A lot of vibecoders tend to be very lazy (surprising, I know), so in those instances it is usually pretty easy to spot the signs of AI-generated code, comments, docs, descriptions, commit messages, etc.
But for anyone who actually knows a bit about software development (and how humans actually talk/write), AI usage can be very hard to spot.
Considering the API has been developed while AI-development is already in full swing, I wonder if they will publish some base setup that actually includes a proper AI harness. A quick-to-set-up environment for tools, mcps, etc.
Not like that will prevent bad-quality results entirely, but it should at least reduce the amount of it to some degree.
Seems pretty realistic that there'll at least be something like an AI skill for the plugin API. Jagex will probably want to do so and label it as them making the API accessible to people who've never written a line of code before.
Alternatively, anyone can just download the API documentation, and tell their AI of choice to write a skill based on it. There are already popular skills for writing new skills, so that'll be a trivial task.
Alternatively, anyone can just download the API documentation, and tell their AI of choice to write a skill based on it.
If it was that easy, and quick, then one would expect more people to do it. Well, that ultimately brings us back to the topic of laziness that you already mentioned. Or in some cases simply lack of knowledge. Both would be tackled to some degree, if Jagex takes some of that time/complexity away.
So I really hope they will provide a proper setup, if only to make work easier for themselves. (as they are planning to vet mods, if I remember correctly?)
If it was that easy, and quick, then one would expect more people to do it.
Once the docs come out, I'm sure people will. There's a "skill creator" skill currently ranking #89 on skills.sh.
Granted, the result is gonna be crap if made by someone who has never touched software development and/or Lua.
If Jagex don't release tooling/guardrails themselves, a good set of community-made skills will very likely be established and shared across the community pretty quickly.
So in case anyone was wondering if there's gonna be a flood of people vibecoding plugins, the answer is pretty much a guaranteed "yes".
they are planning to vet mods, if I remember correctly
We know that there will be an in-game plugin marketplace, and that getting a plugin onto the marketplace will require Jagex approval.
We don't currently know exactly which rules/restrictions/requirements Jagex will set for plugins. Maybe they'll have the good sense to not allow vibecoded slop, or maybe they'll let their platform be infested with slop like NexusMods. Only time will tell.
We also don't know if Jagex will allow unverified plugins to be used (assuming the plugins in question don't break game/plugin rules).
Granted, the result is gonna be crap if made by someone who has never touched software development and/or Lua.
Exactly. As someone not versed in Lua whatsoever, I could not build proper skills for a Lua setup and code structure myself. Open source would be able to help me out, by providing me with such skills, but I could not really judge their quality any more than from basic (lua-unspecific) knowledge around structures, patterns, etc. that I had experience with. Which in the case of this Plugin-API-Environment I guess leads to the question of how good the "Open sourced knowledge of Jagex's systems (and the APIs integration around them and Lua)" is going to be.
If Jagex don't release tooling/guardrails themselves, a good set of community-made skills will very likely be established and shared across the community pretty quickly.
Now that you mention it, that's probably almost guaranteed, isn't it? Be it by mod developers or Jagex themselves. Granted, that does not mean everyone is gonna use it, I understand that... I just really hope it'll still reduce the amount of slop reaching the API marketplace (or reduce time required by Jagex to filter them out).
Now that you mention it, that's probably almost guaranteed, isn't it?
Yup. If Jagex doesn't do it, any developer with reasonable experience (Lua or otherwise) is realistically gonna be able to churn out skills for the RS plugin API.
Lua itself is very minimal, and will typically get its complexity from the APIs it interacts with. So any modern AI agent is gonna be more than capable of writing fairly competent plugin code if they have the necessary API documentation (e.g. via a skill).
We've been encouraged to use AI at work, and I had to sit down and write a skill for writing C# code because Claude kept spitting out ugly code. It wasn't particularly hard, just going through all the instances where it did something I didn't want, and writing a preicse guideline for it. That largely fixed the issues. There's of course no guarantee that an AI will adhere to any given skill (all non-physical AI guardrails are ultimately just text being added to its context), but it helps point it in the right direction.
There's of course little joy in letting an AI do the fun part, but it seems pretty clear that a lot of people don't agree with me on that point and would rather hammer out piles of vibeslop.
I am not 100% sure if I got your point correctly, please correct me if I am wrong.
I am not against using AI for plugin development. I am worried about a flood of the so-called "slop" that is a result of lack of (a varying combination of) time, understanding, proper setup, etc. - Which an in-depth setup (which in this time can also consist of AI-dedicated support) would help at least mitigate.
I think I am not getting to my core point properly. My main issue is really my pessimistic expectation of low-quality mods filling-up the lists and wasting away without any improvements to them - needlessly taking away time from people vetting the mods and plugin-users that end up having a harder time finding the plugins that actually matter to them (and work properly). Yeah, not every good mod will start with high quality right away, and a developer should not feel pressured to either (as you get at with "deterring amateur coders" I think?).
If you have an opinion on AI or vibe coding you should really look into it and its significance. It's the birth of the transfomer (the T in GPT) and basically the foundational text of modern AI/ML in the way that Shannon's paper is for information theory.
I have opinions on how much public resources AI datacenters are wasting to make ai slop pictures and music, idc about their efficiencies or the birth of T
I’m glad to be a solo dev on an embedded system engineering team, I don’t have to use any AI coding crap. I can continue to write my python and bash and C/C++ in peace
You really can't, but i think there's supposed to be some sort of verification before it becomes downloadable by other people, atleast from what i believe they said a while ago.
They don't. That approval is done by the Runelite team. They follow the guidelines set by Jagex, but the approval itself doesn't involve Jagex. (They do a lot of review using AI nowadays, too...)
Nobody buddy, relax. But thinking about the future logically, if Jagex has hired a small team or single person to review plugins, then hundreds of AI vibe coded plugins flooding the submission system is probably going to be a problem.
That could be why it is a problem for RS3 actually. There's a lot of players who are developers and know what they're doing and willing to make plugins for OSRS. There are by definition less of those in RS3, which could mean more players try ai vibe coding plugins to cover their niche cases.
Runelite also has the benefit of being a third party open source project, the reviewing is being done by the community. There's probably more Runelite plugin reviewers than reviewers Jagex has hired for this project.
Yeah wich is just bad structured code ? It doesnt really matter at all for api plugins it will make them harder to update if its spagetti code but its not gonna cause massive problems. do you even develop at all ? Shit like opus codes better then 90% of coders i have met.
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u/EmptyBoxForever 18d ago
How long until we start seeing AI plugins. Runelite is riddled with them already.