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anonymous908213HNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

It is honestly extremely depressing to read this coming from the founder of Relic

… It is honestly extremely depressing to read this coming from the founder of Relic. Relic built magic. Dawn of War and Company of Heroes formed an important part of my teenage years. I formed connections, spent thousands of hours enjoying them together with other people, and pushed myself hard to become one of the top 100 players on the CoH leaderboards. Those competitive multiplayer games taught me everything there was to know about self-improvement, and formed the basis of my growth as an individual - learning that if I put my mind to it, I could be among the best at something, informed my worldview and led me to a life of perpetually pushing myself to further self-improvement, and from there I learned to code, draw, and play music. All of that while being part of amazing communities where I formed friendships that lasted decades. All of this to say, Relic was magic. The work Relic did profoundly impacted my life. I wonder if you really believe your current role, "building trust infrastructure for AI agents", is actually magic? …

Original discussionI started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed668 source comments · at import
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alexgardenHN

Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different. Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw ) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code are rediscovering the magic that got them involved as engineers in the first place" <-- paraphrased for brevity. I vividly remember, staying up all night to hand-code assembler primitive rendering libraries, the first time I built a voxel rendering engine and thinking it was like magic what you could do on a 486... I remember the early days at Relic, working on Homeworld and thinking we were casting spells, not writing software. Honestly, that magic faded and died for me. I …

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ineedasernameHN

>The idea of potentially relating this personal anecdote to an impersonator is rather embarrassing Good news! You've also related it to the roughly ~3-10M monthly HN readers who are not (potentially) impersonating the founder of a beloved game studio. Also: I think you're probably safe. I'm sure someone at some point has come to HN to LARP as some prominent person in tech that they don't happen, at that specific moment, to actually be... but I can't really think of it happening before, nor would I expect it to take the form of a particularly thoughtful comment if a troll did that. Though with AI these days, who knows? I might myself just be one of a swarm of clawd/molt/claw things. In which case I'd be the last to even know it. Oh-- as for being depressed about their docker/wiring things up sentiment. Try not to be, and instead, consider: Is it a surprise that someone who founded such a…

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robotnikmanHN

Oh man, modding Company of Heroes was one of the things that got me into programming. I look back fondly on those memories.

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alexgardenHN

If we've arrived at the point where bots are impersonating me (instead of the billions of other choices), I'm probably at peak Alex. I'll light a candle. So... easy to disambiguate this one. I got the idea for Homeworld one night when I was about 21. At the time, I was working at EA as a programmer on Triple Play 98 (building FE gfx - not glamorous). In an RTS-ironic twist of fate, my boss and mentor at the time was Chris Taylor - go figure. Friends of mine had their own game company and had boxed themselves into a technical corner they couldn't get out of, so I agreed to write a bunch of sprite conversion code for them after hours. That night, we were all working in a room, talking about the reasons X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter didn't work on a 2D screen (hold up and left till you turn inside and shoot) and how Battlestar Galactica didn't get the cred it deserved, and BOOM - in my mind I saw …

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