Jonathan Blow

Jonathan Blow (born 1971) made Braid (2008), the time-bending puzzle game that ignited the modern indie boom, and The Witness (2016), a decade-long meditation on epiphany. Through his studio Thekla he has spent years building Jai, his own programming language, out of conviction that mainstream software has grown bloated and slow. He is famous for holding code — everyone’s code — to brutal standards, most memorably in his 2019 talk “Preventing the Collapse of Civilization,” which argued that software knowledge degrades when each generation understands less than the last.

LLMs meet the standard-bearer

Generative AI walked straight into that thesis. In an October 2025 post that made the rounds on Hacker News, Blow reminded his followers that the quality of AI code output is “very low,” that the models don’t understand what they emit, and that this is “obvious to anyone who knows how to program” — allowing only use cases where large volumes of low-quality code don’t matter. On his programming streams he has repeatedly argued that LLMs cannot really program, that leaning on them erodes exactly the deep-understanding skills his civilizational-decline talk warned about, and that current AI tools weren’t built with games in mind anyway.

He is not an apocalyptic: asked by email in June 2025 how AI would affect game development, he predicted the near-term impact would be modest and tool-side, such as artists generating assets faster. His hostility is a craftsman’s, not a doomer’s — the same contempt he aims at bloated engines and lazy abstractions, now aimed at machine-generated slop. Fellow indie Eric Barone has staked out a similar refusal on the creative side.