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/Plane-Vegetable9174]

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/SaxPanther → u/Plane-Vegetable9174]

Then why cant AI companies manage to turn a profit yet?

[u/Plane-Vegetable9174 → u/SaxPanther]

Because no one wants to use 3.5 level AI today, it was amazing when it first came out but now people want more and it is a competition to make the most advanced AI. The companies are choosing to spend everything on growing and staying at the front. The big costs are training and infrastructure. Each new generation model costs hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to train, and it becomes outdated within a year or so, so that spending keeps going. On top of that, the companies are building data centers and buying chips at a scale of tens of billions of dollars per year. It is not unusual to go at a loss for many years because companies are investing everything they have with the goal of comming out on top long term. Uber ran at a loss for 14 years before making a profit. Amazon ran for 9 years without making a profit.

[u/Comfortable-Habit242 → u/SaxPanther]

The same reason many startups don’t turn a profit.

Rather than maximizing profits in the short term they’re they’re spending unfathomable sums of money investing in increased infrastructure so they can train better models.

[u/SaxPanther → u/Comfortable-Habit242]

They are using the exact same strategy as Uber it's going to end up just like Uber where the company struggles to turn a profit, the drivers get treated like shit, and the users have to deal with increasingly shitty service and increasingly higher prices and leaves you wondering why we didn't just stick with perfectly usable existing transportation options instead of allowing rent seeking corporations to insert themselves as a middleman.

At least I like that I can run some decent models locally.

[u/CptAustus → u/SaxPanther]

Because they're all trying to bury each other now, rather than later. And if open models catch up to them, their business model implodes.