I think I will leave the modding scene within a few years. AI has absolutely ruined it from me.
I know, the world changes, it's fine. But I'll give you my reasons anyway:
- the amount of mods per day has grown exponentially, between the junk, enough are good, and your carefully crafted mods get buried under.
- code bases are growing into monsters, I get a PR every day to fix some stuff on Luma and it's 60000 lines of changes to fix a basic bug.
- it genuinely feel like I'm not much needed anymore. I used to be one of the few ones able to mod old games (HDR, ambient occlusion, DLSS). Now many can slop something in no time, even if it's nowhere as good, many won't know.
- code licenses are completely meaningless now. One guy came on our forum, presented a slop but functional mod, I asked to clean up a few small things before merging and instead of doing so he asked AI do re program the whole thing from scratch to not use my framework.
- making mods has become massively easier, and that's nice, but also the pleasure of gradually unravelling a picture as you reverse engineer a game is gone.
All these things paint a bleak picture.
There's gonna be enough tinkerers to make mods even without me probably, so, no loss.