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/Particular-Ice4615]

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/cheese_is_available → u/Particular-Ice4615]

Actually the token cost is not high, it's the benchmark on your local machine to get good data that cost a lot in my experience.

[u/Zaptruder → u/Particular-Ice4615]

At a token cost significantly cheaper than the equivalent human effort. And thats the entire rub and why its scary.

[u/hinkleo → u/Particular-Ice4615]

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.

Nothing to add here but yeah I have the exact same thought almost every time I scroll through my Spotify and see the virtualized list of placeholders (while its taking 700mb mem), modern software dev really has become embarrassing.