, that is the correct emotion to be feeling.

The reflexive and moralistic anti-AI takes are starting to get more annoying than the actual AI slop

This article is silly. Your employees are using AI to get shit done whether you like it or not. They are just being sneaky about it.

Yet another “genuinely nobody cares” take from yet another service or product I’ve never heard of before this post.

I’m not sure what the authors are looking for, a pat on the back? Good boy points? Reddit updoots? To feel like a real 1337 h4xx0r dev?

Nobody cares about this stance and I feel like I see it daily now. People do care about the quality and usefulness of your product and what you’re doing to continue to improve it.

It has the same energy as when a dude orders “black coffee” despite hating the taste to look more badass.

Here’s a paragraph summary of the story, written by Sonnet 4.5:

The Yarn Spinner team explains they don’t use AI in their game development tool despite having academic and professional backgrounds in machine learning—they’ve written books on it and gave talks about ML in games. Their position shifted around 2020 when they observed AI companies pivoting from interesting technical applications toward generative tools explicitly designed to replace workers or extract more output without additional hiring. They argue that firing people has become AI’s primary value proposition, with any other benefits being incidental. Rather than adopt technology for its own sake (“tool-driven development”), they focus on whether features genuinely help developers make better games. While they acknowledge numerous other AI problems exist and may revisit ML techniques if the industry changes, they currently refuse to use, integrate, or normalize AI tools because doing so would financially and socially support companies whose business model centers on eliminating jobs during a period when unemployment can be life-threatening.