{ on ai }
How I Use AI
AI is a tense subject in games and art right now, and I understand why. For a lot of developers and artists, these tools can feel like they shortcut — or quietly replace — the very craft they’ve spent years building. That worry is fair, and I’m not going to wave it away.
Where I stand
I use AI, and I’d rather be upfront about exactly how. For most of my life I’ve wanted to make games and never had the time to finish them — AI is what finally closes that gap. But I treat it as a tool I direct, not a button I press: every project still runs on my decisions, my taste, and a lot of my own hands-on work.
How the work splits
None of it works without a clear division of labor. Here’s exactly who does what.
ChatGPT — thinking and planning
I use ChatGPT to think out loud: planning, scope control, art direction, writing prompts, reviewing ideas, and turning messy project notes into clear next steps. It’s good for getting unstuck and pressure-testing whether a feature is actually worth building. In its own words: “I don’t make the game for the developer — the taste, judgment, editing, coding decisions, playtesting, and final polish still have to come from the human.”
Claude — building and writing
I use Claude as a hands-on collaborator for the making: laying out features as options before I choose one, writing and structuring the actual code, debugging when something breaks, and shaping my rough notes into the devlogs and writeups you’re reading. It can produce a lot quickly — but always to my direction, and I’m the one who decides what’s good enough and what ships.
Me — the part that matters
The ideas are mine. Every creative and design decision is mine. I tune the difficulty, choose what’s fun and cut what isn’t, hand-edit the art, play-test the builds, and make the final call on every release. The AI clears busywork off my plate; the game itself is still mine.
About the art
The art deserves its own note, because it’s where the “AI slop” worry is loudest — and where I work hardest to earn the opposite.
Every sprite in my games starts as a generation from PixelLab.ai. But that’s the starting point, not the finish line. I bring each one into Aseprite and edit it by hand — fixing what’s off, redrawing what doesn’t fit, tuning it until it truly belongs in the game. AI lets me skip some of the grind. It doesn’t get to skip the craft. Nothing leaves the studio that I haven’t shaped myself.
One honest path, not the only one
None of this is a claim that my way is the right way — only that it’s honest, and that it’s mine. If you build everything by hand, with none of these tools, I admire that more than I can say; it’s the kind of work I’ll always look up to. I just found a way to finally finish the things I’ve wanted to make for most of my life — and to make them with care.