Bay 12's Tarn Adams criticizes generative AI's threat to game development jobs

Tarn Adams, Bay 12 Games co-creator, criticizes generative AI's threat to development jobs. He says generative AI replaces workers with tools that cannot do their jobs. Adams contrasts this with 23 years of deterministic procedural generation powering Dwarf Fortress. The contrast exposes a cost gap between deterministic systems and black-box generative models.

Generative AI's output carries runtime and job-security costs
Adams says generative AI produces bloated, inefficient vibe-coded software.
He ties poor runtime performance to vibe-coded games draining device fans.
"You can tell when you grab a vibe-coded game and your fan starts spinning" - Tarn Adams, Co-creator, Bay 12 Games
Workers across the industry fear replacement by AI tools that cannot perform their jobs.

Procedural generation offers 23 years of deterministic alternative design
Dwarf Fortress has run on procedural generation systems since development began in 2002.
The new Myth and Magic update adds a procedurally generated mythology and magic system.
Modders can rewrite the entire generator since it is written in open Lua code.
"People that are comfortable with Lua can do amazing weird stuff" - Tarn Adams, Co-creator, Bay 12 Games
Adams says he was never tempted to replace this system with generative AI.

The refusal has one named exception: platform lock-in
Adams says no business reason would push him toward generative AI tools.
He adds that generative AI would not meaningfully boost Dwarf Fortress's productivity today.
The one stated exception: a platform mandate forcing generative AI compliance to ship.
"If I could no longer release the game on Windows because Microsoft did some Copilot-ass thing that forced you to do some sort of gen crap to get your game recognised there, then I'd have to seriously think about it, because all my players are there. And they can strongarm you, they've done it in the past with other stuff." - Tarn Adams, Co-creator, Bay 12 Games
What this means
For Investors & VC: Add CPU and thermal profiling of AI-written code to technical diligence on studio targets.
For Service Vendors: Pitch performance-optimization and code-refactoring audits to studios shipping AI-assisted builds this year.