It’s procedural generation but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. People today might use a big generative NN model to do this, using maybe a thousand times as much energy to get essentially the same result. Gen AI is definitely a big step forward in our relentless drive to make software more inefficient in order to compensate for any efficiency gains that the hardware guys come up with.

It’s interesting this article uses the phrase, “you feed it the vibe your going for,” about 5 years before “vibe coding” became a common term.