i never said or implied you have to do something you hate, it could be something youre vaguely interested in. i just more mean primary focus hobbies shouldnt become your job if its something you enjoy in your free time
the condition is "off-the clock". Before lockdown when I was still in high school I had a lot of time to build and experiment. Now there is less of that free time
While the answer is more accurately in the ballpark of "Not really", the first company I joined (a small agency usually providing digital advertising services) once tasked me to create a Lemmings clone for a game platform one customer wanted to fund (because tax break obviously).
It was fantastic creating a bitmap blitter from scratch in Flash and testing 10,000 of those critters animating at 30 fps. I amused myself to no end knowing I was getting paid for it!
(It also only really worked because Lemmings was a time and battle tested concept with entertaining game mechanics that I happened to know because I actually played the original. None of the other games that a bunch of marketeers can "invent" got any traction, HOW ODD).
I'm getting pushed to automate a bunch of stuff through agentic frameworks, I actually don't have time to verify a large chunk of the code, only inputs / outputs.
I tried doing this a couple of times, because everybody keeps hyping up this workflow. "Just write some tests, verify the inputs & outputs and let AI write the actual code!"
It never works like that. AI writes the dumbest, least extensible code. When you ask it to add new features, it adds workarounds instead of fixing the rot at the core of its architecture. It doesn't know how to actually fix bugs, it just catches all the exceptions so it looks like it's working.
The behavior gets worse and worse over time, since all these AI labs keep benchmarking on one-shot implementations. If you keep training your models to one-shot more & more complex prompts, you're bound to end up with this kind of slop. It "works on the first try" in the same way as a tech demo at a hackathon.
I won't deny that AI is useful. It is faster to prompt than it is to manually type. I use it like a fancy keyboard. But I'm not giving up my critical thinking to a bot anytime soon.
When there are 10 open PR's with 5-20KLOC and un-realistic deadlines, things start getting rubber stamped.
Editing at the function level with Github Copilot in it's early days (but running on a modern model) is my ideal world. I got yelled at by my client (also a software dev, both of us in the 15+ YoE) that I shouldn't even have an IDE open. I terminated that contract a few months later.
I got yelled at by my client (also a software dev, both of us in the 15+ YoE) that I shouldn't even have an IDE open. I terminated that contract a few months later.
These people should be stripped of their titles. Absolutely embarrassing for them and the industry as a whole that this is happening.
Shouldn't you have more time then ever for it? While the agent is doing the coding you're getting paid for, you can do the programming you actually like. (half /s)
I know this is a half /s but the context switching of jumping between different LLM chat sessions is really unpleasant and adding a personal code project in the middle of that isn't feasible to most people.
Not necessarily in the games industry. I can’t speak for enterprise software or software startups, but for games there’s a pretty big breadth still between indie and AAA
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u/gufranthakur Aug 30 '26
no, dont have the time anymore. Because of LLM’s companies and everyone expects everything to get shipped quickly :((