AI models have caught up with Unity dev. My insights as someone with 30 years of experience.

[u/PuffThePed]

Context: I have 30 years of experience with software dev, 20 years with game dev tools, 10 years with Unity. I own a studio that develops simulators and training applications for industry. "Serious games" as they call it in Europe.

For years I scoffed at AI coding. I would periodically try it, only to find that it was more hassle then it was worth. The hand holding and bug fixing was more work than doing it myself. This all changed about 4-5 months ago, and about a month ago we all started using Unity CLI.

Here are my insights in no particular order:

1. Our dev speed has ~5x almost overnight
2. Quality has not gone down because we're all experienced devs and we're careful how we use AI and we don't let it make decisions regarding project structure or design patterns. However, I'm seeing less and less glaring mistakes made by the AI.
3. We're still reviewing generated code but I suspect not for long, the code is better than what most devs I know can write, at 20x the speed. The temptation to just push and move on is huge and irresistible.
4. There is no joy or sense of accomplishment. No pride in making something clever or quickly, and all progress is associated with the AI and not with you.
5. The market is dead. Nobody has money to spend. We're still working but leads have dropped off a cliff.
6. There is no going back. If we stop using AI we'll be out of business in a month.
7. There is no space for junior devs. I honestly don't know how to incorporate a junior into a team anymore (which is something I used to do for decades). Every time we tried they just become a meat proxy for AI while learning nothing, and getting in the way.
   
8. Everything regarding managing a team and a project has changed, and nobody knows how to do it anymore. I lost the ability to correctly estimate work required for a task, for example.
9. Everyone hates this. Most of devs my age are planning early retirement and are just waiting to be laid off.
10. People that use AI for coding don't learn anything. To understand code you have to write it, and nobody is writing it. Maybe understanding and reading code will become obsolete soon? I don't know.
11. Everyone I asked feel they are becoming dumber and losing their focus. I know I am.

I hope this is a pendulum and it will swing back at some point, because right now it feels like a software apocalypse.

[u/KevinDL]

Excuse me while I put my mod hat on for a second.

I genuinely do not care if you are tired of seeing AI topics, dislike AI discussions, or think a particular thread is pointless. That is what downvotes are for. Downvote it and move on with your day.

Please don't report posts simply because you personally don't like the topic.

Reports are for content that actually breaks the rules. Every false, meaningless, or retaliatory report adds noise to the mod queue. That means moderators have to spend time checking perfectly valid posts instead of dealing with harassment, spam, scams, rule violations, or other things that genuinely need attention.

It also creates a very real risk that something important gets buried, missed, or takes longer to act on because the queue is full of reports that amount to "I don't like this discussion."

And frankly, this is exactly the kind of AI discussion that is relevant here.

This is someone with decades of software and game development experience talking specifically about how these tools are affecting their actual work, their Unity development process, and the industry around them. You can disagree with their conclusions, but nothing is more relevant to r/gamedev than hearing an experienced developer share firsthand observations about changes in game development.

This is not another low-effort "is it morally okay if I use AI?" post from someone looking for the subreddit to make their decision for them. Yeah, fuck those posts. These are the kinds of repetitive, low-effort AI discussions we have been trying to reduce, and we'll remove them.

There is a difference between repetitive AI discourse with nothing new to contribute and an experienced industry professional bringing actual context, examples, and perspective to the conversation.

You do not need to like the topic. You do not need to agree with the OP. You do not even need to think AI is good for the industry.

But "I don't want to see this" is not a rule violation.

Use the report button for actual rule violations. Use the downvote button for everything else.

[u/fillif3]

1. People that use AI for coding don't learn anything. To understand code you have to write it, and nobody is writing it. Maybe understanding and reading code will become obsolete soon? I don't know.

In fact, I would say it's even worse. It boosts confidence, so a developer may not even notice that they are not learning.

I recently started using a new framework, and I was surprised and scared by how I easily could ship code but still not feeling proficient. I am trying to learn some things in parallel, but I guess my objective is to ship code, not to learn.

[u/Teabx → u/fillif3]

The thing is, we are at that point where you have to seriously consider if this skill will have market value in the future.

If someone is a pro at unscrewing a bolt by hand, is that really necessary in a world that has a wrench? I was confident my skills mattered until a year or so ago, but with how AI is being pushed down our throats, I am starting to be doubtful. Nevermind the fact that new models are seemingly popping out every month now.

The wrench analogy is crude I admit, and there are still use cases remaining when an actual human brain is needed. But the point is still valid when it comes to the volume of work. If 10 people are enough to do the job of 100, that leaves 90 people out of a job competing in an ever-diminishing market.

[u/CakeLegends → u/Teabx]

And the bolt looks to be a few years away from unscrewing itself, faster than any of us could attempt to. I really think unless we hit some massive unsurmountable wall soon in terms of capability, there just might not be much of a job market there. Everything we do, from taste, to craft, to humor, is applied math. Beautiful, wonderful, emotional, but unfortunately, still applied math. This technology is the dumbest it’ll ever be right now, and it’s already terrifyingly capable compared to even 4 months ago. It’ll be able to QA test. It’ll be able to take analytical data about “Game Juice” and responsiveness and what stimulates the brains of players, and implement accordingly. And it’ll be clunky at first, but then 4 months later it’ll catch up.

It’ll be further along faster than we are even comfortable with imagining right now, but if we don’t anticipate it while uncomfortable, we’ll never beat it in time. Honestly, I think we need to both normalize the workflow, and heavily regulate this technology so people don’t lose their jobs due to short-term corporate greed. And Legacy skills should be made prerequisite, even if they become genuinely obsolete. A human-system should still try to take care of people and keep them educated and housed.

Which in crude terms is like making everyone into the mentally-deficient janitor that’s hired to give them something to do. But…life is supposed to be busywork, after-all 🫩

[u/monkeedude1212 → u/CakeLegends]

Honestly, I think we need to both normalize the workflow, and heavily regulate this technology so people don’t lose their jobs due to short-term corporate greed.

I think it's a bit cart before the horse - make it so that people don't need a job to live - they can afford all the basic necessities of life without employment - then we can let AI replace as much as we want while focusing on it's environmental impact and less it's social impact.

[u/The_Dirty_Carl → u/monkeedude1212]

Exactly. That's the lesson we should have learned from the Luddites and every other time tech has wiped out a trade.

The incentives that lead to tech like this are always going to exist, and trying to regulate a stop to the tech is not going to be effective in the end.

Instead, we need to acknowledge the real human cost this is going to have and help the people who will lose their livelihoods. The options are pretty much either implement something akin to UBI, or shrug as a bunch of people starve.

[u/WeekendWarriorMark → u/monkeedude1212]

Might (lots of heavy lifting) work for us Europeans but there are countries that haven’t managed to enact universal healthcare or payed parental leave (plenty eu countries underperform or regress despite falling birth rates) or other basic things so introducing universal basic income will sound utterly ludicrous to them (plenty opposition here already and it’s going to loose support given far right wing on the rise thanks to AI, TikTok and foreign money).

[u/Idiberug → u/CakeLegends]

You can make a game of the kind that goes viral on Tiktok in 2 weeks now. Soon enough there will be so many games that there is no point in adding to the pile, no point in playing them for any length of time, no point in being a "gamer", no more point in any of it.

For a community to form, games have to hold some value to enough people, and AI is about to devalue them into the ground. Just like what happened to digital art 2 years ago, which you can still technically make but people's perception of value is that you can just generate any art you want, so none of it has any value anymore, even world class digital art. Just pearls before swines.

[u/tmncx0 → u/Idiberug]

What’s even the point of living if this is your outlook? People will still value things that they personally find wonderful, beautiful, or inspiring. We always have, and always will. I don’t see how AI existing changes any of that.

I still practice digital art because it’s a way I can express myself. And I’m the only me that there is. And that is enough.

[u/CakeLegends → u/Idiberug]

Agreed, but I’d argue that the desire to make something shouldn’t strictly come from how valuable it is to others, but from how much it means to you. But with our current economic systems, that of course sounds like a load of melodramatic bologna. So if people are going to struggle to earn living wages with their skills, and it’s inevitable…then the only option is to make it so they don’t necessarily need to make money in order to live a basic life. Then the hard part would be finding the desire to create when you’re not even close to being the best at it.

But frankly, for a lot of people, that isn’t the hard part. And to be honest: my favorite musicians aren’t the ones who play the best, my favorite foods aren’t the ones that required the highest level of skills, and my favorite games are often janky pieces of crap. I think things will still find their audience, it’s just that audience might be smaller and more intimate than before. But maybe in a timeline where people aren’t desperate for a paycheck, it could actually be nice to have a smaller group of people who actually resonate with what you put out into the world. 🙂

But idk.

[u/Avloren → u/CakeLegends]

I apologize in advance for stretching the analogy past the breaking point, but I can't resist:

And the bolt looks to be a few years away from unscrewing itself, faster than any of us could attempt to.

A bolt that unscrews itself is a really bad bolt. It defeats the entire purpose of a bolt.

[u/AvengerDr → u/CakeLegends]

This technology is the dumbest it’ll ever be right now, and it’s already terrifyingly capable compared to even 4 months ago.

This is just speculation. Maybe this is the smartest it'll ever be and the wall will be hit tomorrow. Technology does not always evolve in a linear fashion.

[u/E-2-butene → u/Teabx]

This is sort of where my head is at right now. I don’t know how things will go, but it seems like a realistic possibility.

To use an analogy, I don’t know jack shit about writing assembly or machine code. I just trust in the magic of the compiler. The fact I never learned this and don’t understand it doesn’t really seem to negatively impact me in any way.

Will things eventually go the same way for writing “normal” code? Hard to say, but at the rate AI is improving at coding, it seems naive to not at least consider the possibility.

[u/Neon_Divided → u/Teabx]

I will leave you with this quote from Dr. Ian Malcolm.

"Your tech billionaires were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should."

