[Ep576] How Many Dudes Beta Begins, and AI Just Got Dumber

In episode 576 of 'Coffee with Butterscotch,' the brothers kick off the closed beta for How Many Dudes and dig into what they're actually trying to learn from it. Then the conversation pivots hard into the AI hype cycle, unpacking why GitHub Copilot's switch to usage-based billing just handed a hundred-times-larger bill to the developers who went all in, and what that says about where this whole thing is headed. Support How Many Dudes! Official Website: https://www.bscotch.net/games/how-many-dudes Trailer Teaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgQM1SceEpI Steam Wishlist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3934270/How\_Many\_Dudes 00:00 Cold Open 00:29 Introduction and Welcome 01:22 Closed Beta for How Many Dudes 08:15 Game Balancing: Challenges and Techniques 12:25 Evaluating Enemy Strength and Player Progression 18:27 Beta Test Goals and What They're Looking For 27:00 Pivot to AI and the Tech Landscape 29:32 How LLMs Actually Work 32:08 Agentic Programming Explained 37:08 The AI First Company Myth 40:02 Slot Machine Development 44:18 GitHub Copilot's Usage-Based Billing 50:34 The Dependency Trap 53:11 Where This All Ends Up 57:15 The Cost Reckoning Begins 01:00:01 What Comes After the Collapse To stay up to date with all of our buttery goodness subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts (apple.co/1LxNEnk) or wherever you get your audio goodness.  If you want to get more involved in the Butterscotch community, hop into our DISCORD server at discord.gg/bscotch and say hello!  Submit questions at https://www.bscotch.net/podcast, disclose all of your secrets to podcast@bscotch.net, and send letters, gifts, and tasty treats to https://bit.ly/bscotchmailbox.  We also built Ludokit, a tool for managing store pages, promo art, localization, achievements, credits, fonts, change logs, and more. Check it out at https://ludokit.com! Finally, if you’d like to support the show and buy some coffee FOR Butterscotch, head over to https://moneygrab.bscotch.net. [**★ Support this podcast ★**](https://ko-fi.com/bscotch "★ Support this podcast ★")