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"LLMs can help non-programmers with no technical background get a foothold in doing something that used to require a LOT of technical knowledge to get started in, putting them in a better position to learn the technical stuff over time by providing a less steep learning curve" feels uncontroversial?

As a former academic I take some issue with this, since just having the tool do work for you is not learning. It's going to a restaurant and pretending you're a chef. If you use the tool to help understand what's going wrong with what you made, i.e. as a tutor, that's a lot better

So the situation I was really talking about is one where you have to learn a lot of technical skills before you can get to the thing you want to actually learn.

...more quickly, so that they don't have to learn a bunch of learning programming to even get to the place where they are developing the skills the care much more about and potentially end up becoming discouraged because of it.

I also suspect "well this game I designed that an LLM wrote most of the code for has a bug in it and the LLM keeps screwing up and I want this thing I care about to be better" might be a motivator for learning those technical parts?

Like, I don't actually know if this happens. The only real way we'll find out is if a game designer 20 years from now talks about how they got their start vibecoding their own kinda-crappy games and then learning to code. But I'd like to think there's a chance?

What seems to be happening is that people just create deceptive slop that rips off indie games and then don't give a shit about the long term. That was a business model before, but now it's just accelerated. It's the same problem with any LLM creative right now, that just being "good enough"...

This sort of sneaks in the assumption that there's actual design work involved. In my experience, the kind of person who actually puts care and thought into their game design is the same kind of person who doesn't usuallyhave much trouble learning the technical side in the first place.

Clearly you don't have very much experience with the wide variety of kinds of people who are interested in making games and put care and thought into their game design.

Your subseqent comments make me think that your primary interest is your own success, not in more people learning to make games. There isn't really anything wrong with that, but those two things are fundamentally at odds. More people making games means more competition for eyeballs. Simple as.

Conversely, it seems that those who were never ready to put some effort into the technical side of things let the LLM do most of the designing anyway. I don't think this was ever primarily(!) a matter of accessibility but rather a measure of how much effort and care one is willing to put into it.