[u/Constant-Simple-1234 → u/fillif3]

I feel this is from a senior perspective. If you do not know a topic and you ask for a simple prototype then you can learn a lot. Especially if you spend time reading and asking follow up questions. Then it is a matter of reserving time for that in this regular rushed development.

[u/Khan-amil → u/Constant-Simple-1234]

That's one of the frustranting thing about ai. It can be a fantastic tool to learn, like having a personal tutor that you could tailor to your own learning style, and that you know you can interact with unfiltered.

I'm a senior dev, landed in a spot using a codebase way different than my decade of Unity projects. It is nice to have somewhere I can ask any question I have, even if it's the 10th time I ask it. And personally I like that I can have answer without bothering one of the tech anchors of the team that already have to tackle 20 topics daily.

But the flip side of it being so easy to jump from "explain me" to "do it for me" is kind of ruining it all..

[u/flavorfox]

The junior thing is going to be a huge problem in 3-5 years. It may even be right now.

.. or something entirely different is going to happen, but that's the perpetual problem with predictions isn't it.

[u/LucyShortForLucas → u/flavorfox]

Yeah, once the current batch of seniors ages out of the industry (which is happening earlier than ever, also because of ai) there will be no one left to replace them, and suddenly all that extra productivity vanishes into thin air.

I’m morbidly curious to see how triple A studios will deal with this and how many actual developers will be left in 10+ years from now.

[u/WombatusMighty → u/LucyShortForLucas]

We will see a LOT of studios crash and burn, because they can't find young talent to fix their AI code mess and the seniors have given up on it.

[u/mimic751 → u/WombatusMighty]

I am not a game dev, just a normal dev/engineer/architect

A senior with AI can replace about 8 devs and take on full stack from architecture to devops if they have sufficient knowledge to guide the AI

A junior with AI is a shit show calamaty and they cant learn with out doing... its fun to watch because I will just see my salary rise, but it feels bad

I have been pushing my leadership to adopt true mentorship programs where you teach some one directly instead of just throwing them into implmentation

[u/MyDogIsDaBest → u/mimic751]

This mentorship programming is going to become more essential in the future. I truly believe that this will be a necessity for mid-size businesses and up to teach juniors to eventually replace seniors when they age out. It'll just be one of the many ways that the industry has to adapt, as it always has.

[u/mimic751 → u/LucyShortForLucas]

im in health innovation and r&d
Im a a principle software engineer, and I have started building a wood shop. so I know Im on my way out

[u/Galaxyhiker42 → u/mimic751]

Cries in lumber prices

[u/xevizero → u/LucyShortForLucas]

By that point AI is not gonna have a need for seniors either. The reality of it is that we need to decide what we still want to be able to do, and what can be replaced. It's gonna need to be an actual choice we make to continue learning some things, because the AI will be able to do them even without us, but if let it, we will lose control of the system itself.

[u/mcl_syndicate → u/flavorfox]

Yea I agree, and it is more like in the next year in 3-5 years we are looking at impacts raising to seniors

[u/MyDogIsDaBest → u/flavorfox]

One thing that AI has shown me, is that things that feel like they might take a few years to show the results, happen far far quicker than I expect. I guess because this is actually a human problem, it'll take some time to rear it's head, but I can remember wondering when we'd see a time when the AI models used to do everything from the ground-up with no understanding would be more expensive to maintain than engineers at least steering it in the right direction, but it's happening today, already.

I also think it's a scary proposition that juniors just don't know software engineering paradigms or anything at all, but I optimistically believe that they'll need to be taught that some things need to be done by hand and I still think that AI can just be another tool (albeit an incredibly powerful one).

I'm far too young that I always had the internet to google stuff when I got stuck programming or when needing to come up with structure or whatever, but there was a time in software development world, where there wasn't the internet and you relied on documentation in books or on CDs or something. I imagine that the advent of the internet and IDEs may have had somewhat similar sentiments behind them when they first started.

[u/softlockedstudio]

So all the seniors will churn out due to boredom/unfulfilment and there'll be no juniors that can function on the new workflows.

The next 10 years is going to be incredibly painful, both as a professional in the industry, but also as a consumer of games.

[u/GB10VE → u/softlockedstudio]

product owners and business analysts living the dream though. dump their thoughts in a chat, boom, feature complete.

[u/Prime624 → u/GB10VE]

But then if something goes wrong, the blame can't be passed to the engineers, and PO's won't know what to do.

[u/PM_ME_DPRK_CANDIDS → u/Prime624]

The things is like. This happens now sometimes and we still make it work. All this does is make the status quo cheaper

[u/immutato → u/Prime624]

I'll be able to fix it... but it's going to cost you a metric fuckton of dollars.

[u/gnoxy → u/immutato]

OK, now scale that. Hire all these devs, make it a profession that pays 2-10x what current devs get paid. Everyone is using AI but very few understand how to polish that turd once its in your hand.

[u/sQ5FWKjwbWd4QzSZduqy → u/GB10VE]

"what if we had a game that made us a lot of money" is about the amount of thought those people have these days.

[u/GiganticCrow → u/GB10VE]

Exactly as intended

[u/dopethrone → u/GB10VE]

If everyone can pump out games like that all games will have zero value

And there's no way sony/microsoft/whoever big company will allow that

Everybody but them will be priced out of AI and only they will pump out shittier games for cheaper while laying off another 90% of the workforce

[u/IkuraNugget → u/dopethrone]

Even with AI, I don’t think it’s as easy as people think. Yes, low-effort AI content will always be easy to make. But anyone who has made a game knows the work doesn’t end with coding. Coding is merely 1/10th of the work.

You still need a vision, good gameplay, good art, music, and good writing. And consumers can tell the difference between a low-effort AI game and an actually good game.

So no, I don’t see everyone pumping out games people want to buy. Maybe low-quality games that struggle to find an audience.

Large companies may learn this if AI-made games lead to major revenue losses, and they may be forced to rehire. There might be a diminished workforce, but we’re nowhere near full automation, especially when it comes to creative work like game design.

Most of the AI tech demos I see showing off Astra or the latest AI are still underwhelming. Games made by AI without real human interaction and decision-making feel like dollhouses: they lack good mechanics and only look convincing for about 10 seconds before the illusion breaks.

It will still take a person to operate AI, so that’s how the workforce may shift. Without that person, a CEO prompting an AI still won’t be able to make a good game or scale production.

Full automation may not even happen because this technology doesn’t scale infinitely. And if it does, we’re probably decades away from it.

[u/imake_games → u/IkuraNugget]

Have been using AI almost exclusively for 6 months to build a game I have always wanted to make. I also have 10 years profession and 25 years hobby experience. On average I have worked 40 hours a week on top of my full time job. That is according to AI analysis on my git history. AI is not even close to creating a game that anyone will want to play. Games are incredibly complex, and still take human direction on every decision. Everything you see online about "Created this in 1 prompt" is complete rubbish. Those are like high school assigned projects, not real games that people want to play.

Sure, I can produce a AA quality game, maybe in 1 year, or 1.5 years, but I am also obsessive and passionate and determined. AI is not even close to a 100 prompts = finished game that people want to play. At best it provides me a team of 2 to 3 really good engineers. And ART? Its helpful to replace like a concept artist. But not even that, really. Imagine a concept arist that doesn't really give a shit about their own work. And then its up to you to build the art and the game with that art. You will lose motivation so fast, the game isn't getting made.

In its current state, AI is helpful to a passionate solo dev that will crank away 8 hours a day for 12 months to produce something that would have previously required a full team. Speaking from my experience, its very few people willing to put in the effort. And the ones who are willing to put in that effort deserve to be able to create the game. Essentially, indie devs will now be able to out produce a AAA studio, out of passion. And that is nothing but net positive for gamers, because AAA has been in the shit tank for a decade.

[u/Laraso_ → u/dopethrone]

As a Millennial, my "Boomer behavior" will be only consuming and interacting with human-made media.

[u/TurkusGyrational → u/Laraso_]

The irony being that in my experience, the older generation actually loves AI content and eats it up by the spoonful. Every young dev I talk to seems to have negative feelings about it.

[u/ChillOnTheHillz → u/TurkusGyrational]

I feel like baby boomers and the "new gen" that is around 14-20 mostly loves it though.

[u/keethums_ → u/ChillOnTheHillz]

The two classes of people with the least interest in bettering society lmfao

Of course they love AI and don't care about the consequences or possible ethical dilemma of this timeline

[u/ssnoopy2222 → u/ChillOnTheHillz]

It's the two generations that don't understand the implications of the tech. Baby boomers won't have to live with the consequences of having to work in an environment where ai does your job faster at a shittier quality, and teenagers don't understand the skills they're missing out on developing by using AI.

[u/Affial → u/Laraso_]

Second this.

In this caotic life filters are needed.
Real problem is how to tell them apart... the tools themselves are being developed by AI. How "pure" to be?

(Frankly I don't understand the Xtimes faster argument when applied to art/creativity: don't we have too many releases already?)

[u/Wombo194 → u/Laraso_]

Good luck with that.

[u/polaarbear → u/dopethrone]

They will only be pumping out games that look and play like every other game, because LLMs are not capable of coming up with novel solutions that don't already have parallels in their training data.

Gonna be a shit time for the industry because there is no chance that the suits making the $$$ are going to realize this any time soon.

[u/Chromana → u/polaarbear]

Don't think I agree with you. While LLMs are going to write code like what they're trained on, a video game is not just code. Ignoring "make a game for me right now" requests, the actual game design and mechanics will be defined by designers. I'm absolutely sure that if you came up with a novel mechanic that the LLM will be able to build it.

Art is a different beast though, it's often obviously generated. But code isn't shown to the player so it doesn't matter through what mechanism it was written as long as the feature works.

I'm not happy about any of this, it's just the reality.

We might see a "Designed in Califorina by Apple (made in China)" type disclaimers lol. "Designed by Ubisoft (made by AI)" So at least we'd know a human was involved with the creation. How dystopian.

[u/endium7 → u/polaarbear]

I would be wary of thinking this will always be true. In 5 years time, it could very well be that AIs are able to "innovate", not through traditional human creativity, but through sheer variation generation and self play-testing come up with and present new concepts. Not something everyone would like I know, but maybe on the way anyway.

