Analogue Pocket SNES Dev Blasts AI-Generated Code: 'No Place in My World'

Ever thought about contributing to your favorite emulator project? Well, one dev just made it clear: don't bother if you're just going to dump a mountain of AI-generated code on them. The developer behind the Analogue Pocket's SNES emulator core, known as agg23, recently went off on a contributor who submitted a massive, machine-generated feature out of the blue.

Here's what went down: a contributor going by nasonliu dropped an "experimental MSU-1 streaming" feature for the Pocket SNES core. For those not deep in the retro scene, MSU-1 is a fictional enhancement chip that never existed in real hardware, but emulator devs created it as a standard to let Super NES romhackers add CD-quality audio and other improvements to games. agg23 admitted the idea was cool: "If it works, that's pretty cool; I didn't think I would ever see this implemented." But then came the big but.

"You sent me a nearly 50k line diff, unasked for, completely LLM built, and you somehow expect me to review it," agg23 wrote. "There is SO MUCH unrelated garbage here." In other words, the contributor dumped 50,000 lines of AI-generated code that agg23 would have had to manually review before even considering adding it to the emulator core. That's not just a headache—it's a massive waste of time for a volunteer maintainer.

agg23 didn't hold back: "This kind of behavior is not acceptable. You are infringing on the time and brainpower of people by pushing 'your' content that little/no of your brainpower went into; completely unrequested. I hope for the sake of all responsible maintainers that you do not do such a thing again. Again, I think it's cool that you and your LLM supposedly got this to work. It has no place in my world."

If this sounds familiar, you might recall the PS3 emulator RPCS3 devs begging contributors to "stop submitting AI slop code" earlier this year. They don't ban AI outright, but they demand that devs fully understand the code they submit. And just recently, Zelda and Banjo PC port devs slammed a vibe-coded Banjo-Tooie recompilation, saying "Throwing AI at it is just disrespectful."

So what's the takeaway for you? If you're tinkering with AI to help write code for emulators or fan projects, make sure you actually understand what you're submitting. Otherwise, you're just adding noise and burning out the very people keeping retro gaming alive. What do you think—should AI-generated code be outright banned in community projects, or is there a right way to use it?