They are a joke, yes. I worked on some server side code back in the day when a game server could be a nice self-contained executable on an EC2 instance. Even back then, I think it would’ve been a formidable task.

Now that game mechanics often necessitate more complex cloud infra, there’s a lot more going on that you can’t just Charles/mitmproxy your way through because it’s invisible to the client.

At the very least, you’ll need more than one dev, and that means coordination. For a ragtag group of hobbyists, AI is more likely to be a poison pill that kills the project before MVP.