Thread · HN Continuity

> The act of reverse engineering and porting decades old games to modern environments requires a complex, deeply involved set of tasks from multiple disciplines... It's the quintessential deep, skilled knowledge labor profile out there that people understood as a career protected by depth of skill and knowledge acquisition.

Game development, especially this kind of porting, is an extremely technically demanding task. But it is far more constrained and precise in its requirements than the sort of software development that happens outside of the game world. Most developers deal with vague and (importantly for AI) unverifiable requirements that change continuously as a project develops. AI is not as good of a tool for this type of programming because unlike the tasks demonstrated in the article, there is no verification function an AI can cheaply use to validate if it is approaching completion of the task.

In the example in the article, the bots can look at the entire memory state of the game, interact with it to see how the state changes, and then repeat the process on their working copy of the port. So long as the overall behavior of the port is getting closer to the original, the AI can validate its getting closer to its goals. Extremely impressive stuff. But this verification loop exists in a closed world. No equivalent exists for most programming disciplines. No equivalent can exist because shifting the requirements to fulfill the vague business goals is an essential job of a software developer.

So while I am extremely impressed about what AI can accomplish every day, I also have a loud voice in the back of my mind skeptical of the actual economic impact. Because the market keeps demonstrating that these technically simpler but vague requirement tasks have a lot more value than something like game dev, at least monetarily.