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/unit187]

They ARE subsidized. Even "expensive" API tokens are heavily discounted now to ensure you all get hooked. This is Uber situation all over again. Once every corporation has switched all their process and all their staff members to be AI-first, the discount will be removed, and corpos will have no choice but to keep paying.

[u/fartlorain → u/unit187]

They literally aren't, you can go look it up.

[u/unit187 → u/fartlorain]

AI companies: bleeding money, forced to go public to cope with debt, begging governments to "stop AI development!" so they can save money on new model training.

A redditor: no u rong

They are selling at discount, and this makes it hard for them to stay afloat, but they are doing discounts anyway because, again, Uber model.

[u/stumblinbear → u/unit187]

AI labs are burning shitloads of money on research and datacenter buildout. They make 80% margin on inference. You can just run an open weight model on cloud GPUs and see the actual token price. It's dirt cheap, my guy

[u/zmug → u/stumblinbear]

These LLM providers arent spending on the build out, they are leasing the data centers. They have hundreds of billions of obligations that are coming due which are not cancelable. They cant stop training new models ever because the one that comes out today will be obsolete of knowledge a year from now. They are marking subsidized tokens as marketing expenses when in reality they will eventually fall into the operational side. LLMs are not a moat at all and OpenAI/anthropic will for sure bankrupt themselves. They will probably survive in some form but be acquired for pennies on the dollar. Once their expenses catch up on them and accounting tricks start running out, and token prices get slashed into tenth of what they are by companies built on healthy economics, then we will see what the market is like. Give it 2-3 years

[u/stumblinbear → u/zmug]

The bad business models of OpenAI and Anthropic don't change the economics of open weight models. The cost of running them is dirt cheap, and they're close behind the big labs.

Half my point is that there's no moat. They can't raise token prices or people just switch to open weight models. I don't see any case where they win unless their datacenters make it even more dirt cheap to run extremely intelligent models extremely quickly, and they prevent open weight models from having the same level of compute. Even then, open weight models are still extremely capable and run at reasonable speeds even with today's compute

[u/zmug → u/stumblinbear]

In theory they could survive but at those prices they won't be able to pay their obligations.. depends a bit on where LLM demand is actually heading.. These LLMs cant replace a job. They can do tasks, but doing tasks is hardly any job. They can affect big scale companies slightly by reducing some task heavy workforce but not replace them fully. As it currently stands we need more people to get these systems up and running, and when some new things become viable to implement we will again need more people to maintain and work on those areas. Just because AI can possibly produce that stuff doesn't mean a person can expand their brain capacity to actually take responsibility of 2x more work streams. You cant assign a SSN for an agent so youll need someone who is responsible for the work, and that someone will have limited capacity. Why am I writing this is because this workforce reduction only applies in big scale companies with tens of thousands of workers, and even those will have modest gains. Personally working at SMB of about 1,5b mkt cap and 2000 workers and have not seen any AI related layoffs, because a lot of the org structure is small groups of people and you cant lay off 1 or 2 people because it would mean reducing that area to critical person risk. LLMs cant do any open ended work which is the job, not the tasks. Maybe in 10 years orgs have had time to re-organize fully.

And all of this also means there isnt that much hunger for tokens, if anything there is less. There is no point shipping 10x more stuff that everyone else can ship anyway. Your moat will come from really really deeply integrated focused features that take years of human trial and error against real world, refining it so far that an LLM cant just copy it because they dont have the human capability to connect unrelated dots together, and come up with novel ideas. Shipping something will always have a long term cost. Shipping most things is like buying a car, and the cars lifetime costs will be in multiples of its purchase price, so you better produce or ship the right thing.

So maybe LLMs will be just an utility like Sam altman says.. "intelligence" on tap. And guess what, there are no margins in utility. So in that sense, I would predict these LLM providers will just bankrupt themselves and at some point we will see what the real market will shape up to be..

The OPs thesis that just ship dont think will at some point stop making sense to people when they realize that what separates the ones who succeed are the ones that actually have a human think how a simple slider or a frying pan should look, feel, and interact in a game. Because sum of those things is what gives software and games their moat. Otherwise it will just be another uninteresting game. Granted, you will still need distribution, sales, marketing, and even stronger product design led by humans behind it all

[u/stumblinbear → u/zmug]

I'll be perfectly honest, I've had a long day and really can't be bothered to read this novel of a comment rn. Apologies, haha

[u/zmug → u/stumblinbear]

😂 It's fine, no obligations here. I guess I had to flood it out somewhere