Community for hand-coded games?

[grilledmint]

Hello! I learned coding back in university, in the early 10s. And I actually liked that, it was fun to solve problems, looking to MSDN for an answer, even struggling for hours to find out I just misspelled a variable was fun! But then I quit, started working in another direction and the only code-like stuff I touched was game mods.
Then I found this place (not only forum, but indie web in general), made a wacky site and kind of want to actually code again. Especially games, I even already made a few really simple ones. I want to find a community or space for people like me but I have a problem.

The situation changes daily but at the moment of November 2026 all thematic subreddits flooded with AI debates and AI games themselves, a lot of videos in feed about “how to use AI or this vibecoded tool in gamedev” and etc. While the artistic community in general is very anti-ai and you can easily find your people, most of the coders with and without experience are pro-ai. So, when we speak about games there are a lot of people who say “I don’t want genA assets in games!” but when you ask their preference about code - they don’t care, until it works. And I get it, it lacks most of the ethical problems of genAI art and it’s VERY efficient, especially for people without experience at all. But first, it has its own downsides (code readability, technology subsidies, illusion of understanding and learning etc.), second - well, I want to code! I like the process itself, not only the result. I don’t want to be an agent manager instead. And, since it’s just a hobby in my free time and I don’t think I will gain much money from my games - I can afford to be inefficient.

So, my question is - maybe there are already communities with the same goal? To code games the old way, even though it's not that efficient. Old grumpy coders who refuse to change, newcomers who actually want to LEARN basics or people in between like me. Specific subreddit, forum, chat, site, even discord community will be fine. Also if you feel the same please share! From my side I can recommend PICO-8 community in general because main BBS is prohibiting genAI content but wanna know more places like that

(also if it's wrong board for this question please give me know!)

[shaggy]

And I get it, it lacks most of the ethical problems of genAI art

I strongly disagree. AI has been trained on GPL licensed code. When I write GPL licensed code, I'm fine with corporations using it, BUT, they MUST share back ANY modification. But since that code has been filtered thru the AI, the AI bros claim "AI learns and thinks like a HUMAN, SO IT'S FAIR USE". Well, it's not. If AI was trained on GPL code, everything AI spits out should be on GPL code. That's my opinion.

And that's why I say, code generated by AI is NOT ethical just as well.

MIT, BSD and similar, we can argue these are fair game to scrape. But GPL? Nuh-uh.

[grilledmint]

When I write GPL licensed code, I'm fine with corporations using it, BUT, they MUST share back ANY modification.

Oh! My bad, didn't know that.  Again, I wasn't deep in IT discussion about this topic as I just got back my interest in this. I was judging on the fact that, like, extremally many coders start to use AI for assistant. But yeah, looks like it was same situation with art, because nobody have enough money to sue and those who had(big corps) just shook hands on to splitting "future revenue" I suppose

Thank you for letting me know! Now I have one more excuse to not use it haha.

[nobo]

My take is that it just makes coding boring. It takes the natural reward structure out of solving a problem, so it doesn't feel good to build something anymore.

I mostly submit to the fact that the world has decided to go this direction and there's nothing I can do about it.

But you're right, you could retreat to communities where people are programming for old hardware, like modern SNES dev or something, and you could mostly get away from it and just live in a bubble where time never moves on.

Because yeah, any mainstream dev or programming community is just going to be talking about Claude workflows now. Sad but true.