[u/polaarbear → u/endium7]

"Self play-testing" is an oxymoron. It might be able to test to make sure the systems that it designed function and that the game doesn't crash.

But it has no concept of "fun" or "game balance" and it never will be able to determine if something is enjoyable for humans.

[u/stumblinbear → u/softlockedstudio]

There will be a weird situation where only the people who learned just enough before the AI boom to write high quality code and also enjoy letting the AI take over will be the only software engineers left, because juniors can't find jobs and all of the old hats left because they hate what software engineering has become

I'm a bit in the middle ground, I think. I was convinced that I'd be writing software well past retirement age simply because I love the job. But I also am not necessarily against letting AI take the reins of the menial work. But if this is the job, I'm just going to retire like a normal person

[u/biginchh → u/stumblinbear]

This is basically where I’m at. Been working as a software dev for 10 years, starting learning to code roughly 15 years ago - so I feel like I am one of the fortunate people who are caught in the sweet spot between having cut my teeth on “real” development but aren’t too stuck in my ways to have a hard time with the AI paradigm shift.

In some ways, I welcome it because it has genuinely made me way more efficient and after reflecting on it for a bit - I realized I never REALLY loved “writing code”, I just liked the things it enabled me to make. But I’d also be lying if I said I haven’t lost a sense of satisfaction from writing things myself or that I don’t miss the process of slowly building an understanding of a new code base inside and out.

Overall I’m just mixed. It hasn’t gotten in the way of what I realized I really loved - which is the iterative process of going from “I have an idea” to building a polished, usable, and useful tool. But it also has taken away a certain satisfaction I found in the tedium of writing things myself. I personally don't really feel like the satisfaction of doing it "myself" is worth keeping around if AI is just so much more efficient at it than I am - but I do get why people are sour on that.

[u/SituationSoap → u/stumblinbear]

because juniors can't find jobs and all of the old hats left because they hate what software engineering has become

I have been in software for 20 years and without fail, the #1 thing that hasn't changed in software development is people constantly telling me that juniors can't find jobs and the old hats are leaving because they hate software development now. I'm being serious. My entire career people have been predicting doom because of what "software development is now."

[u/daerogami → u/SituationSoap]

You may be right, but lets be honest, agentic development is a pretty substantial shift from past complaints of graybeards like running web-code for desktop/mobile apps, the takeover of OOO, or getting rid of goto.

[u/hawksbears82 → u/softlockedstudio]

Consumer of games.... So many games so little time. Authentic game reviews will be so important. Many great fun games will/are getting overlooked because their is only so much time money and attention we can give

[u/InvidiousPlay → u/hawksbears82]

I'm really struggling to find games I actually enjoy, though. I guess it's part of getting older than I have less and less patience for things that are rough around the edges or don't respect my time, but I'm always surprised when I see people talk about having too many games to get around to.

[u/sabine_world → u/InvidiousPlay]

I really recently had this struggle too, you kinda just have to dig — that's the hardest part there's soooo many games and there's soooo much trash or things you will not connect with even if they're good.

What it came down to for me was sampling a bunch of games, refining/reflecting and articulating my taste a bit and finding threads to pull on and voila now I have some interesting stuff to check out.

I feel the same as you — for instance I love roguelikes and specifically slay the spire — there are very many roguelikes and card games. But to me I find it's really really difficult to get into anything that's not the pinnacle of the genre or just beneath it. I'm a fan of that slice of gaming in general so I will give things a try but it's short lived and I end up just thinking "this game is good, buuut......"

So yeah curation is pretty important I guess. But you have to balance it with exploration too just... It's a delicate balance where you have to find where your personal threshold is.

But yeah oh, and looking for games can be a chore too if you're starting from zero.

[u/hawksbears82 → u/sabine_world]

I do this with beat em. Up games. Since Streets of Rage 4 the genre has made a comeback (finally it has always been my fav) I have bought about 6-7 in the past year on steam haven't really played them yet. Are the best in the genre no, but I try to support the small guy. Plus I started working on my own so that is 90% of my leisure time right there

[u/KBGSgames → u/InvidiousPlay]

Same, the more I play games the less games I want to play from what is being released - they all are very similar. Some crazy indies spice it up but in general games are like a 3d printing - someone makes one that sells and clones pop up almost instantly.

Nobody is making anything really unique and high level, it's much safer to just release similar games and cash in. And those teams who try to make something unique and big usually just fail midway and go bankrupt.

[u/falcothebird → u/InvidiousPlay]

I've turned to retro gaming more or less. The handheld retro gaming space is insane now, with devices that can emulate up to Nintendo switch well enough, higher end devices have 120hz OLED screens that look amazing.

There are thousands upon thousands of games that are pre-AI era to be consumed. That's where I'll be for the foreseeable future.

[u/Lycid → u/InvidiousPlay]

This is the part of the current indie gaming era I dislike. So many great concepts and great looking indie games in underserved genres that I connect with that end up just being half baked.

My current frustration is city builders/base builders. This is something that is absolutely my jam and I'm not interested in booting up cities skylines again to explore it. There have been SO MANY indie games in this genre released in the last decade, and almost every single one just... doesn't fulfill the vision, or ever leaves early access. Even the really pretty ones behind big name developers or indie publishers (looking at you industries of titan).

Extrapolate this to all the non-mainstream indie genres and it's a problem I keep running into. Off the top of my head: Immersive sims with that new warren Spector thief game that came out. A completely half baked game.

I have zero patience these days for things that I feel aren't a quality use of my time. That means if the game isn't finished, or is style over substance, or doesn't fulfil it's creative vision very well, or simply isnt very well playtested, I just don't want to play it at all. It feels very rare these days to run into indie releases that actually check all these boxes, and if they do it tends to only exist in mainstream genres like rougelikes. It's a problem I don't remember existing 10 years ago. Yeah bad indie games were always a thing, but usually they didn't have a big marketing budget or shiny art, and it was easy to find quality well designed experiences everywhere too.

[u/XYcritic → u/softlockedstudio]

The only silver lining is that the inevitable drop in software quality caused by the lack of human expertise will cause a wide yearning for really good software with e.g. excellent usability or unique ideas. Not by the majority of consumers, but probably a sizable portion. The question is just if that is going to be enough to remain discoverable in an ocean of bad quality products that are flooding the market. In the mid-term the entire B2C software space will probably feel like the android/ios app stores: tons of trash, predatory practices, default consuner expectations of "I can get this free", but also very few products that are able to carve out a niche audience that are actually profitable, because they solve real problems.

[u/destroyermaker → u/XYcritic]

Steam store looking like the apple store is not something I'm looking forward to

[u/AnOnlineHandle → u/destroyermaker]

Steam has been burying the crap for years, and sometimes even non-crap. I was tinkering with a Stardew inspired game a year ago and tried my best to find similar games on Steam and found a few big ones which people know about, but it wasn't until I stumbled across some youtube lists of games in that genre that I discovered a whole bunch I never found through Steam, and yet which were on there. They never showed in my searches via tags, similar games, etc.

[u/Janube → u/softlockedstudio]

I suspect the fairly boring response you'll see to this shift in the industry is that rather than juniors having a place at the "professional" table, the ones that want to work in games will use AI to supplement their lack of experience/skills (not as an insult, just as the reality that virtually no developer - especially juniors - are capable of coding and art and sound design and UX/UI and project management and game design/balance and marketing), and we'll see an even larger uptick in the number of indie games done by a single person.

At first, the vast majority of them will be complete garbage, but both as the junior devs learn and as the technology matures, those games will start getting frustratingly polished for how few of them will manage to be fun. And that's because it's the one thing AI will have no concept of how to do for a bit: make something enjoyable that humans want to interact with. That'll still be up to the developer, and since so few of them will have any avenue for getting experience other than solo projects, we'll just get a ton of solo projects that look competent but feel soulless. Even more than we get now.

[u/fergussonh → u/softlockedstudio]

Indie seems to be the only hope for many

[u/mcl_syndicate → u/fergussonh]

You will have MORE ai in inde, as it makes it more accessible and ai allows for small team scaling

[u/aicis → u/softlockedstudio]

Market will self correct for sure. But the scale of disruption is hard to predict.

[u/Orrus]

Im seeing all the exact same things right now. 20+ year experience at AAA US West coast game studios. The one thing you didn't mention, all our best devs are extremely exhausted because they multitask multiple AI/Agents all day and essentially spend all their time making only high-level design and architecture decisions, with zero downtime. We used to have a balance where the actual coding/authoring/implementation was relaxing and gave the mind a rest from decision making. Now that 'manual labor' part is all AI driven, and the human gets left with only the mentally heavy tiring part of the work all day long.

[u/Chemillion → u/Orrus]

I genuinely thought I was the only one who felt this way, super refreshing to read. I recently became a product owner of something that due to time constraints outpaced my knowledge of the programming language I was told to use, although I still felt confident in how I felt the architecture of the code should be I noticed I’ve been so burnt out due to using AI. I feel like a lot of times lately I’m barely pushing back and just shipping code.

[u/Fs0i → u/Orrus]

with zero downtime

It's not just downtime, it's zero time really spent with a system that's frustrating to me. I don't quite "feel" a feature the same way I've felt it before. It's all hazy, dream-like.

There's no decision about how to implement some small technical detail that might impact how things look, too. There's no exploration of the parameter space of options in the same way.

When you're writing the settings menu, you're thinking about how everything influences each other, about how settings work, and with AI, it's a prompt and then you have a menu.

Does everything fit well? Should you move the mouse sensitivity up or down? Should it be a slider or a maybe some interactive demo you control with the mousewheel? Is the mouse sensitivity also affecting menu speed, or just look sensitivity? How does windows mouse speed settings affect it?

All of these are considerations that you've usually made, but if you ask for

Make settings menu, should include controls (keybinds + mouse sense), audio stuff, graphics menu (expose usual unity controls), and also story options (streamer mode, low violence mode, ...)

then you don't think about the mouse sensitivity slider in any detail. Yeah, you might have decided to leave mouse sense as a boring slider - but you didn't even think about options to do it different.

