How we cover AI-assisted projects - GBAtemp community check-in

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It’s about that time of year again where I check in with the community to see if we can get the front page aligned with what people are interested in knowing and what people are interested in talking about. As the title might have given away, there’s one topic more hot than most at the moment, and that’s AI.

I am a C++ developer by trade, and my place of employ has just started to roll out Claude licences for those interested, so the topic of AI assisted programming is very much on my mind. I’m not just going to go out there and say “AI bad”. I don’t necessarily think it’s a productive conversation to have. The reality is that we’re going to see more projects that make use of it in some form, and some are likely to warrant attention.

Going forwards, I think it’s important that we highlight when projects we do feature make use of AI, and to what extent if such information is available. My hope is that this will strike a reasonable balance of being able to share projects that might look interesting, and giving people who want to avoid AI related projects a simple indicator.

Obviously not every project is going to be so open with their usage, and we have no intention of starting witch hunts by deep diving code and looking for em dashes in the comments. The aim here is to make whatever public information there is accessible for people reading here, and just make things a touch clearer for the people who are looking for that kind of disclaimer.

With that aside though, I am interested to know what the general consensus is among the user base. Are you open to playing ports assisted by AI if it’s the only port available, or happens to offer something unique? Do you draw the line at vibe coding, or do you avoid any project that has Claude listed as a contributor? We sadly don’t have access to polls on the front page any more, but I will make sure to keep up with any replies as they come in.
 
Alot of people don't like AI for reasons some valid some not.
I'm a bit depressed because it's clear my job is going to be automated in the near future. I'm struggling with that after seeing how my company is adopting it.

The gates note on AI is a must read on how we are entering the turbulent era of AI: https://www.gatesnotes.com/a-turbulent-ai-era-and-critical-choices-to-make.
However AI is here to stay, i don't think the old world is coming back. Newer smarter models and chipsets that use 1000x less resources like taalas are on the way. The era is going to change. Stripe, Linus Torvalds, and a shit ton more developers are using it and its real and its helpful and it's GOOD.

I don't think the AI discussions love/hate are productive for niche site like GBAtemp. If people want to have them, it should be elsewhere.
if something is slop human or ai, then yea we should avoid it.
The bigger problem is the way people view signal vs noise on a good or bad product/service is probably going to change and have too. The old way and heuristics used to tell good project from bad project are not going to work and people need to adapt.

I've pretty sure if I see a AI agentic public code repo without ai agents skills or a soul.md/claude.md/agents.md , test suite, agentic harness, It's easy to see it's a bad AI project. If I see a non frontier model in the commit history, it probably gonna be slop too. Stuff like this is probably going to be the new way to look at code in the future.
 
are you at all worried about the sanity or the amount of time wasted or unnecessary pressure put on devs by people who are against AI who "react way too emotionally" to the beyond where they lost all sense of reasoning? Are you at all worried that this may lead to some people sending developers "death threats" which people who are against AI have done. I am referring to the "clinically insane" ones not you people who have the ability to keep yourselves together.
First and foremost; I believe that good journalism requires disclosing as much relevant information as possible to allow readers to have a complete understanding of what is being covered. If anyone is emotionally charged enough to send someone death threats over their use of AI, then they probably would do that regardless of whether or not it was covered.

And as a side note; I feel like developers are doing themselves a disservice when they either don’t disclose or worse, outright deny obvious AI usage (the James Pond collection being a recent example). Any project worth looking at wouldn’t need to hide their AI use to avoid controversy; anyone seriously harassing devs about it is gonna do it whether they disclose it or not. They can only benefit from being honest and open about it.
 

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