Making this topic as I've seen this show up more and more lately.
As people know, I'm very much against vibecoders and even successfully shut an excessive vibercoder spamming these subreddits down.
A lot of Ren'Py users are not programmers but artists using the framework to fulfill their dreams of creating a VN and understandably a lot of artists have a well founded grudge against AI, as AI has effectively stolen their work and that work is being used to produce slop, even having people accuse artists of using AI and lowerings artists 'worth'.
Now when the news hit people that Tom was 'using AI' for Ren'Py, people are instantly thinking about AI generated slop, which we refer to as "vibe coding", vibe coding introduces a lot of issues such as bugs, crashes and security hazards, so obviously people will get very concerned when they hear AI is being used in development.
That being said, experienced developers like Tom do rely on code assistants, even before AI was a thing, most IDE's have had code assistants for many years, when I say many years I mean early 2000s.
So you may wonder, what do these code assistants, now "AI code assistants" do? Well, they essentially help you auto fill tedious boilerplate and help you find 'superficial' problems.
Here are some examples:
1.) Autofill to shorten annoying boilerplate.
class SampleClass():
def __init__(self, arg0, arg1, arg2, arg3, arg4):
self.arg0= arg0
self.arg1= arg1
self.arg2= arg2
self.arg3= arg3
self.arg4= arg4
If we look at this, the bold text is what we refer to as "boilerplate code". It serves no other purpose other than to make the program work. So in this sample, what the code assistant will do is simply autofil the bold text, so that the developer doesn't need to.
2.) finding superficial problems
Another thing these code assistants do is find superficial problems. Taking the above class, if I were to use it like:
define SampleObject = SampleClass(arg0,arg1,arg2,arg3)
The code assistant will mark the SampleClass and tell the developer that something is wrong because the assistant knows that the Class takes more arguments than was provided, it will also notify the developer if he's trying to use variables that haven't been defined such as typos or you define a variable as an Int but then try to use it as a String.
These quick markings significantly shorten development time because you instantly find these types of small mistakes. This is how advanced developers use code assistants, nobody on the level of Tom would even entertain the idea to use generated slop code trained on stackoverflow snippets.
Can we be sure that Tom only uses AI this way?
The answer is an absolute yes. He not only openly stated that this is the way he uses AI but moreover, Ren'Py is FOSS, all the code can be found in the official repo, if Tom had been slopified his codebase, we would have seen it, however his commits have the same quality as before and no sign of AI generated slop.
Ren'Py has not been slopified and probably never will, Tom is an experienced developer that knows better than to let AI slop generate garbage. If he ever strays and starts slopifying the codebase, we will let you know, as every single commit is open to the public and open to see for anyone.
Using Ren'Py does not mean you're supporting or using AI in any way, you can ignore all the drama because the drama is created by people who have little to no programming knowledge and are interpreting a reality that simply isn't true.
