Farting around with Amigas in 2026 means actively choosing to make things harder for the sake of making things harder. Making that choice and still outsourcing the bulk of the craft and creative process is like claiming to be a passionate hobby cook while serving professionally catered dinners and pretending they’re your own concoctions.
There’s not much to be done about it, because the scene has no governing body or court of appeals—and I dearly hope it stays that way. I just can’t wrap my head around the point of using AI in this setting: It feels antithetical to a culture that so adamantly celebrates creativity, technical limitations, extremely specialized skills, and anti-commercial sharing of art and software.
I do not know hour they’re handling it! Most of my demoscene knowledge comes from a single event by the CMU Computer Club in 2009.
Edited this to “even though the software industry has long-since automated this with compilers in typical development.”
Came across this post on the art side of the demoscene: The Curious Case of Retro Demo Scene Graphics :