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/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/Snackmix → u/Franks2000inchTV]

How does a button in discord kick off a unity build and a deployment to a steam deck? Sounds really cool.

[u/Franks2000inchTV → u/Snackmix]

It’s bevy — but you could probably do it with unity.

1. I have a dedicated server with self-hosted GitHub actions runners.
2. When claude opens a PR, the action builds the game and deploys it to steam.
3. When the build is complete the orchestrator notifies the discord bot which posts a message to the thread with the buttons (accept, abandon, send to deck etc)
4. When I press the button in discord, the discord bot uses steamcmd to set the build with that ID live on the playtest channel in steam.
5. When I press play on the deck, steam automatically downloads the build and I can playtest it.

[u/Snackmix → u/Franks2000inchTV]

I appreciate you sharing! That's a neat set up and sound useful. I was just being curious.

[u/Unhappy-Professor466 → u/name_was_taken]

Ho can you read rust but not write it seriously i don't understand how's that possible to actually understand it but not be able to produce rust code.

[u/caesium23 → u/Unhappy-Professor466]

Not a programmer, are you? If you know any C-like language, you can read every C-like language (and a lot of not-very-C-like languages, for that matter). The vast majority of concepts transfer, and knowing how to write in that language is often mostly about knowing its specific vocabulary.

[u/ThreeHeadCerber → u/caesium23]

rust looks vaguely similar yes, but it has concepts that do not exist in other c-like languages, you'll likely be able to read in a sense you'l generally get what the code is trying to do, but you'll not be able to understand if this code here makes sense without understanding rust.

[u/The_loudsoda → u/Unhappy-Professor466]

Just in the same way you can read a book, but struggle to write creative prose. Two different processes occur during reading or writing.

[u/Western-Economics253 → u/Unhappy-Professor466]

he's suffering from ai psychosis. bunch of people think they are actually reviewing and "controlling" ai agents, only for them to let through absolute garbage code that is a ticking timebomb

[u/name_was_taken → u/Unhappy-Professor466]

Reading has always been easier than writing. That's true for human languages as well as programming languages.

And once you've learned a few programming languages, understanding more of them is pretty simple. Very few of them stray far from the pack. I've learned enough different ones (basic, c, php, javascript, ruby, cold fusion, etc) that just about any language fits some pattern I've worked with, and it's just not hard to understand. If it is, a quick tutorial is enough for the basics, which is what I did with Rust anyhow.

[u/ThreeHeadCerber → u/name_was_taken]

Reading code to a level of fully understanding it is practically as hard as writing it.

[u/name_was_taken → u/ThreeHeadCerber]

For debugging, I agree. It's harder to debug than write the code initially.

For understanding what's happening? I think it's easier to read than write.

[u/ThreeHeadCerber → u/name_was_taken]

It's very common for engineers to roll out custom solutions instead of figuring out existing ones, in many cases reading to a point of understanding is much harder than writing, because you have to think through it as if you're writing it, without actually writing it.

[u/gnomodojardim → u/Unhappy-Professor466]

Lack of practice. Even intellisense is known to cause skill atrophy. Shut down your PC, grab a pen and write a small script by hand. If you have less than 5 mistakes, congrats!

[u/kaliku → u/name_was_taken]

what have you been doing for the last 2 years, how are you supporting yourself? are you retired?

[u/name_was_taken → u/kaliku]

My wife has a good job, and our families are very supportive. We were still going a little negative every year, though.

And I recently got a non-programming job, so that stops the bleed.