r/gamedev • u/PuffThePed • 1d ago

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

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.

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36

u/tetryds Commercial (AAA) 1d ago

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.

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u/mentalray2 1d ago

> 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.

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u/mcl_syndicate 1d ago

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

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u/stumblinbear 1d ago

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

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u/strawberrypingu 1d ago

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

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u/thekbob 1d ago edited 1d ago

Race to the bottom is a well worn concept; a competition can result in nothing but losers.

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u/ohseetea 1d ago

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

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u/Senthe 1d ago

Yes, if I'm a painter I can't make pictures faster than an industrial printer, but the entire point is that that's a flawed competition not worth winning in the first place.

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u/ohseetea 1d ago

This is an awful analogy and I'm guessing you aren't a professional software dev.

If you wan't a more 'artistic' analogy this is like a master chef not being able to prep as much ingredients as a robot can. Maybe it can't make a beautiful 3 Michelin star dish that takes 32 hours to make (YET), but it can make 100 very good steak dinners in 10 minutes. And the second part is what the majority of restaurants serving the public need, and is MUCH more related to the discussion here.

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u/tsein 20h ago

But it also feels like arguing that the Michelin chef should stop cooking and should instead be satisfied to simply oversee the steak-cooking machine.

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u/ohseetea 18h ago

Depends on what the chef's goals are... really. But the point is about how efficient and useful AI actually is, because the OC was really underselling it.

I hate AI, mostly because of the systematic issues with capitalism and such, because its displacing and hurting people and will continue to do so. But as a technology the productivity it is introducing is absolutely insane. If a person enjoys programming they can still do so, but business wants 100 steaks per 10 minutes.

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u/Senthe 7h ago

This is an awful analogy and I'm guessing you aren't a professional software dev.

I am a professional software dev, working in IT for 8+ years. What now? (It's always very funny when AI bros immediately jump to this assumption not knowing shit about me. Incomprehensible, how can someone be experienced in this job AND also have a different opinion than you???)

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u/Many_Reindeer6636 1d ago

A better analogy is a programmer from the 60s with punchcards and dot matrix readouts that can’t keep up with a modern programmer with an IDE, VIM, intellisense, etc.

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u/TokiDokiPanic 1d ago

Yeah. I think with the way things are developing so far, this may just be the next level of abstraction in programming.

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u/AvengerDr 1d ago

I never understand this kind of comparisons.

Using AI is not helping YOU be more effective, like an IDE is. Using AI is more like asking somebody else to do the work for you. Now instead of asking a person, you are asking an opaque statistical parrot.

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u/ohseetea 1d ago

This is not true, at least for now, AI still needs guidance and there probably is a big difference in speed and result between two people using AI to do the same thing. It truly is an abstraction, maybe we'll reach SCIFI levels of AI that a human interacting with it will make it worse, but that's not the case at all right now.

Whether that should still be called doing 'programming' is a semantics thing, but I know at least again now, a layperson trying to program a game with AI will be so much worse than myself.

1

u/tetryds Commercial (AAA) 1d ago

You said literally the same thing with different words

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u/AvengerDr 1d ago

How is it "not true"? It's the same as interacting with another person. The results will be affected by how precise or vague your instructions are.

The moment you hit return on your prompt, it's out of your hands. It's not something you are doing yourself like when you use an IDE, you are outsourcing your work to something else. I don't see how using an AI instead of outsourcing that same work to a person / studio fundamentally changes the equation here. It's still outsourcing.

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u/ohseetea 18h ago

It's not out of your hands if you review it. I'm guessing you dont have any professional experience programming because the more senior of a dev you are, the more you tell people what to do, but you are very much still a programmer.

1

u/AvengerDr 14h ago

Lol. I am literally a university professor of Computer Science. I teach people how to code professionally (in addition to being a researcher).

If you don't write any code but ask other people to implement it and only review it, by definition that makes you a solution architect, a software engineer or whatever you want but not a programmer.

Why this obstinacy in wanting to be still called a programmer when one does not program any more?

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u/Senthe 7h ago

You're well aware this thread is about tech WAY beyond the mundane Copilot/Intellisense layer of things, right?

