shounic
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2021–2026
2:03 · 5.5M views · May 9, 2020
A short video that reads out comments from the leaked Team Fortress 2 source code to show the frustration of Valve's programmers over time.
HN cites it as an example of messy code behind successful games and of the human stories that code comments can hold.
3 comments from Hacker News
I've been coding by hand for nearly 20 years. I don't get any rush from generating code with agents. Most of the time I just feel loss. Coding to me has always been the work of a craftsman. I spent years learning syntax, studying APIs, and generally becoming an expert in a language I could then use to exactly express myself. My code became my way of of telling a story. I picked that language not only because it was the right tool for the job, but because I liked the community, I liked the direction of the tool, and I liked writing it. Agents obliterate all of that. Before, source code was like exploring a canyon. Each function, loop, and nested brackets was someone's choice. There was an implicit story to follow. Agentic code is that valley after the glaciers have retreated. A good illustration of what I'm afraid of losing is in those videos cataloging the [the rapidly dwindling sanity of valve programmers as expressed through code comments]( this video ). When AI generates your code, you lose that context. You lose that human connection to code that I care so much about. Unfortunately, I don't think the human touch was as high-of-value to other developers as I previously thought. I've realized that for most developers, it was never about the journey, it was about getting to the destination as quickly as possible. We were infected with a plague of idea-guys and didn't even know it. That's okay. There are a billion things in the world where what was once the sole dominion of craf
Like the author states, the "written in Rust" bonus many projects get does not apply to games. Most of the games I consider to be the most fun are built on an absolute rats nest dumpster fire of code (see: this video ). Sometimes bugs even expand game mechanics and make them more fun and expressive. That being said I'll definitely check out Unrelaxing Quacks, it looks great.
Valve's development practices are apparently good for a chuckle. this video The devs don't seem like they have enough time to deal with the code they have to write, let alone respond to security issues. (not their fault, of course)