Rami Ismail

Rami Ismail (born 1988) is a Dutch-Egyptian developer who co-founded Vlambeer, the two-person studio behind Ridiculous Fishing, Luftrausers, and Nuclear Throne. Since Vlambeer wound down in 2020 he has become the indie world’s roving ambassador — building free tools like presskit(), founding gamedev.world, and advising studios and funds across dozens of countries, with particular focus on developers outside the Western industry’s comfort zone.

The junior pipeline problem

In GamesRadar+’s June 2026 survey of 32 developers on generative AI, Ismail’s refusal was the pithiest on record: he won’t use it because “I like my job” and will not offload it to a machine. His structural warning cuts deeper — with studios handing entry-level tasks to AI amid historic layoffs, he sees “the collapse of the junior pipelines” brewing: an industry consuming its own next generation of talent to save on wages today.

The critique lands alongside allies across the craft — Dragon Age veteran David Gaider calling gen AI a “plague,” Marvel Rivals and Palworld leads keeping it out of their pipelines because players reject it — and echoes what Jonathan Blow and other independents argue from the opposite temperament: that the work itself is the point. Ismail’s framing is characteristically economic as much as artistic; in an industry that “lays off people for making superhits,” he notes, nobody is doing this job for the money.