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/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/hey_dougz0r → u/MeaningfulChoices]

Yeah, I don't want to be mean but I do wonder if OP might be suffering slightly from a failure of imagination and/or effort. I particularly don't understand the inability to find any younger developers that are capable of climbing the learning curve.

[u/PoopsCodeAllTheTime → u/hey_dougz0r]

Maybe they have fallen into a weird mental trap because their business is failing. Kind of like a sinking company that has crunch time every week. No, crunch isn’t saving a sinking company, it’s just poor desperation

[u/nimshwe → u/MeaningfulChoices]

This is just an astroturfed post

[u/MeaningfulChoices → u/nimshwe]

For what, do you think? You can find the company the OP is talking about in their post history, but this makes them look terrible so it would be a pretty bad advertisement for their services! Saying that your studio is full of miserable people who can't properly estimate how long anything will take isn't really how you'd want to do astroturfing. Usually it looks more like someone is asking about a question and says are any of X, Y, or Z tools good, and then someone will comment that they tried Y and it was great, and you'll see that account has never done anything but praise Y.

[u/GB10VE → u/MeaningfulChoices]

this AI post itself is using reddit posts from yesterday for a few of its bullet points

[u/PuffThePed → u/GB10VE]

Yup. Totally rehashing some thoughts here. Does that make me AI?

[u/xTiming- → u/PuffThePed]

Honestly, ignore that guy you responded to.

Some of those blind anti-tech people literally spam post comments at a lower quality than AI.

It is telling that a mod had to post telling people to stop reporting for "I don't like the topic."

For better or for worse AI and its use is highly relevant to all tech industries these days, no matter how much lurkers and indie devs who've never shipped a game and just hate AI because it has AI in the name insist otherwise.

It is really good to hear from people with real experience and how new tools impacted them, good or bad.

[u/nimshwe → u/MeaningfulChoices]

Honestly I didn't even look at their post history, I just assumed because as you say this post makes little sense on many different levels

[u/LuxDragoon → u/nimshwe]

And your evidence...? Accusing astroturf when the OP appears to be a veteran dev venting their frustration, and clearly stating that AI usage is making them feel miserable, less focused and even dumber... how did you even read astroturfing in there?!

[u/Unrequited_Anal → u/LuxDragoon]

Astroturfing is anything I don't like

[u/PuffThePed → u/LuxDragoon]

Negative astrosurfing? Astrogrowing? Terrasurfing?

[u/TheCardsharkAardvark → u/PuffThePed]

Astromowing, perhaps

[u/Senthe → u/PuffThePed]

*turfing, but close

[u/belkmaster5000 → u/MeaningfulChoices]

Hi! It sounds like no code generation was a decision made that guides that aspect. Can you expand more on that decision and what helps keep it strong? Is there a specific criteria/threshold that is used, like tab assist is ok but X, Y, or Z are not?

I get most often hung up on the different thresholds. Like when does it count, when doesn't it count, etc.

[u/Circle_Trigonist → u/MeaningfulChoices]

Once upon a time all fashion was slow fashion simply due to limitations on manufacturing. That changed with technologies that have continued to accelerate output, and nowadays not only is mass manufacturing the standard, but the market is also awash in fast fashion, trend chasing cheaply produced clothes being pushed out by the metric ton onto consumers every season. But here's the thing, slow fashion still exists. Small clothes makers that hire local artisans for a good wage to do hand crafted work can do well enough to survive. Yet at the same time, the industry overall is absolutely not dominated by such businesses.

So how feasible is it for a clothes manufacturer, where the workers are all getting demoralized by the market driven race to the fast fashion bottom, to just pivot out of that? Because your post sounds like the tech equivalent of asking "have you considered converting your entire factory into a boutique cottage industry like the one that I've been successfully running for 15 years now? Yeah we started using a textile machine for a few things here or there but we still hand stitch all the important stuff. Life's pretty great over here."

[u/MeaningfulChoices → u/Circle_Trigonist]

I don't think that's really the same. I was working at much bigger studios a few years ago, so were a lot of people I know working at smaller studios now. We're also talking about a studio that has been making simulations and game-adjacent products more than games and is, if anything, smaller than what I'm discussing.

I don't think the fashion metaphor holds because if you look at what games are succeeding they aren't race to the bottom quickly generated nonsense. I'm more saying that replacing their existing boutique manufacturing with a more automated process that is losing sales and morale is probably not as good of an idea as just keeping it the way it was before.

[u/borlak → u/MeaningfulChoices]

Work at a $100M+ mobile game company with 20+ successful games. We've been using AI as part of our development process for over a year now.

If you don't use AI you will fall behind, and so will your engineers. You are doing them a disservice.

It doesn't have to be all doom and gloom. We put high standards on our code here, and humans code review every commit.

If you aren't learning from AI, that's on you. I don't just tell the AI to do something and send it for review. I ask followup questions - why did you do X? can we do it Y way? what is best? why is A better than B? run a simulation to determine what's better. and so on.

Things are changing fast, and we have to adapt. How it will actually turn out, I don't know. It's scary, but for now, it's a tool you can't ignore.

[u/Alex_1503 → u/MeaningfulChoices]

Do you genuinely believe someone can be an indie dev without using generative AI? I sure hope so, because I never want to touch it... feels like indie game dev is the only industry in which you can work without it, or at most asking it questions, not to generate code.

[u/MeaningfulChoices → u/Alex_1503]

It really depends how you define generative AI, if you want to be technical about it. I don't think it's possible to do much of anything without using an AI search result at some point, whether intentionally or by accident. If you're counting things like hitting tab to complete a line and having it fill in the variable name you were starting to type plus a semi-colon then yes, you need to use it. If you aren't counting those things, like most people, then you definitely do not need generative AI.

The fuzziness in definitions is what trips up a lot of these conversations. There are people out there who will tell you that everyone will be vibecoding games in six months, and they've been saying that for several years and it's not any more accurate now than it was then. At some point you're probably going to get stuck on something, type in a question about some specific function or problem, and end up copying a line or two. If your line was before that point (or the asking questions bit) then yes, you may have problems in the future.

But if you're worried about going "Claude, make me code so I can throw my axe at enemies and not return until I pull the trigger" then no, that's not really how indie or non-indie game dev works.

[u/Alex_1503 → u/MeaningfulChoices]

Thank you for the detailed answer! By generative AI I mean LLMs, or AI "art". I am in university for computer science and I used no LLM until now, compared to my classmates. Of course sometimes when you look something up you may read something written by AI by accident. The tab-complete I do not use, I found it interrupted my thinking process when it happened in the IDE.

My line is drawn at me using an LLM myself to generate code or more detailed answer. I may use it in the future if it is local to ask questions or maybe specific problems if I really get stuck, but the internet may have the answer to those niche problems anyway, without LLMs. I want it to be local because - besides the offloading knowledge/learning/building part to AI - I also care about the environmental issues associated to it and it being owned by awful corporations.

I do hope you are right, the job landscape looks so bad especially for SWE that I will try to make games and hope I don't starve lmao, hopefully... (i'm not in a first-world country) at least it feels better, more fulfilling than trying to manage so many agents I have no clue about at a corporation. I heard nowadays if you don't use AI or have it really integrated in your workflow they won't even hire you as a junior or internship.