People want pieces of art made by actual humans. Not garbage from the confident statistics black box.

I'd argue that even if gen-AI art is indistinguishable from human art, human art is better. E.g. when examining a painting you might be wondering what the artist was thinking of, what was going on in their life at the time, what they were trying to convey, what techniques they used and why. For AI art, the answer is simply it's statistically similar to art the model has been trained on.

But, yeah, stuff like game textures usually aren't that deep (and I don't think they're typically crafted by hand by artists passionate about the texture).

As a dev and foremost artist, I can see using AI to uprez images or to generate random slop you can use to find interesting shapes and as inspiration. As I learn programming, AI is very useful in finding mistakes. Instead of spending days and bothering people or engaging with the assholes at stackoverflow, you can just ask deepseek what is the issue and it will say you misspelled length.

Indie studio teams are pretty small so its possible, I personally hate that the word copilot ever even appears and never ever autogen code, but moreso I'm sure the stamp refers to art, texture, and sound.

I remember an old song "I'll go green when they go green and they'll go green but not really green more like aquamarine" and it appears to no longer exist on the internet.

Another song I can't find is about a guy who tells the story of all his past lives and in each he was a whore and someday he'll be a whore again.

Really wish songs would stop disappearing.

If you learned to code with AI then you didnt learn to code.

FWIW I agree with you. The people who say they don't support these tools come across as purists or virtue signallers.

I would agree with not having AI art* or music and sounds. In games I've played with it in, it sounds so out of place.

However support to make coding more accessible with the use of a tool shouldn't be frowned upon. I wonder if people felt the same way when C was released, and they thought everyone should be an assembly programmer.

The irony is that most programmers were just googling and getting answers from stackoverflow, now they don't even need to Google.

*unless the aim is procedurally generated games i guess, but if they're using assets I get not using AI generated ones.

I understand where you're coming from. AI can be a learning tool to help fill in some gaps in knowledge, however the moment you don't understand what it's doing and just copy and paste the code, it no longer become a tool but instead a crutch. Instead of copying and pasting code you can take the time to look into why it's doing what it's doing. For Godot in particular they have really good documentation and there's plenty of resources to learn. GD script is a pretty easy language to learn on a surface level. You should do some research into game design patterns and basic programming concepts.

I did take a look at your code and while you do have your main.gd organized, having a large monolith like that with 1100+ lines of code that has multiple responsibilities is certainly a choice. Typically you want your scripts to handle specific responsibilities, that way each script and each object that contains that script has a single responsibility. This helps with efficiency and debugging since you have smaller scripts running and if something breaks you know what broke without everything else falling apart. You employed that partly with your save manager and notification manager etc. But you could certainly pare down your main script. Also considering how much it's handling I'm curious as to what the structure of your game looks like. Godot likes to have nested objects but based off your code yours doesn't seem to be conducive to that. Also there appears to be some needless abstractions with your variable storage.

Anyways I think taking the time to research and learn some basic programming principles and game design patterns would go a long way to help you. Coding can be difficult and seem like a black box when you first get started, and AI can seem like a way to pierce through that, but if you don't learn why it's recommending the code it is then you'll never really understand what your own game is doing and that's not helpful to you or your players.