Remember the first time you saw Doom running on a calculator? That moment of pure, childlike wonder? The hacker had spent weeks, maybe months, wrestling with assembly code, bending hardware to their will. You felt their struggle in every pixel. That feeling is gone.
This week, someone published a writeup about running Doom on a regex engine. A regex engine. The thing you use to find email addresses in a text file. And technically, it’s incredible. The implementation is a mind-bending, multi-layered abstraction that shouldn’t work. But something felt off.
The top comment on the article nailed it: “I like this, but the writeup is so Claude that I suspect the regex was written by Claude too 🙁 Which is a shame, because the ‘Doom running on…’ space is one of the ones where I treasure articles written by motivated hackers.”
We’re not celebrating the hacker anymore. We’re celebrating the prompter.
That’s the gut-punch. The ‘Doom on X’ genre was never about the game. It was about the human story—the obsessive, face-palming, late-night debugging that turned a technical impossibility into a reality. It was a love letter to human ingenuity. Now, we look at a masterpiece and ask: “Did the AI do the thinking?”
Let me be clear: I’m not anti-AI. I use it every day. But there’s a difference between using AI as a tool and letting AI be the artist. When the core idea, the iteration, and the implementation are all outsourced to a language model, the achievement becomes hollow. The artifact is impressive, but the cultural value evaporates.
You’ve probably seen the flood of AI-generated technical writeups. They’re polished, structured, and utterly soulless. They read like a recipe for a dish nobody actually cooked. The ‘Doom on regex’ piece is technically perfect—and that’s exactly the problem. It lacks the friction, the ugly workarounds, the human signature.
If the AI did the thinking, then the ‘achievement’ is just a really clever output.
This is the paradox of progress. We’re pushing boundaries further than ever, but we’re losing the one thing that made those boundaries worth pushing: the story of the person who pushed them. The hacker culture that birthed these feats was built on shared struggle, on the beauty of the hack. That struggle is being replaced by a prompt.
So what do we do? We don’t ban AI. But we need to be honest about what we’re celebrating. When you see a ‘Doom on X’ post, look for the human. Look for the mistakes, the side comments, the ‘I tried this 47 times.’ That’s the real gold. The rest is just a really good simulation of creativity.
The ‘Doom on everything’ meme isn’t dying because we’ve run out of platforms. It’s dying because the human element is becoming optional.
And that’s a loss we haven’t fully processed yet.
FAQ
Q: Isn't it still impressive if AI helped? Why does the method matter?
A: It's impressive in the same way a perfect forgery is impressive. But the cultural value of these hacks came from the human story—the struggle, the failed attempts, the late-night epiphanies. Remove that, and you're left with a clever output, not a meaningful achievement.
Q: What's the practical implication for developers and content creators?
A: If you publish a technical feat, be transparent about your process. Share the messy parts, the dead ends, the moments you wanted to give up. That's what readers actually connect with. AI-generated polish might get clicks, but it won't build trust or community.
Q: Isn't this just gatekeeping? Shouldn't we celebrate that AI makes complex hacks accessible?
A: Accessibility is great. But there's a difference between lowering the barrier to entry and removing the human element entirely. The 'Doom on X' genre flourished because it was a showcase of personal obsession. If anyone can generate a similar result with a single prompt, the genre loses its meaning. We need new ways to recognize human effort, not pretend it's the same.