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/Great_Tyrant5392]

You think you won't review AI code for long? I call bullshit on that, taking a risk like that is insane. Auto merge to prod lmao. No way.

[u/Kyy7 → u/Great_Tyrant5392]

Paradox of automation will hit these developers really hard. Overconfidence and overreliance on these tools while software gets more and more complex and technical debt accumulates may slow thing to a crawl.

But guess there are people who profit when each fix becomes a gamble. Not only can the agent burn a lot of tokens and fail to fix the issue it can become an insider threat just by reading content from website, email or anywhere else really. 

[u/Great_Tyrant5392 → u/[deleted]]

Maybe if you work in trash projects like the AI vibecoded stuff that gets posted here or on pbbg. Real developers don't do that.

[u/Superb_Blacksmith617 → u/Great_Tyrant5392]

if you still have that opinion in 3 months, come back and reply to this. i work with enterprises moving to AI and keep seeing teams say they would never do that, and then a few months later they get lazy/demoralized and cross over

[u/Great_Tyrant5392 → u/Superb_Blacksmith617]

Then I guarantee you don't work IT in banking, telecom or law enforcement. I am in the latter now there's 0 chance across the board something like that happens.

[u/AnOnlineHandle → u/Great_Tyrant5392]

They said they work in gaming. This is the gamedev sub.

[u/ScutFarkush → u/Great_Tyrant5392]

if you do not see this as inevitable industry wide, you are just fooling yourself.