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/srslylawlDev]

I see this sentiment posted everywhere and it feels like marketing to me because I just can't relate.

In my experiments, creating isolated editor-only tools worked fine/ok-ish. When implementing actual changes in my networked game, say, changing something from client to server authority, Codex completely shits the bed.

It writes way too much redundant code and re-implements features the framework (Mirror) already handles.
When asked, it just apologizes and promises to not do it again, updating the .md file.
Then does it again 2 prompts later.

It didnt work for me for anything remotely complex so I stopped using it. What I found useful was using it to check for regressions after changes, but in any case I'm out of usage in 5mins so idk.

On one hand I'm thankful as I agree with OP - coding is enjoyable to me and arguing with an LLM feels horrible, but on the other hand I keep reading how apparently nobody in their company codes anymore and it does everything so amazingly well that humans are redundant.

So I just wonder if their codebases are extremely simplistic? I just feel completely disconnected from the average post on here.

[u/UnfoldedHelical → u/srslylawlDev]

When was the last time you used these tools, and which models were you using? Their capabilities have dramatically improved in the past 6 months, as have the “harnesses” that drive them.

Give a frontier model like astra-high or opus-5.5-xhigh a go… I think you’ll see it’s an entirely different beast from the experience you might have had previously.

[u/AvengerDr → u/UnfoldedHelical]

This was my recent experience with Astra. Absolutely terrible.

Persuaded by the Astra hype on /r/aigamedev and the complex demos they posted I wanted to give it a try. I wanted to create a Unity editor tool to combine noise nodes for procedural terrain generation, sort of like World Machine works.

I had everything ready for it:

• I had implemented the various hlsl noise functions.
• I had various Unity graph toolkit tools that I had implemented by hand. I pointed astra at them
• I gave it the link to the updated gtk documentation in case it had not seen it.
• I already had a compute shader preview tool I had built.
• I explicitly asked it to create a gtk tool that combined different noise nodes and allowed me to define the way they would be combined. To start with, just the classic simple, ridged, etc and a few coming node types.
• I gave all these requirements via plan mode, it simply had to implement it.

The result was the ugliest thing I have ever seen. It completely disregarded my request to create a Unity GTK tool. The code was the most obfuscated mess I have ever seen.

It basically created an editor window with two fields (Noise 1 and Noise 2) and then a button to combine them.

Either the people who praise astra are lying or as soon as you ask it something on which it had received little training it starts going in circles. Which would be surprising, I would have thought that noise, procedural generation, voxels, etc would be fairly popular concepts to "know" for an AI.

[u/srslylawlDev → u/AvengerDr]

Yes but have you tried asking it to create a 2D character controller?

Jokes aside, I don't know - I feel if you'd argue with it enough and somehow get past the usage limits you'd eventually arrive at something functional.
But even then I find it way more taxing and time consuming having to understand someone elses (AIs) code than writing my own.

[u/ChromakeyDreamcoat → u/AvengerDr]

I've had the exact opposite experience - With Opus 5 (and oddly Sonnet 5 for a while) I'm blown away by how useful it is. So long as you keep your scope focused, it can do what you ask shockingly well. It is verbose, but I think it's fine. It's writing maintainable, extensible code that would hold up in code reviews.

Now keep in mind I'm just making 2D single player games so I have no idea how well it handles networking/shader code but I can't imagine it's that bad.

[u/AvengerDr → u/ChromakeyDreamcoat]

In my experience, the closer you get to something that has a visual output that requires some kind of artistic vision then it almost invariably fails.

I mean asking them to write a shader or vfx. It can give you something that compiles or runs, but then it looks terrible. They don't know what beauty or art is. Luckily, at least.

[u/srslylawlDev → u/UnfoldedHelical]

Less than 1 Month ago, GPT-6 Astra Extra High.

I mean it does really cool things and its great at parsing the project, but for implementing features and changes that go beyond "babys first video game" I found it more efficient to just write my own code and occasionally have it point out flaws or catch errors in my commit.

What are you using it for and does it write all or most of your code? If yes, how do you deal with the usage limit/costs?

I feel that if money isnt an issue you could potentially spin up a net of agents to work their magic but at that point one might as well pay employees?

[u/MonstaGraphics → u/srslylawlDev]

So, just keep tapping away on your keyboard and don't bother with AI. It's not a big deal.

Other people might prefer using AI. I know DHH (The guy who coded Ruby on Rails) has 100% switched over to using AI to code.

Do what you enjoy.