steam needs 'no ai' as a setting

It is going to suck.

On the positive side, it does seem to be starting something of a reniassance in the modding scene.

Why don't the AI mods suck?

Because they work fine.

I'm using some in Valheim atm, and actually they're pretty sick. There definitely wasn't the manpower the sheer scale/breadth of many of these mods before.

I could opine/speculate about why this is, but in a nutshell I think LLM assistance going to make game development toxic, but lower the barrier to modding dramatically and make larger mods much more practical. They're just different dev environments with different constraints, incentives, and expectations.

A mod is a small, well defined feature made against a very well documented API, modders don't face normal commercial pressures, and mods don't need to work for all kinds of edge cases.

Plus, there are a fuckton of them, so you never hear or care about the flops.

The main challenge in making a mod is often "how TF do I even get started"?

AI coding is in the EE world as well. Claude was set up for me at my workstation for testing hardware. I was able to get a small board's firmware done in a day, it works flawlessly.