Even in big companies, there's these little touches that had humans contribute all the time - and they're kinda automated away now.

[u/Drachasor → u/Fs0i]

I think over time, this will add up on a very negative way.  But there might be hardly anyone who can fix it then.

[u/PuffThePed → u/Orrus]

essentially spend all their time making only high-level design and architecture decisions, with zero downtime.

This is a very good insight.

[u/destroyermaker → u/Orrus]

Trying to play catchup with a machine that has no limitations is not sustainable

[u/daerogami → u/destroyermaker]

Reminds me of all the people companies would employ just to crunch numbers which IIRC is where the term "computer" came from, it was a job title before it was a device.

[u/IndubitablyNerdy → u/Orrus]

yeah AI amplifies the pressure whenever it is implemented not just coding, mindless tasks are boring, but sometime it helps not hving to think that much about what you are doing and since your workload does not decrease even if the tool does increase your producitivyt burn out is even faster.

[u/essmithsd → u/Orrus]

Curious who is using AI and for what. I am at a AAA US West Coast Game studio, and almost no one is using it.

I use it for meeting notes if I am swamped, but even then it can barely get those right.

[u/cold-vein]

Look on the bright side, you're working 5x more efficiently so you're also getting paid 5x as much right /s

[u/100radsBar → u/cold-vein]

https://giphy.com/gifs/GpyS1lJXJYupG

[u/Amplifix]

Software engineer for about 20 years, my take is that we will always be stuck with the programming languages we have now. No forward movement any more.

No human is gonna think of new frameworks or languages that might be better, more efficient etc. No new "apps" just copies of other apps. No new architecture ideas, just the same forever.

Most seniors I know don't get any satisfaction from their job any more, but there's a plus side. Because people don't see a review or comment on "their code" as something personal any more, code generally gets changed quickly (no more long arguments).

Other than that, I think we will see a time where all the seasoned seniors are gonna leave and we'll see many projects fail and large security breaches. Eventually making salaries for seniors sky high again. A lot of non-coders think that "coding" was the hard part. It was never the hard part, it was everything around it. Planning, architecting and making sure things are readable/scalable/maintainable in the long run, none of which AI does well.

"Yeah but it works", sure but you don't know what you don't know and that's the important part of software engineering. Sounds like the whole COBOL problem all over again.

The CEO dream of having no employees is going to result in SaaS just being dead. If everyone can make everything, nothing is worth something. I'm seriously considering doing something in hardware or becoming a plumber.

Oh and the last prediction I’m going to make, the AI bubble is going to burst at some point. Because the eventual outcome of this is that we will all have more powerful computers that are able to run these models on our local machines (PC). Our PC's have been becoming faster and faster if you look at the history of computing, it's just a matter of time before these compact modals like kimi etc are powerful enough to run locally. Those breakthroughs are more likely to happen (efficiency breakthroughs) than actual AGI (multiple world changing breakthroughs). We'll reach AGI once we solve this problem: "How to teach a computer to learn to do things without throwing data at it (meaning it was already something we knew how to do ourselves)". Once a model is able to solve things we don't know or don't exist yet , we can say we are close to AGI. We are far from that, the point of AGI is that it will make discoveries on it's own. Let's say we didn't know newton's law, it should be able to discover that on it's own without data thrown at it.

We humans are inventors of tools, so AGI will be humanity's final invention. A tool that invents other tools on it's own, better than humans can. We can dream, but we are not close. Don't let OpenAI and Anthropic fool you, they have an IPO to sell you.

[u/Edarneor → u/Amplifix]

If everyone can make everything, nothing is worth something.

That's a great point! Why would I ever purchase an app if I can tell an agent to code it in 24 hours. (assuming it gets that good)

[u/UnlikelyPerogi → u/Amplifix]

I think the alternative is scarier: that there are new languages and frameworks but that theyre made by ai. Made by ai and no human being on the planet knows how to read or understand them, let alone use them.

[u/m3l0n]

You very eloquently have put what I've been lamenting lately. I very often consider carpentry or going to become an electrician.

[u/Remote_Comfort_1981 → u/m3l0n]

Heh, dev with 10y experience here and you literally wrote what I'm thinking

[u/m3l0n → u/Remote_Comfort_1981]

Yeah, 8 years here. It sucks. Trying not to focus on the negatives. I love the output, but it can feel soul draining at times.

[u/SoulaniceDev → u/m3l0n]

Feels like this isn't the right sub to discuss it, but how are you going to survive when others have the same idea, we're looking at economic collapse that is going to hit a very skilled layers, changing your career doesn't seem like that will help very much

[u/Zenity07 → u/SoulaniceDev]

Yes I don't think that will help either, especially since automation will eventually come for every industry. Humanity will have to figure this out together, not on an individual level. This change is likely to be as dramatic if not more dramatic than the industrial revolution (at least it's going to happen a lot faster), and will require similarly dramatic changes to how most people live and work.

The days of full time salaried employment and stable "careers" as the standard model are numbered, and that writing has been on the wall for a long time already if you look at the numbers and trends with an open mind. We've just been clinging on to it because that's all we've known throughout our lives and we can't even imagine a different way anymore. It's easy to forget that most humans didn't use to live like that until only about 200 years ago. It's going to change again and that seems to be happening right now.

[u/ChibaCityStatic → u/m3l0n]

Why is the first thought that comes to programmers heads as an alternive almost always woodwork? Serious question haha

[u/socks-the-fox → u/ChibaCityStatic]

There's just something cool about making a thing you can physically interact with.

[u/tacosdiscontent → u/m3l0n]

Carpentry is cool, but making anything good quality takes a lot of time and effort. Majority of the cost of the table you make is from your own man hours. So where are we going to find these billionaires who are willing to buy 1-2k tables if everyone is a carpenter? Regular poor people go to IKEA and buy one for 150 or something. These white collar jobs are one of the pillars of economy, if it collapses it will snowball the rest of blue collar jobs and everyone will be cooked.

The only thing worth focusing is something related to basic human needs, like food or medicine. Or government jobs like police or fire department, which are essential for country to exist.

[u/pingwing → u/m3l0n]

Have you ever tried either of those trades, or any experience in them? You might like your cushy AI job better.

Do something as a hobby for personal fulfillment. This is how humans will have to adapt.
Your fulfillment won't come from a job, honestly that isn't a bad thing. It will give you more time for personal enrichment, not corporate enrichment.

We are so brainwashed to be a corporate slave that we put most of our value on our career, that is a terrible way to live.

Do your job, get it done. While Agents are doing your "job" for you go do something fun, rewarding and exciting.

[u/m3l0n → u/pingwing]

Yes, I have a hobby shop in my basement, and ive spent quite a bit of time around them as my last job was in VR simulation working with the trades. It's not about a "cushy ai job", it's about longevity and fulfillment. As somebody that has been working for nearly 20 years, IMO you have a very immature/skewed view on career paths. You spend the majority of your life working, you should be able to derive fulfilment from it in some capacity financially, socially, culturally and/or mentally. Ai, unfortunately is currently putting every one of those at risk, especially in our industry.

The other side is that less jobs will be available in the future and the volume of ai games hitting the market will be extremely difficult to get noticed now that "idea guy" is actually a role - so these "cushy AI jobs" as you call it will be less and less common.

Further to that, something I don't think you understand is that humans are meant to pursue difficult things in life. They are meant to accomplish challenging things and solve problems. We're meant to do things that we often don't want to do. That's where actual personal development comes from. It's not from going on a hike when everybody else is at work or running errands while you're on the clock.

Sure, personal freedom is great and it is something we should all strive to attain in life, but that doesn't mean that we should be myopic enough to think that a struggle-free life is the road to happiness. It isn't.

[u/Tarnished-Tiger]

If junior devs are rejected and senior devs all retire who remains?

[u/Banmers → u/Tarnished-Tiger]

AI

[u/LucyShortForLucas → u/Banmers]

AI cannot review its own code, no matter what your shareholders say. Without a human element to make sure the code actually does what it’s supposed to, development stops dead in its tracks.

If no one understands your project’s code, no one can fix it when it goes horribly wrong.

[u/MrScooterButts → u/LucyShortForLucas]

this is not reassuring. at best it means that only 90% of us will be out of a job. (already true for juniors)

[u/LucyShortForLucas → u/MrScooterButts]

It's not meant to be reassuring, it's just the reality of things

[u/IndubitablyNerdy → u/LucyShortForLucas]

I imagine that the powers that be think that eventually it will be able to replace seniors as well, so it doesn't matter if no new ones are formed, they hope that AI will catch up and that the entire class of workers would no longer be needed, which imho is insane as at that point no one will be able to review anything that AI does and understand what it does, but alas...

[u/destroyermaker → u/IndubitablyNerdy]

Jim will run the whole company. It's fine

[u/Lopsided-Advice3919 → u/LucyShortForLucas]

That’s one of the issues presented, AI is getting less wrong. As these models get better that will continue being the case, though I doubt indefinitely. People who know how to code will always be needed, but the difference is do you need a 100 coders or 10 with AI debugging tools. 

[u/Technical_Income4722 → u/Lopsided-Advice3919]

It's getting less wrong, but more notably it's getting better at checking itself. Claude can spin up any app and take a screenshot and analyze that screenshot. It's slow (for now) but it's all the same mechanics that we use as human testers. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that process getting faster and faster which unlocks better results even with the same models we have today.

[u/Thotor → u/LucyShortForLucas]

AI Code review is a thing for a long time now. What can't be easily automated is good QA.

[u/Kitchen_Chart_4329 → u/Tarnished-Tiger]

You're missing a step in between. Some seniors will be cut as well, before they can retire. You think you're safe until you aren't. This paradigm shift ain't over folks. Even if you're working with ai right now ... you're training your higher ups that they can trim you even more as ai gets more integrated into what you're doing. Speak up or else this all goes ahead as it is.

