This is not quite true. Currently you still need to give them guidance on what type of architecture would best work for your game, or after many iterations on gameplay you'll end up with terrible performance and a complete mess of a codebase. I expect that will be solved sooner rather than later, though.
PS no, I am not interested in your alternative harness that will supposedly 100% trust me bro fix all these issues
Fwiw I tried the same thing ~a year ago and the result was horrible; like so much worse.
Sure it’s not AAA, the art looks like shit and most people would probably not enjoy it - but it was fun for me to play and I’ll work on it a bit more to see if I can bring it into a state where others can enjoy it too.
This is revisionist history. Coding was definitely one of the hard parts!
all those things equal time and money eg. difficulty
Why 'nasty'? I agree it's a problem to solve, but you just use a fixed-point math library and it's fine. Determinism is freeing, not confining. It allows you to do things like rollback netcode, replays and easy debugging. You can't just say that 'reality' happens to be what you in particular are used to.
Assuming the agent didn't put in a native nondeterministic trig function deep in the code instead of using the library one, it's an easy mistake to make and hard to debug in a big game. It won't even show unless you have a robust CI matrix. It can indeed be "nasty" to maintain.
Also determinism might work for simulation state, but shader/gfx differences across platforms can be really nasty and a library can't save you. Not even something like WebGPU. Also if you're doing any sort residency streaming dependent on GPU timings trying to make that deterministic will be a nightmare.
I’ve worked on games with intentional determinism, and it’s a very valuable tool. A playtester can hand a dev a recording of the game inputs (including clock) for whatever bug they encountered, and the dev can fast forward to the exact point and repro it 100%. The amount of time saved chasing down difficult bugs is enormous.
Take a given start point; feed a set of inputs; compute a checksum on the resulting state. Check that the checksum matches on different platforms.
And if your language is good you can parameterize your logic on a particular numeric type, so that a particular fixed point implementation is consistently used
But many top games have complex engines and online services that require technical mastery beyond the current AI capabilities. For those genres, engineering is a huge barrier of entry.
For a not so extreme example, you won't vibe code Cyberpunk 2077 while just taking care of art and gameplay ideas. Gosh, humans could barely pull that one off!
I learned that one the other day - I've been building a little RTS game with a replay mechanism, and replays in Safari broke where they worked in Chrome. Opus 5.5 fixed it by replacing calls to things like Math.sin() and Math.cos() with its own deterministic functions: https://gist.github.com/simonw/7df96ed7296c69b70a9990102cae0...
It's definitely not my intention to try and describe ways for making game development be more turnkey. I'm more trying to directly address ways to make non-one-shot (read: actual) game development be more tenable when an agent is involved.