Brendan Mulligan

Is: Head of Experiential AI @ Riot Games. Was: Creating joyfully @

[Brendan Mulligan @BrainEngineer]

Vibecoding has gotten so good that it feels like magic, yet we still haven’t seen the true potential of AI-powered creative tools for the masses.

I wrote about how the next wave will enable joyful creation for everyone. I call them AI Crayons.

https://t.co/jrjSKulICv

[Brendan Mulligan @BrainEngineer]

Nothing beats supper club with Grandma and Bro

[Grant Mulligan @gtmulligan]

Great family time and World Series wins in Wisconsin. Onward to DC! Let’s get to work on BAAJA!

[Brendan Mulligan @BrainEngineer]

Milwaukee does not mess around

[Brendan Mulligan @BrainEngineer]

@gtmulligan @MLB I don’t know what you’re talking about, this is high art

[Grant Mulligan @gtmulligan]

World Series!!!

[Brendan Mulligan @BrainEngineer]

This is the peak of sartorial graphic design. Happy Milwaukee World Series 2026 World Series 20 Brewers 26 Brewers Baseball!!

[Brendan Mulligan @BrainEngineer]

@BlasMoros @wabi @Plaid Grats on the multiplayer launch. I was always so stoked for that direction for you guys.

[Brendan Mulligan @BrainEngineer]

@lukeburgis Beautiful, thank you for sharing

[Brendan Mulligan @BrainEngineer]

@Necrit94 @kiittwy All good partnerships are both sides choosing each other!

[Jan Orszulik @JanOrszulik]

Well, as you've probably noticed, there's a controversial discussion going on, and since controversy isn't something I shy away from, I'd like to chip in.

Specifically I would like to show example of using Ai acceleration to achieve YOUR vision while maintain absolute control over the result, hence this thread.

So here's a tool I've made, which I'll talk about a bit more in the comments.

#gamedev #indiedev

[Brendan Mulligan @BrainEngineer]

@simonsarris Is there a readily available download link? Could be helpful to have in your bio

[hungrybox @LiquidHbox]

Can I be honest for a sec?

Regarding LLMs in gaming, I feel more confused than ever. And I would like my peers and other people who are familiar in this field to chime in.

It’s barely been a week since I made my post about distancing myself from a vibe coded project made by my friend in Smash. I even said “AI has no place in gaming”.

After I made that post, I was reached out to by multiple colleagues in the space and people hired full time in software development. They educated me severely on the topic and I feel dumb now for my earlier sentiments.

I was informed by my colleagues that it is now the norm to do 90% (and this is low estimate apparently) of all your coding with AI assistance or vibe coding. 75% of all new code at Google is made by AI and engineer approved.

The vast majority of all the apps we use now are updated or maintained with AI coding - I imagine that also goes for Twitter, the very app you’re reading this on.

So I figured okay - it’s here to stay in all software development - but where does that leave video games?

I saw the posts from Epic Games, XBOX, and other publishers that seem to embrace the new era instead of rejecting it.

In the last week I’ve been sent about a dozen different projects like this one that dissect and reintegrate Melee in multitudes of creative ways.

One of them is even a build of Melee that runs natively at 120FPS and one of them simulates the feeling of a CRT almost perfectly.

Some of them feel silly and useless, like low effort projects someone probably gave a single prompt and an ISO of Melee to build. Actual slop.

And yet some feel like legitimately useful things that the community or people practicing could benefit from.

I’m doing my best to navigate what is clearly a rapidly changing sector, especially when we regard the question of “Are Video Games Art?”

And since they clearly are art, does that render AI in its development a bastardized amalgamation of what’s been “learned” from people with actual original ideas?

Or is it strictly optimal to use AI in game development because games ARE software and therefore a necessary tool to wield in this day and age?

I am making this post because I need more guidance on this topic and I feel open discussion on it might be the best way to do that.

[Brendan Mulligan @BrainEngineer]

I had one of the best days of my life here, back in 2016

[E ★ @reminiscinbby]

Guilin, China

[Brendan Mulligan @BrainEngineer]

Excellent. Much better than the official commercial.

[Kevin Ngo @kevin_t_ngo]

I asked Claude Opus 5.5 to make an unofficial commercial for Apple HomeView.

[Brendan Mulligan @BrainEngineer]

@wickerwaka Rad! What motivated building this?

[Brendan Mulligan @BrainEngineer]

@jsnnsa Agreed, which is why Elon was so good for them. But like I said, two years ago it looked genius.

[Brendan Mulligan @BrainEngineer]

@jacksondahl When are you there? I’m around until the 19th 👀

[Brendan Mulligan @BrainEngineer]

This is a role previously held my consultants, suboptimally. For years their principle purpose was diffusing process knowledge throughout the economy, imperfectly and for large fees.

[James Rosen-Birch ⚖️🕊️ @provisionalidea]

there is an argument (which I've made privately until now) that one of the principal innovations of the large language model labs is a *legal* innovation, not a technical one

by building a system that hoovers up mind-bogglingly large volumes of human information and feeds it into a recombinatorial association machine, the companies have bulldozed the existing IP regime and made the contents of ~all human IP (including the most mundane) searchable, reconfigurable, and usable while also obscuring any trace of origin and eliminating a need to provide credit or attribution. much of the perceived benefit is therefore access and exposure to IP people would not otherwise have had access to, presented behind a system that abstracts the IP from its context and history and presents it as net-new information.

I imagine we would have seen ~similar productivity outcomes had Google actually been allowed to make productive use of the Google Books database over a decade ago.

[Brendan Mulligan @BrainEngineer]

@jacksondahl @patrickc This is especially true in luxury markets where “quality” on a utility axis is necessary but not sufficiently equal to “quality” in terms of belonging, dream fulfillment. These axes are unlikely to be selected for by agents, leaving the human still dominant in the process.

[Brendan Mulligan @BrainEngineer]

@Mortdog I bought turtles in time a few years ago and played through the whole thing again. Great game.