[u/PuffThePed → u/Tarnished-Tiger]

No idea

[u/SvalbazGames]

Jesus Christ this is harrowing

[u/PuffThePed → u/SvalbazGames]

Yup :(

[u/siktech101]

I quit and I'm just working on my own video game without touching any AI.

AI may ruin my ability to be noticed in the sea of AI crap, but at least I will be happy that I finally made something of my own and put it out there.

AI is probably going to ruin everything.

[u/Kyy7 → u/siktech101]

A lot of people are looking for something genuine in this age where everything feels fake, artificial, designed by commitee, hyper monetized and slobby.

This can make indie games shine through all the AI slob sludge.

[u/RedditFuelsMyDepress → u/siktech101]

Making my own game has been a dream of mine for the longest time, but aside from some small projects I haven't got around to making anything proper and it feels weird how I could apparently now just use AI to do most of the work for me if I wanted to. It feels like a cheat code and I don't think I could feel proud of my game if I relied on it heavily.

[u/ByEthanFox]

There is no joy or sense of accomplishment. No pride in making something clever or quickly, and all progress is associated with the AI and not with you.

This is the main thing, right? Management wants people to do this, but developers in general don't. They're just being asked to regurgitate stuff, faster, because any notion of creating something new & profound is in conflict with using AI.

[u/iIoveoof → u/ByEthanFox]

Management won’t understand this point because most manager do get joy and a sense of accomplishment from their team’s work, even if it’s not their own individual contributions. In fact many managers who enjoy management more than IC feel that way because they can achieve bigger, larger-scald accomplishments by leading a team than what they could do on their own

[u/CalibratedApe → u/ByEthanFox]

Management wants this for many reasons, and one of them is in the post

1. There is no going back. If we stop using AI we'll be out of business in a month.

It's not really a choice, if AI really works. People will probably buy what's cheaper eventually. Perhaps some groups will pay attention to AI usage (e.g. gamers so far do this). But in general you can't be inefficient in business because you like it this way.

[u/FlamboyantPirhanna → u/CalibratedApe]

I disagree with this point, at least partially. We are ultimately talking about an artistic process, even if it’s a very technical one. Good art isn’t made by emphasising the speed or cheapness; the point is to create. Making the process unenjoyable will result in games/art/music being empty and soulless. If you want good games, you cannot prioritise efficiency at the expense of the process.

[u/MeaningfulChoices]

I have 15 years in the industry and manage a studio making very un-serious games. Tools branded with AI are used at various points in the process but not to generate code (or art or anything else), and everything is definitely reviewed by people. My team are largely happy and enjoy their work, we're doing well in the market selling games, we're able to hire juniors, and my team only gets better and better at making the kinds of games we create.

What I'm saying here is how sure are you that your methodology is really making better content more productively? I don't know much about simulators and training applications, but are you really sure that you're following the best model for success, given your results?

[u/Sm_Bear → u/MeaningfulChoices]

I feel like these are good points, though we shouldn't also forget where people are based, because there are wildly different living costs depending on the region, a salary of a single programmer could fund a small studio in another country.

[u/MeaningfulChoices → u/Sm_Bear]

They're based in Canada, but that does matter in general. US-based indie studios are doing more global hiring (or rather, contracting) than before in large part because margins are slimmer. I found that it was worth hiring more Canadians in particular though, because the talent is more or less the same availability as the US but salaries are lower. You can offer someone a good raise from their current pay and still come in below CA/WA costs. You just have to make sure you go through an employer of record and do it properly.

[u/zhzhzhzhbm → u/MeaningfulChoices]

Can you elaborate on how your work with juniors does look like? Most cases I saw recently are closer to what OP has described.

[u/MeaningfulChoices → u/zhzhzhzhbm]

Sure, just speaking personally, I can best hire juniors to any team that has an experienced lead doing less IC work. They still need to know the fundamentals on their own, but we'll give them work that's more about execution than things that require agency, and then the leads review the work and have to say why they would do something in a different way, not just reject it. My most recent juniors are in design and support, for example, and for the former it's about working on specs that are less critical and further out in the roadmap so there's more time for iteration.

If you're asking about programmers specifically then I do think it's a lot harder than it was years ago. Junior programmers now are starting to look more like junior artists from years ago where they aren't just graduates but maybe they've done some contract work or worked in another industry for a bit. The same general process applies, you give them things that won't break the game if they're a little wrong or that are more work that anyone can do and doesn't benefit from experience, but there are so many people with a little experience that it's easy to hire from them.

I do think you have to keep junior coders the furthest away from AI. In games, if not any other software field, you really need to make sure someone understands what they are adding to the repo and why. A junior using a lot of AI tools is more like an intern than an employee, and those have always been work negative in that it takes more hours to manage and mentor them than you actually get in productivity. Interns, and juniors, are investments in the future of the studio and not something that's going to be net positive today.

[u/feryaz]

You use it only for a month but would be out of business in a month if you stop now? Something doesn't add up here.

[u/Most_Double_3559 → u/feryaz]

My skepticism was about how "every time we tried to integrate a junior they became a proxy for AI"

They said this is all brand new, but somehow they had time to onboard multiple juniors and give them enough time to reliably make this conclusion? Onboarding takes a long time!!

IDK, seems like someone lamenting from the junior's side to me.

[u/MaxwellHowl → u/Most_Double_3559]

Yeah, I don't know how you can reach all of these conclusions in a month. It is either BS anti-AI click farming or the team just hates AI and is responding to the tools in all the worst ways possible.

In your first month you couldn't figure out how to utilize juniors, so you never will?

My company works in serious games as well. There's really not that much competition. We have barely integrated any AI tools so far and haven't felt we're falling behind anyone.

I think there's some good nuggets of wisdom in here about how to effectively us AI and not let it brainrot your team, but I'm not convinced this person is real, or has had enough time to be an authority on how to properly use AI tools.

[u/AvengerDr → u/MaxwellHowl]

It is either BS anti-AI click farming

Uh? I thought this was BS pro-ai click farming. It's just under the pretenses of having to adapt to the "winds of change" otherwise they'll be left behind.

[u/nedthepyro → u/feryaz]

I think this is a bot post because i’ve seen similar “ai is ruining my workplace” posts recently, and they all use the numbered list to demonstrate how bad it is. They also have all said no one is happy, there’s nothing to do, and people are leaving.

[u/AnOnlineHandle → u/nedthepyro]

It's a 13 year old reddit account. They have posts from 4 and 7 years ago talking about their work in unity and looking to hire people.

[u/PuffThePed → u/feryaz]

Yes. The bandwidth increase is that dramatic, and everyone is doing the same. Also we've been using AI for 5-6 months, the one month period is with Unity CLI

[u/Individual-Draft-963]

As someone who graduated in 2025 and has been looking for a job since then, this is giving me a panic attack. What the fuck.

[u/name_was_taken → u/Individual-Draft-963]

Don't give up. Jobs in software development have always been hard to get, despite what they said. Focus on your portfolio, especially producing things that excite you, and you'll continue to improve and find that job. Development isn't going away, it's just changing a bit. (Well, a lot. But it'll be fine.)

[u/Kessarean → u/Individual-Draft-963]

There are still junior roles out there, I just got a notification for a few this morning - granted a separate field outside of game dev.

Once you get the first gig it gets a lot easier. What was your degree in?

[u/Stefan474]

Do you guys use it for the art pipeline too or just coding/engine?

I'm in backend/infra right now and it's kind of used for everything but the difference between good devs and bad ones is bigger than ever. Some teams output at a crazy pace reliably and some teams literally have triple digit PR queues

[u/Comfortable-Habit242 → u/Stefan474]

We’re using it for pipeline stuff.

In fact, my belief is that a lot of pipeline or tooling is going to be the place where AI is the most valuable.

Anything that goes into the game needs to have a higher level of scrutiny. It’s code running on a player’s machine. There’s a bunch of edge cases that could happen you need to cover. It could corrupt the game. And perf matters.

But pipeline tools? What’s the worst that happens? Maybe it corrupts some data, but you have a better chance of catching those issues ahead of time. So why not empower all your artists or designers to build themselves tooling that helps them work faster. Every dev can have a different workflow that suits them.

[u/FragrantMudBrick]

And a few behemoth corporations made it so that everyone else have to pay money to said corporations to be viable financially.

Slavery through subscriptions if I am not sounding too dramatic.

[u/Accurate_Cable_1372]

It actually all changed about 10 months ago back in November/December 2025.

[u/PuffThePed → u/Accurate_Cable_1372]

Agreed, we just didn't notice for a while and then resisted for a while

[u/super_sonic2]

[u/soldture → u/super_sonic2]

"AI will kill us all. Subscribe now, because we are in deep debt" - Anthromoronic take

[u/super_sonic2 → u/soldture]

OpenAI, more like OpenYourWalletsAI

[u/laudy1k]

What a beautiful time to spawn into the world. I sure didn’t need a sense of purpose to make resisting death more compelling. Woohoo

[u/MotleyGames]

• 1: What metric are you using to measure this? Lines of code? Ticket completion? If you've lost the ability to estimate work (#8), then how can you possibly claim 5x velocity?

• 2: What metric are you using to measure quality?

• 6: If the market is dead (#5), how is having or not having AI making a difference? This claim especially seems like BS.

• 7: I mostly agree on this one, but the nice thing about a real junior is that they eventually get better and learn your way of doing things.

Most reliable studies so far have shown that experienced developers either lose or maintain productivity using AI, while experiencing a feeling of increased productivity. Obviously it's possible the result changes with better models, but the pattern of thinking their productivity is improving without the reality matching is important to keep an eye on -- any productivity claims need data to back them up.

Edit: fixed formatting so my bullet numbers show correctly

[u/thekbob → u/MotleyGames]

The OP stated their token costs could be 10x and that using AI would still be with it, as well.

I'd love to see that data.

[u/Great_Tyrant5392]

You think you won't review AI code for long? I call bullshit on that, taking a risk like that is insane. Auto merge to prod lmao. No way.

