Can you really hand game dev off to AI?
Space Tower development started in March 2026, and it's now around 90% complete.
The "hand it all to AI" question
You see articles and videos all the time claiming you can just hand a game to AI and it'll come out the other side finished. I wonder about that. If it were genuinely true, great — but in my experience, building a game with AI isn't that different from working with a human team.
- Available any time, day or night
- Summarises problems and issues at lightning speed
- Writes code at a pace no human can match
- A fraction of the cost of hiring someone
Those advantages are real.
How the process works
The basic loop is: brainstorm ideas, pick the best one, talk through the spec, think about how to implement it, have the AI write the code, try it, test it, and improve.
I sit in the producer/planner role; the AI is director and programmer.
You can't just hand it over and stop checking
That said, whenever I look at what the AI has produced and something feels off, I check the current spec. Often what I find is something like: a simple altitude check that should be straightforward, implemented with several complex formulas stacked together. Bugs that won't go away no matter how many times you ask for a fix almost always turn out to be cases like this.
When that happens, you can't just keep delegating — you have to dig in yourself, figure out what's going on, and sort it out. Without that discipline, I don't think you can ship a finished product.
Ideas have to come from the human side
On the ideas front, I don't think the AI's suggestions alone are enough to make something interesting. You bring the idea, the AI thinks it over — and sometimes, out of nowhere, it comes back with something surprisingly good. That part feels just like working with people, too.
The best part: any hour, from any device
The thing I value most about AI is that when I wake up at 2am with a great idea, I can open my phone and talk it through with the AI right then. Any time, anywhere, without any sign of reluctance. That's one of the biggest advantages of working with AI.
You couldn't do that with a human team — well, actually, in the nineties and early 2000s, being called on weekends or in the middle of the night was just part of the job. But still.
Series: "I wish I'd known this from the start"
- Start with GitHub, whatever else you do
- Where I got stuck connecting GitHub
- Don't trust the AI's memory. Keep everything in GitHub
- Working with Xserver — FTP, .htaccess, and deploys that fail
- Always start from the facts — write the rules, then keep fixing them
- The parts that were genuinely hard, and what I did about them
- AdSense keeps rejecting my site
- Just write @claude in an Issue, and Claude Code gets to work
- Can you really hand game dev off to AI? (this article)
- Goodbye, ChatGPT — Banned Twice, Moved to Claude
- How I Get Claude to Make Pictures