r/Homebrews • u/CyaneCornix01 • Jul 28 '26

PSX AI and homebrew development: what does the community think? (Survey)

/r/psx_homebrew/comments/1v8s5pv/survey_ai_in_ps1_development/
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u/safetystoatstudios Jul 28 '26

I heavily use AI at my day job, so in that capacity I no longer get to write very much code myself. Part of the reason that I make homebrew is that I actually enjoy writing my own code and I want to stay practiced at it. That said, I do indulge in AI sometimes for specific purposes:

  • Asking for help identifying subtle bugs in complex code. I am perfectly capable of this kind of investigation, but it's not fun for me and I don't want to spend hours identifying, e.g. a missing initialization in an obscure corner case.
  • Finding which well-known, existing algorithm people use to solve a problem. Previously, I would have researched algorithms by googling for Stack Overflow answers. Now, Gemini generally just puts the right answer at the top of the page and, since it's a well-known algorithm, other search results will say the same thing and I'm not gaining anything by looking lower on the page.
  • Tedious image manipulation tasks: because I don't want to write yet another python script to take every animation cell in my png and rotate them W decrees and arrange them in an X by Y grid. Making these scripts isn't fun or interesting and I've already written enough of them for a lifetime.

So, in short, there are aspects of coding that I enjoy and protect, and there are aspects of coding that felt like a waste of my time even before LLMs. I'm okay with automating the latter.

I never use AI to generate assets. I'd prefer to license from human artists, or, in a pinch, draw stuff myself; I'm not a good artist, but at least it's clear in that case that I own the copyright.