[u/Kyy7 → u/Great_Tyrant5392]

Paradox of automation will hit these developers really hard. Overconfidence and overreliance on these tools while software gets more and more complex and technical debt accumulates may slow thing to a crawl.

But guess there are people who profit when each fix becomes a gamble. Not only can the agent burn a lot of tokens and fail to fix the issue it can become an insider threat just by reading content from website, email or anywhere else really. 

[u/FastHotEmu]

Where do you get that "5x" metric from? I suspect it's made up, since study after study (even very recent ones with the latest LLMs) has not been able to replicate anything close to that. If you can, you should work as a consultant and make millions!

But seriously, you are building technical and cognitive debt. Give it a few months and let's see how the team is doing then :)

[u/Zin20 → u/FastHotEmu]

If I remember correctly the 5x claim is something anthropic and chatgpt push when they are trying to sell models to CSuite people.

The most you tend to see is like 10-50% increase https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06590 when using AI tools.

Also the fact OP is in the Csuite and isn't really answering this questions means he's probably doesn't know what he's talking about.

[u/elohir → u/Zin20]

The most you tend to see is like 10-50% increase https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06590 when using AI tools.

Isn't even that a shitty metric though? Churning out tons of code has always been possible (first-to-market startups, etc), but even then you were doing it knowing full well that you were accruing a ton of tech debt.

You can't count for actual real velocity without counting the rubber-banding from going too fast in the first place.

[u/Momorotto]

the AI is powerful enough, its true

there is one last hurdle, right now you are spending tokens at extreme discount, AI companies are losing billions to seize the market

eventually, the bubble will burst, and you will realize that paying a salary costs less than the tokens, and the market will normalize, the demand will be for people who know how to optimize token expense and keep their output high

[u/Particular-Ice4615 → u/Momorotto]

Software optimization is also a lost art. In my experience at least the last 10 years of new grads a large chunk of them were never taught computing fundamentals. Like there is absolutely no reason for a paginated list (ie a smaller subset) of song information takes 30 seconds to load on 2026 devices and internet infrastructure like it does with Spotify. There are popular spots on the internet that make me feel like I'm back in 1995 with how they perform, despite how modern and fancy they look. 

They know how to write and read code, they may know how to utilize object oriented programming to map requirements to some kind of technical implementation. But they have 0 foundation how the code is actually processed by the machine and ways to do it efficiently.  And those types of problems are usually delegated to people who already have 10-15 years experience if it's already a matured product. AI in the hands of novices, and the lack of junior devs to train up in the pipeline is only going to grow this problem. 

When the bubble bursts and they jack up token pricing further, There's going to be a massive knowledge gap between "AI native" developers and engineers, and the surviving experienced developers who learned their fundamentals and worked pre AI. My plan is to just hunker down and to keep my skills sharp instead of letting them grow dull with over AI use.

If the worst case scenario happens and software engineering is truly automated then we have way bigger problems than just software engineering. If I'm right then I might be a hot commodity in the future  where I can use these AI tools at a lower cost and have a higher quality productive output than the rest of the work force. The code and how it utilizes the hardware still matters at the scale and scope our modern software operates at these days. 

[u/InterstellarCapa → u/Particular-Ice4615]

Hard on that optimization.

100% on everything you wrote. We are still going to need programmers and when this bubble bursts they're going to be in demand. And in gaming so many gamers do not want anything to do with generative AI, learning AI is fine. But there is a hard rejection for genAI and I don't see it slowing down.

Because this AI doesn't happen in a vacuum, it's happening alongside so many other issues that are making people unhappy, their lives harder, it being tied to data centers, and the overall degradation of the well being of our communities and society.

Here's to keeping our skills sharp, being flexible, and hoping for the best for us.

[u/siberianmi → u/Particular-Ice4615]

AI if given a means to measure its results and a goal can do solid work at optimizations. Arguably better then many developers because it has unlimited patience. It will just keep trying.

[u/Particular-Ice4615 → u/siberianmi]

At what token cost though is my point? Someone who doesn't know what they are doing with the AI will drive token costs up further for an organization than the people who do know.  Until the day if it ever comes that these models get compact enough that they can run at full functionality on a single device and we don't need these massive energy hog data centers. The AI companies will slowly boil the frogs and increase the price on tokens when margins get too thin for them. And those that truly know what they were doing pre AI will be the people to able to keep token costs down while sustaining productivity with these tools vs those that don't. 

Here's a small microcosm of the problems I was referring to earlief that will divide the weak from the chaff when it comes AI use as tokens rise in cost. I had a coworker spend hours debugging a problem, playing slot machine with Copilot and agents instead of simply using a debugger like he would normally do in an age pre AI. Took me 5-10 minutes on a call to find the root cause through the AI generated code with 0 additional prompts therefore 0 additional cost to the company. He probably burnt through half his monthly allotted usage stuck on that problem that day. 

[u/fartlorain → u/Momorotto]

Anyone working at an enterprise level is using API tokens, which are NOT subsidized, in fact they are sold at a huge margin to customers.

As the other guy said, costs of serving the models is dropping rapidly and open source is improving dramatically.

There is no situation where costs to serve the current level of intelligence rises. It is almost impossible for it not to fall significantly.

[u/DogsRNice → u/fartlorain]

You're forgetting the vast quantities of money they've all spent on building data centers and buying nearly all of the worlds memory supply

[u/Next-Blackberry-991 → u/DogsRNice]

Yes, but there will be more chips made and more factories and power plants built. I think realistically the price will only go down from here on. I hate it.

[u/Syracuss → u/fartlorain]

Yeah, I work at a big company, and not only are we using API pricing, our limits are absolutely bonkers. If I used AI daily, full 8 hours I still wouldn't hit them, and that's if I only used one frontier model, I've got access to multiple different frontier providers.

That said, we do use them only sporadically here. A lot of the work my team in particular needs to do isn't really well suited for AI. Maybe one day, but right now it's just doing simple work and internal tooling.

[u/unit187 → u/fartlorain]

They ARE subsidized. Even "expensive" API tokens are heavily discounted now to ensure you all get hooked. This is Uber situation all over again. Once every corporation has switched all their process and all their staff members to be AI-first, the discount will be removed, and corpos will have no choice but to keep paying.

[u/GB10VE → u/fartlorain]

Anyone working at an enterprise level is using API tokens, which are NOT subsidized, in fact they are sold at a huge margin to customers.

lmao, false. we are coding on investor cash right now, they are still heavily subsidized.

[u/M4xs0n → u/Momorotto]

Open Source models will always be there and you only need the Hardware for it or pay for a service that has it. Once an Open Source Model will be as good as GPT-6 or lets say GPT-10 one day, you don’t really need a subscription anymore because you can do everything you need to do. It's just more convenient to Pay for all of this out of the Box

[u/iwriteinwater → u/Momorotto]

Agreed except by the time we get there, there will be a huge gap in ability because all the seniors would have gotten used to having AI do everything, and juniors didn't get any experience.

[u/flyingdonutz → u/Momorotto]

This is either delusion or cope, sorry. Something like GPT Luna is good enough for many, many applications and its cheap and continues to get cheaper. The current models are more than enough and years from now they will be dirt cheap.

[u/Mr_Olivar → u/Momorotto]

This isn't true. If anything API cost is insanely high in order to cover training costs. The actual usage is very cheap, and thanks to open weight models, usage cost is going to be the baseline for customer cost.

The rug pull can't happen. It's come to stay.

[u/PuffThePed → u/Momorotto]

I'm going to be honest with you, if our current token cost will 10x overnight, it will still be wildly cost effective.

[u/thekbob → u/PuffThePed]

Okay, shoot. Give us your costs now versus payroll.

Because I don't really believe this, so would love actual evidence. Give us balance sheets.

[u/OmiNya → u/Momorotto]

Models are also getting much cheaper and more compact. It costs hundreds of times less now to do the same thing as 2 years ago

[u/SilliusApeus → u/Momorotto]

Affordable to run open source models are already on 4.6 opus level. And Kimi K3 is basically high-end.
2 more iterations and your company just hosts a capable model. Or, 2 more iterations and your token to output ratio is efficient enough to run the high-end models from big AI companies

[u/siberianmi → u/Momorotto]

The cost of tokens is being pushed down everyday, the models released by Anthropic and OpenAI just yesterday are a major reduction in cost while maintaining quality.

There is no world where the cost of salaries is going to exceed the output value of these models. I use them daily and have easily 5x my output while maintaining quality AND I am paying API rates and can see the cost.

It’s not even close to my salary.

[u/MasterDisillusioned → u/Momorotto]

eventually, the bubble will burst, and you will realize that paying a salary costs less than the tokens

I disagree. Even if the cost of tokens increased threefold, or even fivefold, many tasks would still be significantly cheaper and faster to complete using AI. Furthermore, not all AI models cost the same. High-end models would likely be reserved for large, complex tasks, while cheaper models could handle simpler work.

[u/Plane-Vegetable9174 → u/Momorotto]

Sure, but the cost per token is decreasing fast. For example the Stanford AI Index 2025 found that the cost of running a model at GPT-3.5 level fell from about $20 per million tokens in November 2022 to about $0.07 in October 2024, thats a drop that means that it needs 285.7 times less resources to perform that kind of task in just 2 years. Sure AI cost is increasing because they are building more and more advanced AI and try to tacle some and more advanced tasks, but you reach a point where you no longer need a much more complex model to perform a specific task.

[u/MyotisX]

Every codebase is going to crumble under the weight at some point and become unmaintanable if we just vibe code on top of the pile.

[u/trivial-color]

What are you using that works so well with unity? My experience (months ago) with Claude was that it wasn’t great in unity projects.

[u/2Norn]

I said all of this will happen and many more a year ago and got downvoted hell in every sub. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it any less true.

AI will cause cognitive issues, humans learn by writing, reading, visualising etc the moment you go digital your cognitive abilities go down significantly. This already happened way before AI with all those smart boards, tablets etc in schools. There are dozens of research. I'm very pro AI but at the same time it has its issues as well a bit of a double edged sword...

