the golden age of hobbyiest projects?
Another hackernews articles sparked the opposite of joy in me:
I'm stoked for the golden era of side-projects!
Love that attitude. Me too!
There were also comparisons with floor796.com and I find that depressing.
And that is very judgemental of me. Sure. BUT, everything in me screams "ALL YOU CREATED IS A PERVERSION OF AN IDEA!"
The main culprit are these kinds of comments:
A few AI anomalies, like several roads turning into rivers and lakes.
THIS IS SICK! The BGM, the SFX, the visual are all perfect.
There are also other voices:
Sorry but that is not pixel art.
Crazy to me that people engage with this. This is not pixel art or any art really, it's just a weird blurry mess. Looks terrible.
But the comment that strikes me especially is this one:
Really cool. I can see some issues, like Starr King park turned into a lake for some reason, but it’s so much fun to look at. Do you have any way to patch errors and discontinuities at the tile boundaries?
And the answer is no. No the author did not have anything like that. He just slopped his way through it all without honing the edges. There is a similar project with New York that I saw some moons ago that was very similar but apparently a bit easier to make. He describes proudful how he created this:
Similar to isometric.nyc, I generated a few ghibli-style pixel-art images using Google's Nano Banana. [...] There was a LOT of manual trial and error. But as usual, Claude Code added this feature to the dev app that allowed me to select the best images and approve them.
I am very negative here but this place is the one where I just let my mood run wild and I hate every single sentence of the explanation. There is no Art in this! I am sure there was some craft going on but all I read in my heart is "like a child I banged it with a metal pipe until it roughly had the shape I wanted to see". This is the artistic level I perceive. Art is ephemeral, hard if not impossible to define, but for me it also involves some strife for perfection, and this ain’t it. All I see is someone brute forcing their way to a mediocre result.
I used to marvel at pixel art, I know people who produce it and it’s an interesting craft, like the ability to create nice icons (there is an article somewhere how this is also a dying art). It’s not something you can just do. To create a minimalist picture with as little information as possible and still communicate the original image or reality is an art! It’s hard to get right 100% of the time. And this is why this project and the New York one annoys me so much, on the first glance its marvellous, I want to like it. But then you take a closer look and see that its slop, slop everywhere! It’s not proper art, it’s something someone banged out with their iron pipe without a shred of decency for the process.
While I am at it, I further judge the technical side of things. It’s so unpolished at the edges. The hallmark of AI slop, good enough to be impressive in a board meeting but doesn’t hold to scrutiny. And this is a repeating theme..for now. I fear the day it gets better or good enough to fool on a second glance and distance people further from the soul of the art.
I fear that I sound even higher and mightier as I aim to, and I know that there is a lot of commercial "art" that is not better than this, barely passing, good enough, and yet, I cannot understand how people are willingly feed the slop machine, create more of this facsimile of humanity and make this world more grey.
I got a few unfinished side projects myself; I get it. Live is so full of things, so many good ideas and so much distraction from all the nice stuff. To get the inner extreme socialist going for a second, that is maybe the reason why we should aim for a better society that values humans instead of feeding the endless corpo slop machine that enriches the few and enslaves the rest? To have more time for being human? But I digress, I see how it seems so easy to just use Claude, codex, whatever (its astonishing how I am really unknowledgeable about it all because its so repulsive for me) to just let it make the annoying parts of the work and get the idea rolling. For me coding was never tedious, thinking about how to solve a problem was. Interface is harder, sure, I am not a graphical person, which is probably why I marvel at clean pixel art. But still, I take proud in the little trinkets of code I created for my amusement, my personal niche utility. I have grand Ideas myself, I see the process and know most of them can never be, but I wouldnt want them as the monstrosity that vibe coding would create. They wouldn’t be my creations anyway.
I remember that back in an elective class I took about paper making there was a quote from the tutor about Japanese paper making: "If it doesn’t take time, it isn’t worth it". It’s not like the Japanese aren’t violating that themselves with their weird work culture but fast paced city live style, BUT, I find this applies to craft and especially hobbyist projects.
If I read the blog of someone, I want to grasp their thoughts, not the vomited AI slop they copy & pasted after try&erroring some vague thoughts in front of an LLM. If I look at a picture I want to feel the metaphoric soul of the artist, not the words the prompt left behind. And there will be AI Art that is touching, that is convincing, it will produce astonishing works..randomly. By pure chance, after some few rounds of monkey typing. And I don’t like that.
You are doing a hobby project, why do you fixate about results? You are creating the flesh of your idea, why is your own idea not worth the time to do it properly, by hand, in a deliberate way? Or was your idea always just a product for you and all you could think of was to show it off? To be the first to the market, the one that increases KPIs? I think that is what my heart thinks when I see another slop project. Capitalism in the hobby space. The desire to show off, not the love for the craft.