I get being uncomfortable. To be honest it does also weigh on my conscience a bit. While it didn’t do anything more complex, than what i could’ve done myself, and it made a bunch of mistakes that i wouldnt’ve made, even with those mistakes it was still at least 5 times faster than what i could’ve made in the same time. I do think that with a second programmer on the team, and me also doing some coding work, that maybe it would’ve been possible to make this game in the same amount of time (or at least still within the confines of the jam) but it would’ve been a lot more stressful.
However i‘ve never been able to make a good looking 3D game for a gamejam before. Being able to just push out assets and having them implemented in a matter of minutes feels incredibly rewarding.
I‘d say to the extend I‘ve been using AI, it’s not sustainable for a larger project. the codebase is hellish spaghetti code and there’s not a single person in the world who knows how it works. But if you just outsource certain jobs to the AI and make sure to manage the architecture like you would with a team of developers, i do think it becomes viable, at least as a solo dev. In this case it helped, that i knew from the beginning how i wanted the whole game to work, and i could implement the right features from the start.
It’s however not the best learning experience. I learned more about 3d art and animations, and music, but if you’re trying to learn how to code, stay away from AI.