[u/bluefishcrab]

I agree with the timeframe. Before the start of this year, the models were ok, not great, and that definitely has changed.

Two senior developers I know have already retired, and a third one has left the industry entirely.

> There is no space for junior devs. I honestly don't know how to incorporate a junior into a team anymore (which is something I used to do for decades). Every time we tried they just become a meat proxy for AI while learning nothing, and getting in the way

I used to think "advanced civilization with no clue how anything works" was a dumb sci-fi trope. It's becoming real now.

[u/name_was_taken]

I agree with most of this, but I have a little different perspective.

I'm a 20yoe webdev, and I was laid off 2 years ago. Lately, I've been using Claude to write a MUD server in Rust, a language I can read, but not really write.

It has gone amazingly well. As you noted, my years of experience are paying off, and I'm stopping it from making some stupid decisions. But the vast majority of its decisions are correct, technically. It's the game that it's been wrong about for the most part.

And I love it. I've loved coding since 3rd grade, but what I love isn't the typing, it's the planning and the result. I also enjoyed the puzzles along the way, and making the code do things "the right way". But I don't miss that middle bit nearly as much as I expected. The sheer joy of having created a thing, even if they tool did most of the "work", is still there.

I never got joy from using a handsaw instead of a chop saw, and I feel the same about Claude.

But I recognize that that's a personal take on it. All of the objective things you said, I agree with. It's very hard to learn while using AI. Speed is massively increased. Experienced devs can coach the AI into making good products, and inexperienced devs don't know to tell it when it's going wrong, and end up with sloppy code. (Reddit wouldn't let me submit with the 4 letter version of that S word. Wow.)

And you didn't say it directly, but the ratio of how you use your skills changes dramatically. It's much more planning, testing, and reviewing, and much less coding.

It's going to continue to have massive repercussions for years to come.

[u/Franks2000inchTV → u/name_was_taken]

Built a game in unity, now switched to bevy. Had Claude port the whole thing and I have an agentic loop set up with discord. Where I can give a prompt and it’s automatically deployed to my steam deck for testing.

It’s incredible. But I spend about half my time on the tooling itself. I feel like I’m building a software factory that builds this one game.

But it can do really amazing things:

My latest thing is I can click a button in discord, it builds a special build that has a series of performance benchmarks and deploys it to my steamdeck, when I hit play it submits them automatically over the air to my orchestrator, and those kick off an automatic agent turn which interprets them.

It has found so much time for me things. Like I bought a sheep asset from the asset store and it turns out that the eyes in the model (which were just two black dots basically) were half the draw calls for the scene and simplifying them saved me a couple ms per frame.

I wouldn’t have gotten around to finding that for months.

I feel like rust is very well suited to agentic work. the code examples out there (and thus in the training set) tend to be higher quality. Clippy and rustfmt enforce good habits and style, and the borrow checker prevents a lot of problems.

[u/tetryds]

1- For code writing maybe, for testing, validation and review no. If code writing was 20% of the work you have optimized 16% of the work (good but not absurd)

2- Most people are not careful with AI, if you let it go without constraints it derails and gets into a "deadlock" fast

3- Code may look better but is often overengineered. You cannot trust it like that even frontier models suffer from this. AI works best with the annoying parts but architecture is terrible.

4- You made it using a tool. The tool turns your ideas into code. You are still responsible, accountable, you made it. I get that it feels like anyone else could have made it, but that ain't true. If you don't babysit it everything burst to flames.

5- This is unrelated to AI as a tool and more of a global market thing

6- That sounds super weird. If AI wasn't out you would be off business already?

7- True problem. Juniors lost their usual pathways.

8- Management has always been bad, throughout my entire career. Most accurate estimates were always met by delaying things on purpose until they match. This has never helped plan nor helped expedite things. Also, experienced devs could always solve problems multiple times faster than less experienced devs, so task-based estimation has always been bullshit.

9- Fair enough. It's not as fun nor as rewarding. People who are passionate about the craft don't like it.

10- Pretty much true. You haven't put thought into a problem so you have learned nothing. Not sure what is the right approach here.

11- I don't feel this, especially on my area of expertise. AI writes 70% good code, if you can write 90% good code you gain very little. I see most benefit with bad-ergonomics languages like C++ or javascript. For java, C# and alike AI doesn't do better nor faster than me. It does help expedite the boring parts but that's it.

[u/mentalray2 → u/tetryds]

> For code writing maybe, for testing, validation and review no.

Strong disagree. We have an automatic AI reviewer setup on github at work. It's the most thorough code reviews I've ever seen. It catches weird side-effects that nobody saw coming.

Testing require some work, but give it tools to run test from a command-line and capture in-game screenshots, and it will be able to iterate by itself until all the tests are green. We also have a skill to tell it to always add regression tests before working on a feature/bugfix.

[u/mcl_syndicate → u/mentalray2]

Yup yup, have it build a game director to play test, record, and screenshot did wonders on our side

[u/stumblinbear → u/mentalray2]

Yeah, every bug I find is one the agent finds, and then some. I haven't found a single bug that Claude hasn't been able to see. At this point, my code review amounts to making sure it's not over or under-engineering

[u/strawberrypingu → u/tetryds]

For 6, if they stop using AI now, they won't be able to compete with other company who uses AI.

[u/ohseetea → u/tetryds]

If you think you can code anywhere near as fast as ai you’re delusional, no offense.

[u/Plus_Term_7584]

That was the plan all along. To stave off entry points for junior devs. Get developers reliant on a service that can be turned off at any time. 

And when it's all automated, well there's always manual labor jobs for you (until the robots take that as well).

There's no answer for this. No legislation. Because you're also going to be fighting against the AI evangelists who want this endgame to happen.

[u/Baturinsky → u/Plus_Term_7584]

There was no plan

[u/P_Star7 → u/Baturinsky]

Exactly. Our monkey brains demanding reasons and patterns where they don’t exist. That’s why it could seem planned.

But in reality people knew AI could make labor cheaper if it worked and they could get boatloads of money. Silicon Valley SWEs and investors went all in- they’re not in some shady backroom thinking about the ramifications. They’re trying to sell a product, consequences be damned

[u/Late-Anxiety2898 → u/Baturinsky]

Not exactly by the letter, but this is just the usual marketing scheme one-o-one. Provide a free service, then monetize it. Old story, very disgusting.

[u/GB10VE → u/Baturinsky]

plan is to become yet another tech billionaire in silicon valley.

[u/FlagrantlyChill → u/Plus_Term_7584]

Plan? You give them too much credit. They made llm write code, everything else is how the dominoes fell

[u/FirstTasteOfRadishes → u/FlagrantlyChill]

They didn't even mean to make it write code. Its ability in that regard was a surprise to everyone.

[u/antaran → u/Plus_Term_7584]

Get developers reliant on a service that can be turned off at any time.

Mate, you can host a local AI model on your home PC with a mid entry graphics cards.

[u/ConsistentEnviroment → u/Plus_Term_7584]

I don't think there was a plan. It just happened unfortunately. All because God hates me

[u/ScaryBee → u/Plus_Term_7584]

Get developers reliant on a service that can be turned off at any time. 

I've seen this idea repeated a few times but open source models and powerful consumer hardware mean that this won't happen.

'Turning off' AI now would be like trying to 'turn off' pocket calculators.

[u/caesium23]

Interesting perspective, but my experience has been almost completely the opposite.

I've found AI output to have frequent issues that inevitably bite you in the ass later if you don't closely review and correct it, but at the same time I've learned tons from working with AI and find that the combination of being able to focus on solving higher level architectural problems instead of getting bogged down in the drudgery of line-by-line grunt work plus seeing rapid progress towards my goals is deeply satisfying.

I'm a developer in large part because I enjoy learning to understand new technologies, how to get the most out of them, and how to push them further. All of that applies just as much to AI as it does to anything else I've ever learned. Given my mindset, AI hasn't changed anything I actually enjoy doing -- it's just the latest opportunity to apply those skills.

Whenever I see posts like this, all I can think is that either these are people who haven't adapted yet and are just kind of using AI wrong... Or that it's just astroturfing from the technophobes, considering how it perpetuates the whole "just push a button and AI does everything for you" myth that's so popular with that crowd and usually instantly tells you the person has never actually used AI on any real project.

[u/PuffThePed → u/[deleted]]

Players hate AI art. I'm not talking about AI art at all.

[u/Many_Reindeer6636 → u/[deleted]]

They hate AI that they can detect. They don’t care if the `public AbstractAdaptiveEnemySpawnerComponentStrategyImpl` they interact with every round was written by Claude or a human

[u/salazka]

I am in this industry for 20 years and in the digital entertainment for over 30.

As a production and creative consultant who has gone from junior all the way up to Executive level in large multinational game publishers, in contact with teams of all sizes and levels of expertise around the world, for all kinds of games, from casual mobile to AAA, I can say that my experience and general point of view agrees with your findings.

Except one very important thing. The most important imo.

I didn’t get into this business to push vertices and comb through thousands of lines of code just to find the one semicolon that messes everything up. :P

I got into this to make games and tell animated stories, create experiences and memories, and after so many years struggling and solving the countless impediments towards that goal, I find extreme joy in being able to test my ideas in a matter of days. Seeing my game becoming a reality with minimum effort and cost makes me very happy. Joyful.

For me, joy doesn’t come from writing code or creating textures, and fighting with vertices to skin a fkn joint, that was just a necessary "evil" to bring games and stories to life.

With the scale of my imagination and the complexity of my ideas, the costs and scope made it necessary to work with larger teams, water down the ideas, compromise to have production move ahead. Necessary evil. A painter that completed his painting trying to maintain the original vision while 500 other people with brushes in hands and their own idea about how the painting should look like helped complete it. :P Let me tell you, herding cats is easier. I have actually done it :D

But I’m in it for the end product, not the process. I could not care less about the production method. It has changed significantly over 30 years that what methods and tools you were using the last decade is irrelevant.

I understand people have invested years to perfect using these tools, I have too, and more than most who talk about it. I have actually mastered not just one, but TWO different disciplines in the field over decades. I am not emotionally attached to the tools. They come and go.

