The Rise of Software Clickbait
Inspired by some of the things I've seen in the past few weeks, I wanted to make a dedicated post to this phenomenon.
The 'vibe-coding era' has allowed people to shove software out the door faster than ever. Recompilations of old games, specialized emulator interfaces, merging two games together into one singular mess, translations of games put together with zero care or reason. One of the latest ones I saw was a 'remake' of Zelda 2 the Adventures of Link. It had all the hallmarks of shit put together with no rhyme or reason, including of course a shitty AI-generated tileset which you could only get by joining their discord.
Most of these efforts are not designed to be played. The setup process is arduous, the games are buggy and unfinished, and the recomps are less accurate than just running a game in an emulator. These projects quickly are abandoned as whatever AI tooling they're using makes it impossible to complete and the devs move onto another project. If you go through the actual codebase(s) on Github assuming they exist, the code is unreadable and the readme is filled with five pages of technical jargon that adds up to being empty fluff.
What these efforts are designed for is clickbait. They're bullshots of the modern era; games that look good in a YouTube video and will quickly get a lot of clicks from less than authentic users. Worse still these efforts are often directly stealing from others, taking work in progress translations or efforts by real users and then completing them with slop so that they can be the first to get credit.
It's one of those things that has been driving me mildly insane. Software itself is built on a tenuous thread of trust: Trust that you (the developer) are writing safe, secure software and that you're writing something that does what it says. Bugs are inevitably a part of any software, but how can you trust someone that put out a new release today, whose commit history starts only a week ago, with every commit co-authored by Claude? How do you know this new recomp created by John1254 doesn't contain a keylogger or malicious packages or any number of other issues especially given that the code is functionally unreadable?
A number of friends of mine have said that they only want to engage with stuff made before 2020, before the rise of all of this. I try to be as much of an optimist as possible so I like to believe and trust in new and exciting projects but increasingly we're moving to a lower and lower trust environment. Projects are receding into the shadows to avoid having their stuff stolen, people are viewing every new release with skepticism. This has been a whole issue for open source repositories for a while now, but I fear it's becoming akin to a cancer and metastasizing across the entire web.