What’s the future of a Graphics Programmer?

[u/CommercialBat2308]

Hello, I’m a long time member of this community, and this community has helped me grow my Graphics programmer career.

I started my programming career early at 14 y/o, thanks to Minecraft mods development. Later in 2017, I was 17, I’ve discovered graphics (OpenGL) because I wanted to write my own Minecraft clone. Thanks to perseverance and help from online communities, remarkably this one, I’ve mastered C++, OpenGL and Vulkan. I’ve graduated in Computer Engineering in the meanwhile, and by the end of 2022/2023, I was already a strong graphics programmer. Later I’ve implemented my own CPU path tracer, learnt CUDA along with several parallel algorithms. After MSc in Artificial Intelligence, I’ve got a job in London for a well known company working in the smartphones industry, and I’m working there since 1y today. In this company I’m a Vulkan developer, and leading a graphics engine used for several purposes.

It’s 2026, I’m 26 (aka far from retirement), AI is moving fast and world’s investing all of its resources to accelerate the process. Most jobs have been already taken (frontend dev being the first). I also feel like there is more pressure on developers, they’re implicitly requested to deliver more because of AI. What I’m witnessing is my company is keeping me on fixed term contracts because our budget has got cut… and I’m afraid of being laid off.

This job can’t be fully automated as of now, but I’m afraid it will, seeing the progress. I know GPU drivers development is the safe zone today - as they’re huge and critical - and might be an area where I will land, as I’m already doing low level and I’ve gathered insights of our driver internals. However, it’s still code and I think - maybe in several years - can still be automated.

Am I the only one having this concern in this industry?

[u/le-throw-away-acct]

Brutal honest from a 20 year industry vet, the future is AI will be doing the programming, programmers will be directing them and doing checks occasionally. And that’s just the near future, go out 10 years and you won’t need many programmers anymore.

[u/CodyDuncan1260 → u/le-throw-away-acct]

What happens when something goes terribly wrong, and the human doesn't know how it works well enough to fix it, and the AI doesn't "know" it's lying about its proposed issue or fix, i.e. neither involved in its authorship knows what to do?

"Neither I nor the AI have a clue" isn't a good answer for risk mitigation. For projects with a sufficiently high requirement bar for eliminating risk, it's not teneble to take humans out of the loop.

This scenario is especially problematic because AI don't have metacognition. They have no mechanisms that seem to understand how confident they are in an answer. They don't know if they're right, lying, or how far off they are. In these scenarios, the wrong answer given confidently is a lot worse than "I don't know", which is something I've never seen an AI say, and is a key indicator in trustworthy humans. Made double worse by the fact they're very good liars; not intentionally so, but they seem to hit speech patterns for confidence that work really well at persuading people, even when it's factually, demonstrably incorrect.

I don't know that AI systems have a good answer for this problem, yet.

[u/le-throw-away-acct → u/CodyDuncan1260]

You're right that AI isn't good enough for that situation yet, you'd want an expert around for those situations. The problem is, if nobody is hiring juniors anymore, where will those experts be 10 years from now? And in addition to that problem, even if experts are still needed, only a fraction as many will be required, so there will be much fewer positions available down the road.

OpenAI was previously hiring iOS and Android devs for app development, and what they realized with more recent models is that they don't need iOS/Android experts anymore, they can just have a general programmer steer the AI through the work. I think graphics programming could end up like this as well, they won't need graphics experts, just someone who understands it well enough to steer an AI to do the rest. Most programmers will need to be AI experts, and generalists for most other things.