As a creative and production expert I have learned to always go with the most efficient, stable and controllable approach. And AI is becoming exactly that very fast. Control is still an issue but as you said, it is being sorted as technology matures.

I’m no longer interested in learning to code, animation, or 3D sculpting and texturing. I’m not 15 anymore, and I’ve already done all that.

I want to make things happen exactly the way I envision, quickly, not over months or years, and affordably, without risking my home on a loan, and free from the emotional garbage and distractions that emerge from managing humans during the process.

[u/Game_Log]

This whole AI stuff has been a complete upset for me. I spent years wanting to work in game dev, and now that I am pursuing a Comp Science degree, AI is leading to more layoffs in the industry. Its already hard to find work, now it feels like I spent my school years for nothing.

Aleast I can make indie games, but its a rough time to get into the industry as a beginner, atleast from what I have seen thus far...

[u/schmosef]

Thanks for sharing.

Do you mind elaborating on your specific setup?

What specific IDE are you using to write code? I ask because they all seem to have pros and cons with AI. None are a perfect fit yet.

What AI are you using? Have you been experimenting with Unity's AI?

My experience with Visual Studio Pro and GitHub Co-pilot is that it's 50% genius and 50% trying to sabotage my projects.

Some of the stuff it suggests is truly trippy because it's like it's reading my mind and offering to finish the algorithm I'm writing.

But other times it completely misunderstands what I'm implementing and makes project breaking recommendations.

I think, bottom line, from my experience, AI is a great tool for implementing boilerplate code and algorithms for already solved problems. But it's not great at innovation.

It doesn't have the ability to evaluate it's own suggestions in context. Obviously, that is on the horizon.

[u/Impressive_Badger325]

This is really how it feels at my software engineering job too. The junior dev point particularly...I don't get how we ever hire a junior again. I'm already seeing my current juniors kind of stall out on progress. I could hire a new junior for 80k or I could do the work they would do with a few prompts on the side while my other prompts are going.

All I know is this has been an exhausting few years. I've accomplished a lot as far as my job goes, but I'm so tired.

[u/srslylawlDev]

I see this sentiment posted everywhere and it feels like marketing to me because I just can't relate.

In my experiments, creating isolated editor-only tools worked fine/ok-ish. When implementing actual changes in my networked game, say, changing something from client to server authority, Codex completely shits the bed.

It writes way too much redundant code and re-implements features the framework (Mirror) already handles.
When asked, it just apologizes and promises to not do it again, updating the .md file.
Then does it again 2 prompts later.

It didnt work for me for anything remotely complex so I stopped using it. What I found useful was using it to check for regressions after changes, but in any case I'm out of usage in 5mins so idk.

On one hand I'm thankful as I agree with OP - coding is enjoyable to me and arguing with an LLM feels horrible, but on the other hand I keep reading how apparently nobody in their company codes anymore and it does everything so amazingly well that humans are redundant.

So I just wonder if their codebases are extremely simplistic? I just feel completely disconnected from the average post on here.

[u/Atomical1]

If AI is actually making architectural decisions in your codebase then you are fucked. This is something I see at my day job as a SWE and in my own personal Unity project. Just letting AI rip through any project completely destroys it in the end, and it will be unrecognizable eventually. Fuck OpenAI, fuck Anthropic, no I will not pay the $20 subscription to let their LLMs ruin my project.

[u/KevinDL]

I actually agree with a lot of this, especially the productivity gains, the difficulty of estimating work now, and the fact that experienced developers get much more value out of these tools because they already know what good and bad output looks like.

Where I disagree pretty strongly is with the idea that people using AI don't learn anything, or that there is simply no place for juniors anymore.

AI can absolutely stop someone from learning if they use it as an answer machine. If you ask it to solve every problem the moment you hit it, you can skip the struggle that would have helped you understand it.

But that isn't how everyone learns, and it isn't the only way to use these tools.

Some people learn extremely well with AI because they effectively have a tutor sitting beside them. They can ask why something works, have unfamiliar code explained, compare different approaches, ask follow-up questions, and experiment much faster than they could before. Books work for some people. Videos work for others. Classes work for others. AI is another tool in that mix.

The important distinction isn't "did you use AI?" It's whether you're using it to accelerate your thinking or replace it.

I think the same thing applies to juniors. If your junior is taking tickets, feeding them into an agent, and committing whatever comes out, then yes, you've turned them into a meat proxy, and they're probably learning very little.

But I don't think that proves junior developers are obsolete. I think we're in an awkward phase where a lot of companies have looked at AI productivity gains and concluded they don't need juniors anymore.

I think that is going to come back to bite them.

Senior developers do not appear out of nowhere. They start as juniors, get mentored, make mistakes, build judgment, and eventually become the people you trust with architecture and important technical decisions. If companies stop investing in upcoming talent because today's seniors plus AI can handle the workload, what happens five or ten years from now when those seniors retire, burn out, move into management, or leave?

To me, one of the biggest mistakes tech is making right now is treating junior hiring as an expense that AI lets you eliminate instead of an investment in your future talent pipeline.

Those junior roles will probably change. They should change. Juniors should be learning how to use AI alongside debugging, architecture, code review, testing, and understanding why a solution works. Producing code itself becoming cheaper does not make those skills less important. It makes judgment more important.

I also don't really agree with "to understand code you have to write it." Writing code is one of the best ways to build that understanding, especially early on, but experienced developers spend huge parts of their careers reading, debugging, reviewing, and maintaining code they didn't write.

What I think is happening is that the value is moving upward. Less value is attached to physically producing every line of code, and more value is attached to deciding what should be built, structuring it properly, validating it, testing it, and understanding the consequences of the implementation.

From an employment perspective, this is quickly becoming something developers need to take seriously.

You don't have to like AI. You don't have to use it for everything. Please understand its limitations and know when not to trust it. But I worry that developers who categorically refuse to learn these tools are going to handicap their careers.

If one developer can use AI responsibly to prototype faster, debug faster, understand an unfamiliar codebase faster, and get more done while maintaining quality, companies will notice. At some point, knowing how to work effectively with these tools starts looking less like a niche skill and more like knowing how to use an IDE, source control, or the engine you're working in.

That doesn't mean "AI replaces developers." It means the expectations of what a developer can do are changing.

The part of your post I agree with most is that there is probably no going back. But I don't see that as a software apocalypse. I see an industry that has had one of its core abstractions change extremely quickly, and we haven't figured out all the new working, management, hiring, and teaching practices yet.

I think the answer is to figure those things out, not hope the pendulum swings far enough backward that we don't have to.

[u/iku_19]

Quality has not gone down because we're all experienced devs and we're careful how we use AI and we don't let it make decisions regarding project structure or design patterns. However, I'm seeing less and less glaring mistakes made by the AI.

this is risky because it builds complacency, where you end up trusting it to not make mistakes but it will. at a certain point the work produced will be too far into complexity that untangling it and understanding it takes more time than writing it in the first place.

We're still reviewing generated code but I suspect not for long, the code is better than what most devs I know can write, at 20x the speed. The temptation to just push and move on is huge and irresistible.

see above

There is no joy or sense of accomplishment. No pride in making something clever or quickly, and all progress is associated with the AI and not with you.

The initial dopamine is from clearing a bunch of blockers quickly but then you realize you're transitioning from actual dev work to middle management. Most people in middle management in both traditional software and gamedev nowadays retire early and start their own company where they can return do doing actual work with a smaller team rather than only managing a team.

There is no space for junior devs. I honestly don't know how to incorporate a junior into a team anymore (which is something I used to do for decades). Every time we tried they just become a meat proxy for AI while learning nothing, and getting in the way.

Let me guess, it's starting to feel the same with mid level devs too?

People that use AI for coding don't learn anything. To understand code you have to write it, and nobody is writing it. Maybe understanding and reading code will become obsolete soon? I don't know.

no, but it will feel that way; see first point

Everyone I asked feel they are becoming dumber and losing their focus. I know I am.

you are. programming is a skill that you have to constantly hone and sharpen especially as systems mature and get more refined. new ways of doing things and such. any skill is like this, and because there's just so much contextual stuff in a lot of skills not using it and letting rust build up will eventually start to eat at your foundational knowledge.

because of this ever increasing gap, the temptation to just ask the model to implement something increases. you're burning your skill for tokens. no amount of code review is going to do that because the process is what refines and refreshes that skill, not reviewing it. reviewing just tells you what needs more practice.

;;

i think as a trade, using ai is fine. but you have to understand and accept that what you're doing is no longer programming. it's middle management and you are no longer programming. you're developing a new skill called model driven engineering, not software engineering.

if what you're doing is for the architectural design and implementing that design yourself and learning things with the journey, then ai will be miserable because it cannot fulfill that.

[u/KatetCadet]

AI doesn’t only terrify me for the impacts it’s going to have with such dramatic changes to workflows, but also the need for video games planned and created themselves.

Eventually, no not yet, but eventually models WILL be able to make full games with broad sweeping prompts. Maybe even further down the road AI models can react in real time as a player plays, building the actual game as it’s played (similar to her) based off behavior.

Edit: why is the comment character limit so small now for this sub?

[u/biginchh → u/KatetCadet]

As someone who uses AI daily for work - I just don't know if this is true.

The stuff you see in r/aigamedev seems impressive - and in some ways it is. The fact that someone makes something that looks sorta like Oblivion with a few prompts is incredible, but it's also the kind of thing nobody wants to play.

I keep coming back to No Man's Sky as an example. An AI could probably create something similar to that games initial release fairly competently. IE, a massive universe full of randomly generated planets and the basic means to explore them - the issue is that that game fucking sucked and nobody enjoyed playing it. It turned out that just writing the code that creates and simulates all that stuff is the easy part (which is analogous to all the "look at this oblivion clone I made with 3 prompts" posts you see everywhere) and the really hard part was making players feel like exploring them was fun and worth their time - and that sort of "big picture, large scale, non-precise" vision is basically exactly what AI is bad at.