The Age of Programmers is over. The Time of the Vibe Coder has come.

The RPG Maker community has a history of attacking successful plugin creators. It happened to Yanfly, when he decided to obfuscate his code. It happened to VisuStella, when the group stood firmly against an entitled mob that demanded unobstructed access to their trade secrets.

Now it's happening to Sang Hendrix.

RPG Maker, a program originally conceived as a tool for creating games without having to write code or create graphics from scratch, now sees its community split in two different camps: those who vocally and energetically oppose any kind of AI use, and those who are more concerned about actually completing their projects.

If the programmers at Gotcha Gotcha Games were using AI tools for developing their products, would this vocal group stop using RPG Maker? Even without using AI to generate code, most programmers are inadvertently feeding training data to AI.

Is it worse to use AI or to use the tools that are used to generate AI training data?

According to their own terms of service and license agreements, popular git frontends, code editors, and IDEs are getting used to train AIs, so to avoid contributing to the AI hivemind, programmers have to use less advanced tools. But the places that employ programmers want their programmers to use industry standards, so the only viable way for programmers to avoid using AI or training AI is to leave their jobs.

Is that a realistic thing to expect?

The cat is out of the bag. There's no way to catch it. There's no way to contain it. There's no way to unsee it. There's no way to ignore it. The cat is here to stay.

But not everyone's a cat person. Some prefer dogs. Some prefer creating their own code editors and tools because nuking popular software from orbit is the only way to be sure.

THE REAL REASON WHY THE RPG MAKER COMMUNITY CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS

In the past 20 years, there were a lot of brilliant programmers and artists that eventually left the RPG Maker scene because the incentives to create professional-grade, quality content for RPG Maker just weren't there. Before AI existed, lots of plugin makers who tried to make cool things for RPG Maker left, lots of artists who made beautiful resources for RPG Maker left. AI didn't have anything to do with it: the community did.

First, it was outrage about putting a price tag on resources and plugins. Then, outrage about obfuscation. Now it's a crusade against something that's already present and in wide use. They're just excuses masking ulterior motives.

AI slop has flooded Itch and other marketplaces, but is infighting amongst fellow RPG developers really going to solve that?

Is trying to shame Sang Hendrix for having used ChatGPT a few times really going to help people complete their projects and escape the rat race?

Companies aren't going to stop using AI. Powerful people aren't going to stop using AI. So who will actually benefit from this anti-AI campaign?

Not indies. Not the little guy. I can tell you that much.