I recall being in my childhood home in San Francisco, staring at the nine-inch monochrome screen on my Mac, clicking square zoning tiles, building roads, and averting disasters late into the night. Yes, that was SimCity in 1989. I’d go on to play pretty much every version thereafter, though the mobile one isn’t quite the same.

Anyhow, Andy Coenen, a software engineer at Google Brain, decided to build a SimCity version of New York as a way to learn some of the newer gen AI models and tools:

Growing up, I played a lot of video games, and my favorites were world building games like SimCity 2000 and Rollercoaster Tycoon. As a core millennial rapidly approaching middle age, I’m a sucker for the nostalgic vibes of those late 90s / early 2000s games. As I stared out at the city, I couldn’t help but imagine what it would look like in the style of those childhood memories.

So here’s the idea: I’m going to make a giant isometric pixel-art map of New York City. And I’m going to use it as an excuse to push hard on the limits of the latest and greatest generative models and coding agents.

Best case scenario, I’ll make something cool, and worst case scenario, I’ll learn a lot.

The writeup goes deep into the technical process—real NYC city data, fine-tuned image models, custom generation pipelines, and a lot of manual QA when the models couldn’t get water and trees right. Worth reading in full if you’re curious. But his conclusion on what AI means for creative work is where I want to focus.

Coenen on drudgery:

…So much of creative work is defined by this kind of tedious grind.

For example, [as a musician] after recording a multi-part vocal harmony you change something in the mix and now it feels like one of the phrases is off by 15 milliseconds. To fix it, you need to adjust every layer - and this gets more convoluted if you’re using plugins or other processing on the material.

This isn’t creative. It’s just a slog. Every creative field - animation, video, software - is full of these tedious tasks. Of course, there’s a case to be made that the very act of doing this manual work is what refines your instincts - but I think it’s more of a “Just So” story than anything else. In the end, the quality of art is defined by the quality of your decisions - how much work you put into something is just a proxy for how much you care and how much you have to say.

I’d push back slightly on the “Just So story” part—repetition does build instincts that are hard to shortcut. But the broader point holds. And his closer echoes my own sentiment after finishing a massive gen AI project:

If you can push a button and get content, then that content is a commodity. Its value is next to zero.

Counterintuitively, that’s my biggest reason to be optimistic about AI and creativity. When hard parts become easy, the differentiator becomes love.

Check out Coenen’s project here. I think the only thing that’s missing are animated cars on the road.

Bonus: If you’re like me or Andy Coenen and loved SimCity, there’s an online free and open-source game called IsoCity that you can play. Runs natively in-browser.