ChatGPT 4o seems pretty good at writing Pico-8 code. (At least for simple games).

I asked it:
"Can we try something different? Like a simple Space Invaders or Galaxians style game?
I have 4 sprites in slots 1,2,3,4 with a player ship, alien invader, player bullet and enemy bullet respectively. Could you make a simple game where the aliens move left and right in formation, and the player moves left to right along the bottom of the screen?"

I got this.

I pasted the gif into the chat window, and it said:

"Awesome! It looks like the basic mechanics are working. Let's add a few more features to make the game more interesting:

Enemy Bullets: Add bullets fired by the aliens.
Player Lives: Track the player's lives and end the game when they run out.
Score: Add a scoring system for each alien destroyed."

Then gave me an updated version that looks like this:

Then I got worried that AI is doing all the work and I'm going to turn into the spaceship inhabitants in WAL-E. So I asked it to quiz me on the code and check my answers.

It came up with questions like:

"Bullet Mechanics:

Q3: How does the player fire bullets? What happens when a bullet is fired?
Q4: How are player bullets updated and removed when they move off-screen?
Alien Movement:

Q5: How do the aliens move left and right in formation? What happens when they reach the edge of the screen?
Q6: How do the aliens move downwards after reaching the screen edge?"

Nice

Impressive! Did it still remember it's own code after quizzing you about it? Did you try to give wrong answers?

Don't take ChatGPT's word as gospel. A machine that attempts to do everything is a machine that isn't very good at anything. That said, I HAVE used it before in order to point me in the right direction with dumb little things like, say, how to write an object so that I can make multiple instances of it. It's sort of like a more interactive version of rubber duck debugging, or a way to search StackExchange (let's face it, SE needs its OWN plaintext interface) that's easier than trying to rephrase your problem into keywords and going through irrelevant results. It has its uses, but a crutch it should NOT be.