The Old Tradeoff
Historically, creators faced a tradeoff:
Small worlds with care or Large worlds with sameness
Curation was expensive. Scale was cheap.
Procedural Generation
Traditional procedural generation created infinite variety but struggled with intentionality.
No Man's Sky offered billions of planets, yet exploration felt hollow because each world followed predictable patterns.
Scale was achieved, but curation was lost.
What AI Actually Changes
AI does not replace authorship. It changes the economics of it.
By making candidate generation cheap and iteration fast, AI allows taste, judgment, and constraint to operate at scale.
Authorship becomes selection, not fabrication.
Key Insight: AI enables curation at the scale previously reserved for procedural generation.
AI-Assisted Curation
An AI can generate 100 dungeon layouts in seconds.
A designer reviews them, selecting the 5 that create interesting spatial puzzles and memorable moments.
The remaining 95 are discarded without regret.
Many Small Worlds
The future is not endless terrain.
It is libraries of complete worlds — each finite, learnable, and internally consistent.
AI enables creators to build more rooms worth exploring, not more space to traverse.
Pattern: Instead of one infinite world, create 20 discrete worlds, each taking 2-3 hours to fully explore and understand.
Hades Walks the Line
Hades demonstrates the power of curated repetition.
Each run through the underworld follows a finite, handcrafted structure with carefully tuned variations.
Replayability emerges from depth, not from infinite generation.
Artificial Minds, Human Taste
Models trained on human artifacts inherit patterns of pacing, surprise, and restraint.
Used correctly, they can assist in placing content that feels intentional, not random.
AI does not guarantee taste. It lowers the cost of exercising it.
Discreteness is not a limitation.
It is a design choice we can now afford again.
The future belongs to worlds that are finite, intentional, and worth learning.