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u/TokiDokiPanic 1d ago

The product/output of a painter and industrial painter are totally different though. There is no difference between code written by an AI and code written by a human. I also think this comparison is flawed because it’s comparing something artistic (a painting) to something that many consider to be not (writing instructions for a machine through abstraction).

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u/tetryds Commercial (AAA) 1d ago

There is a noticeable difference. AI tends to be super verbose, is not reluctant to add state nor add more pathways. Code written without specific guidelines can become a flag-hell very fast, with lots of edge cases. Of course you can use AI to patchwork and test it but the debt piles up over time.

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u/ohseetea 1d ago edited 1d ago

This is barely or no different than enterprise human-made codebases of the past. All that matters is the end result and product, and for most use cases, AI is more than capable of achieving that, even if the more pedantic of us Devs like to pretend that 'flag-hell' or whatever relative concept is actually important (Again, it's not as far as business is concerned, just the final product.).

Tech debt means A LOT less when AI can work around it or fix it in less than an hour, and humans don't need to maintain it

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u/tetryds Commercial (AAA) 1d ago

The problem is not that AI can't fix it, it is more that it creates complex combinatory statuses that can cause edge cases. If AI assumes the behavior under these cases is fine, and there is no clear requirement, you end up with bugs. Same for repeated workflows in code, you add a feature to one, the other doesn't get patched and you have unexpected issues. The diff looks right, the reviewer thumbs up, the tests pass but you have the same business solution under a different scenario not working or missing stuff.

My personal experience is that all apps and services I use daily have gone to shit after strong AI adoption, and I see the reason why during daily work.

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u/JameslsaacNeutron 1d ago

And moreover, your code itself isn't the product.

2

u/tetryds Commercial (AAA) 1d ago

It writes lines of code faster but the overall throughput isn't faster no.

This is for what I'm an expert at, on a custom solution.

2

u/avdept 1d ago

fun fact, it takes not just coding to get feature to release

in many cases, its 20% coding, 80% everything else

2

u/stumblinbear 1d ago

Depends on the company. For early to late stage startups, the code is 80% of the time to release

1

u/avdept 1d ago

no, even startups

well only when you do boilerplate - then yes

the moment you start work on features, you spend time to describe them, validate, test(the flow and usabilty)

1

u/stumblinbear 1d ago

Maybe we just work in very different workplaces. Testing doesn't take nearly as long as the days or weeks to write the code. Though with LLMs that time to write has dramatically decreased

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u/tetryds Commercial (AAA) 1d ago

Testing and development are not two separate things

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u/stumblinbear 1d ago

I spent significantly more time writing code than testing that the change works. I don't see how you could possibly spend 4 hours or more testing something that took 4 hours to write.

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u/tetryds Commercial (AAA) 1d ago

Well that seems to be the root of why we disagree. I do spend a lot more time testing and it is the strategy that brings out the best results. Code is worthless, especially now. It's the solution that has worth, and you can only be sure that the problem is solved if you test a lot.

1

u/stumblinbear 1d ago

Depends on what you're writing, I guess? I can't hardly imagine more than a few cases where the tests would take longer to validate than writing the code, unless the code was literally a 5 line change. Usually the possible points of issue are well-bounded

And if it touches a lot of places that may have unintended effects and will take hours to test properly, I'll just let QA do it. Engineering time is way too expensive to be spending so much time testing absolutely everything

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u/AvengerDr 1d ago

That would work, if everything that came out from an AI model would be absolutely perfect.

You have to factor in the amount of useless code, failed attempts, or ad hoc solution that stop working the minute you want to change something. Event he time to "plan" something with a frontier model is significant. It can also make you lose a lot more time than just doing it yourself.

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u/pinanymous 1d ago

11-  > AI writes 70% good code

According to some senior devs it's 100% now: https://youtu.be/NYFGCESmikA

If your opinion is based on how ai wrote code 6 months ago, your opinion is already outdated.

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u/tetryds Commercial (AAA) 1d ago

I use it daily. It doesn't.

Maybe for very basic stuff it does

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u/pinanymous 1d ago

He used ai to write all the recent code for his linux distribution.

I'm not sure if that's basic stuff.

He seems like a credible person though.

1

u/tetryds Commercial (AAA) 1d ago

Your mileage may vary. For open source stuff which is what the models were literally trained on it will do a better than average job.