Hi,

I know a lot of you will stop reading after this next sentence, and I respect that, but I want to try to explain myself. My name is Chris Ellis, and I use AI to code my apps. (They contain no AI art.)

I’ve been a programmer/developer for 15 years now, professionally. Until very recently, I refused to use AI in my coding, but in April of 2025 I suddenly passed out. Doctors still don’t know what happened to me, just that it was a “cardiac incident.” After that my health went downhill rapidly. I won’t go into all the details, but the most important part is that my brain broke a little. Part of it breaking is that I can’t really read code anymore. It feels like reading a foreign language, and even simpler code that I can read, I’m not able to follow the logic across multiple functions/scripts. It was devastating, and destroyed my career, as well as one of the things that I’m most passionate about in life.

Cut to a few months ago, when someone suggested AI has gotten better at coding. Frankly, I didn’t believe them, but I gave it a shot. I can say with all sincerity that it’s terrible. It makes horrible decisions, it changes things when you don’t want it to, it loves to duplicate code/css so that fixing one thing leaves other similar parts broken, it lies about the things it did or didn’t do, and the list goes on. Sometimes it would take me days to finish something that would’ve taken me an hour or two when my brain was at full function. But after fighting with it for days, I had created something. It was small and dirty, but it was functional… and it was the first time I had created anything since all this started.

The thing that a lot of people who create “AI Slop” don’t understand is that coding was never the hard part of making things. I was a solo freelance developer taking games from client concept to production (using their art assets) on my own. That leaves me with a bunch of skills that the people churning out the garbage don’t have, but that no one is willing to give me a job using. Making a real product that people want to use isn’t just having a good idea and throwing it together, especially a game. You have to consider user experience, flow, performance, “finding the fun,” “juice,” and hours upon hours of testing and iteration. If you want to make a game with AI you have to be a game designer using it as a tool. And the honest truth is that in its current form, it will take longer to use AI than it does to code it from scratch. For most people, learning programming will be a vastly better use of your time than trying to make something with existing AI technology. But for someone like me, it’s the only way I’ve found to do one of the things I love most in this world, which is to create something other people will enjoy.

So, that’s my story. I don’t expect it to change most people’s minds, but I hope some of you will understand where I’m coming from.

P.S. All AI Art (images, writing, music, etc.) is theft.

Thanks for your time,
Chris Ellis