The two hypotheticals are difficult to answer because any change in process produce a change in result, but in general, I would say the answer to both is yes, perhaps more likely.

Diversions are one of the most discouraged things ing game development. The most common advice to a starting developer is "Limit your scope" I think that advice might need some recalibration. If a developer has a neat idea for a thing, they might now be able to explore it and integrate it into a game over a few days instead of pausing the core game for several months so they develop an idea while their money runs out.

> I don't doubt that most don't care, same with how most people fairly don't care about most things, but I do think those that like to immerse themselves in the whole journey as well as the result are probably not feeling great. At the very least, this one doesn't feel great.

Why? It literally has zero effect on you. Nobody's stopping you from obsessing about voxels of diversions in whatever if it makes you happy. But it comes across as genuinely pathological that you feel worse because other people don't care about something you care deeply about. Ask yourself this: do YOU feel deeply about EVERYTHING EVERY OTHER PERSON cares deeply about? Should other people be saddened because its-summertime doesn't care about their favorite TV series or how to crochet some particular object? Doesn't this appear patently insane to you?

Sure, but I think I was careful enough to qualify my statements to account for these kinds of "gamers." I'd say the kinds of people you're describing are really game dev enthusiasts. It's certainly the case that almost all game dev enthusiasts are gamers, but it's also certainly the case that almost all gamers are not game dev enthusiasts.

Of course, even for those people, I doubt AI is, in itself, a turn off. You can use AI, even considerably, while still adding important creative elements to the process. Obviously something completely vibecoded and spit out in a cycle wouldn't qualify, but you can still do serious development on top of code that is being primarily written by AI.

So based in reality. I don't really understand people enjoying doing stuff with prompts, either they're very mediocre or there must be something else. There's also the question that usually some famous game mechanics existed because of trial and error, line after line of hand coded stuff, and patterns emerging as you see fit from the code to the test, if all you do is prompting and piling slop over slop I'm afraid what we have ahead won't be fun, in any industry really