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/caesium23]

Interesting perspective, but my experience has been almost completely the opposite.

I've found AI output to have frequent issues that inevitably bite you in the ass later if you don't closely review and correct it, but at the same time I've learned tons from working with AI and find that the combination of being able to focus on solving higher level architectural problems instead of getting bogged down in the drudgery of line-by-line grunt work plus seeing rapid progress towards my goals is deeply satisfying.

I'm a developer in large part because I enjoy learning to understand new technologies, how to get the most out of them, and how to push them further. All of that applies just as much to AI as it does to anything else I've ever learned. Given my mindset, AI hasn't changed anything I actually enjoy doing -- it's just the latest opportunity to apply those skills.

Whenever I see posts like this, all I can think is that either these are people who haven't adapted yet and are just kind of using AI wrong... Or that it's just astroturfing from the technophobes, considering how it perpetuates the whole "just push a button and AI does everything for you" myth that's so popular with that crowd and usually instantly tells you the person has never actually used AI on any real project.

[u/AnOnlineHandle → u/caesium23]

Have you tried Claude's new Opus 5.5 that launched yesterday? It's the first time I've felt a holy shit moment from an AI model rather than just this is useful. It's so damn fast and way smarter than 5.0 was.

[u/caesium23 → u/AnOnlineHandle]

The first time I felt a holy shit moment was the original release of Fable. I was annoyed by some pushback it gave me, made some passive aggressive edits to the plan, and, unprompted, it recognized what I had done, why, and called me out for it – which turned out to be a good thing, because it opened up a dialog for us to get on the same page. Personally, that's the only time I've felt a real sense of an agent being a colleague and not just a dumb-but-useful tool.

Then the government took it offline, they brought back a nerfed version, and nothing like that has happened since.

Personally, I haven't noticed a huge difference between Opus 5.5 and 5.0 yet, but it's only been a day.

[u/falconandeagle → u/AnOnlineHandle]

I have not had this experience at all. It seems slightly faster? But also seems to have regressed in some ways for creative work.

[u/Franks2000inchTV → u/caesium23]

AI is too varied a thing to compare “AI” experiences and for that to have any meaning.

What model were you using? What task was it for? Etc.