alt Hacker NewsI don't think that's insane, at least not in the game dev world. I was big into the Bethesda game modding scene 15-ish years ago, and did some work on e.g. Tamriel Rebuilt, and saw the scale and man-hours that went into that- and that was even using a premade modding toolkit, and I compare that to what I can build with Claude...
To be fair, in the game dev world there are a lot of things you can do now that would have been impossible, or required 10,000x the number of devs that it does now, e.g. making No Man's Sky without the proc-gen tools that can exist now would have been physically impossible. Point being, it's perfectly normal to be able to say, "using the tools available now, I can build what would have taken tens or hundreds of devs years of work in the past", in game dev.
The project I'm building rn is a black-box rebuild of a client that has been being developed for ~22 years, and I've rebuilt significant portions of it over the last 2 weeks. That was, quite literally, equivalent to tens or hundreds of peoples' labor.
> a client that has been being developed for ~22 years, and I've rebuilt significant portions of it over the last 2 weeks.
Taking the end result of a 22 year old dev process and telling Claude to rewrite it, is in no way equivalent to doing 22 years worth of the work put in by the developers working on it.
That’s like saying replicating a paper that was the result of 22 years of research is the equivalent of 22 years of the author’s labor.
No Man’s Sky isn’t the equivalent of 10,000x the devs who made it. Because the procedurally generated content isn’t equivalent to handcrafted content. I’m also not aware of any procedural generation techniques in No Man’s Sky that weren’t possible 30 years ago.
As far as Tamriel rebuilt goes, if you’re talking just about just reimplementing Daggerfall in the Morrowind engine, you might be able to do that in a month of vibecoding.
But that’s not hundreds of dev years worth of work.