alt Hacker NewsLLMs are a PCG system. This is one of my pet peeves, I've been working on a procedural generation constraint system for quite a while (way before LLMs) as a hobby, that came with a domain specific language, where you could specify constraints.
Things like the red key must be reachable before the red door, and there should be no path that bypasses the red door, etc. written as a set of constraints.
I was working on is because I realized, constraints tend to be similar in nature (graph cut, minimum/maximum shortest path etc.) algorithmically, but its usually quite hard to control designer intent.
The reason I shelved the project, was I asked an LLM a couple years ago, to generate a dungeon room graph, following a similar set of constraints, but stated in plain English, and it did a perfect job.
Which brings me to my final point. LLMs are amazing and flexible constraint solvers, and are woefully underutilized in scenarios like this.
The trouble is the LLMs non-determinism and the "You're absolutely right, I placed the red key behind the red door rather than in front of it. This was load bearing for the whole dungeon and I blew it" moments.
With a hand authored constraint system if the red key is in the wrong place you have a bug in the constraint system that can be deterministically fixed, with a LLM you have to roll the dice on prompting again and go through expensive verification.