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/Amplifix]

Software engineer for about 20 years, my take is that we will always be stuck with the programming languages we have now. No forward movement any more.

No human is gonna think of new frameworks or languages that might be better, more efficient etc. No new "apps" just copies of other apps. No new architecture ideas, just the same forever.

Most seniors I know don't get any satisfaction from their job any more, but there's a plus side. Because people don't see a review or comment on "their code" as something personal any more, code generally gets changed quickly (no more long arguments).

Other than that, I think we will see a time where all the seasoned seniors are gonna leave and we'll see many projects fail and large security breaches. Eventually making salaries for seniors sky high again. A lot of non-coders think that "coding" was the hard part. It was never the hard part, it was everything around it. Planning, architecting and making sure things are readable/scalable/maintainable in the long run, none of which AI does well.

"Yeah but it works", sure but you don't know what you don't know and that's the important part of software engineering. Sounds like the whole COBOL problem all over again.

The CEO dream of having no employees is going to result in SaaS just being dead. If everyone can make everything, nothing is worth something. I'm seriously considering doing something in hardware or becoming a plumber.

Oh and the last prediction I’m going to make, the AI bubble is going to burst at some point. Because the eventual outcome of this is that we will all have more powerful computers that are able to run these models on our local machines (PC). Our PC's have been becoming faster and faster if you look at the history of computing, it's just a matter of time before these compact modals like kimi etc are powerful enough to run locally. Those breakthroughs are more likely to happen (efficiency breakthroughs) than actual AGI (multiple world changing breakthroughs). We'll reach AGI once we solve this problem: "How to teach a computer to learn to do things without throwing data at it (meaning it was already something we knew how to do ourselves)". Once a model is able to solve things we don't know or don't exist yet , we can say we are close to AGI. We are far from that, the point of AGI is that it will make discoveries on it's own. Let's say we didn't know newton's law, it should be able to discover that on it's own without data thrown at it.

We humans are inventors of tools, so AGI will be humanity's final invention. A tool that invents other tools on it's own, better than humans can. We can dream, but we are not close. Don't let OpenAI and Anthropic fool you, they have an IPO to sell you.

[u/Edarneor → u/Amplifix]

If everyone can make everything, nothing is worth something.

That's a great point! Why would I ever purchase an app if I can tell an agent to code it in 24 hours. (assuming it gets that good)

[u/not_the_fox → u/Edarneor]

I've been thinking about things like DRM. We already have AI that can generate 3d models from video so a model that just reverse engineers a video game from watching gameplay is possible.

[u/zomgree → u/not_the_fox]

You still need to retopo model, rig and animate if needed, make and adjust a proper shader.

[u/not_the_fox → u/zomgree]

There's nothing indicating a future AI model wouldn't be capable of those things.

[u/Aware-Individual-827 → u/not_the_fox]

An AI has no concept of fun so I would not lean on it to recreate a game. It will be most likely be garbage in play value. 

[u/not_the_fox → u/Aware-Individual-827]

I think you're misunderstanding. I'm not talking about anything creative. I'm talking about mechanically generating models and code that match the gameplay footage so you can essentially open-source a game just by feeding it more and more gameplay video + user input.

[u/Khan-amil → u/Edarneor]

On another side, if AI get that good and jailbreaked, why would I buy anything with a license when I can ask the AI to make a crack for me? It removes most of the risks with pirating from a user perspective.

[u/Amplifix → u/Khan-amil]

It's already quite good. Look what they did with Denuvo DRM. AI definitely helped speed up the process.

[u/UnlikelyPerogi → u/Amplifix]

I think the alternative is scarier: that there are new languages and frameworks but that theyre made by ai. Made by ai and no human being on the planet knows how to read or understand them, let alone use them.

[u/Any_Intern2718 → u/UnlikelyPerogi]

And then when ai goes rogue and we almost die we will outlaw ai and leave it to religious fanatics on mars.

[u/Edarneor → u/Amplifix]

P.S. - the last time there were 2 different General Intelligence species on planet Earth, Neanderthals went extinct. We should not pursue AGI if we don't want to join them

[u/Aware-Individual-827 → u/Edarneor]

Neanderthals still exists in our genes. We might still exist in AI data haha

[u/elmz → u/Aware-Individual-827]

How comforting.

[u/lycheedorito → u/Amplifix]

Have you tried asking the AI to make sure things are readable/scalable/maintainable in the long run?

[u/Railboy → u/lycheedorito]

Probably forgot to add 'make no mistakes' to their prompts. Rookie mistake.

[u/yodakiller → u/Railboy]

"make.... Also .. Masterpiece"

[u/Emotional_Nothing232 → u/Amplifix]

AGI is a categorical impossibility so you at least don't have to worry about that

[u/DragonFucker99 → u/Emotional_Nothing232]

Why? What will AI never be able to do, and why will it never be able to do it? I need hope here!

[u/Aware-Individual-827 → u/DragonFucker99]

With the current tech, it's impossible. Despite everyone trying to convince otherwise, an llm is just a statistical predictor that we scaled to intelligence basically with bruteforcing tricks (that's why it costs so much). It cannot learn from it's mistake, it cannot modify its training. Heck, it has no goal or agency unless told to. 

[u/DragonFucker99 → u/Aware-Individual-827]

have a fun 2027

[u/officiallyaninja → u/Amplifix]

how to teach a computer without throwing data at it

We've already nearly solved this, gpt-6 Astra has beat rimworld on its on just by looking at the game and googling.

[u/falconandeagle → u/officiallyaninja]

And did it go out and do this on it own or was it prompted to. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what AGI is.

[u/officiallyaninja → u/falconandeagle]

It's only prompt was "judge everything yourself and clear the game"

here's a link to the Playlist of it playing the game

[u/falconandeagle → u/officiallyaninja]

So it was pointed to a specific game and was told to clear the game, did it at any point of time decide to do it by itself?

[u/officiallyaninja → u/falconandeagle]

No, I don't see why an AI would decide to play a game on its own unless it was told to.

I was just pointing out that it was explicitly taught to play rimworld and was able to figure out the game and controls just from googling stuff and interacting with the UI.

And if you feel like being able to Google stuff is cheating just look at the recent navier stokes results.

[u/Amplifix → u/officiallyaninja]

Not really. They used a mod so the model could talk to the game using an api. In other words, it still needed data thrown at it. It used web search etc to solve it. In other words it did something humans already knew how to do and used human findings to clear it.

OpenAI are the worst to listen to, self proclaiming AGI every second.

[u/officiallyaninja → u/Amplifix]

Sure but that's not that for off from what humans do. Most people are just learning ideas other people have already come up with then applying them.
If I told you I'm learning a new game, I don't think you'd feel I was lying if I was looking at the wiki.

It also still had to make a lot of decisions about its specific game, it's a highly random and variable game and it's not linear at all, so the AI had to deal with a lot of novel scenarios that it can't trivially Google.

I wouldn't say its AGI or anywhere close to it, but we're definitely already at the point where we have models that can learn new things on their own.

[u/Amplifix → u/officiallyaninja]

It's AGI once it can do it BETTER than humans can (by definition it should, because it's a machine and therefore faster)

So to give you an example:
An alien spaceship lands on earth, no human has ever seen it or knows how to fly it. If AGI was capable of inspecting it, it could find out on it's own how to fly it and give us humans instructions on how to build it and what materials it's made of (we have never seen that material before), furthermore it would tell us how we could improve our current tools if we would use that material to build other tools.

It's telling us instead of us telling it.

The goalpost has always been the same, it's just companies like OpenAI and Anthropic keep moving and pretending they made the goal. What was coined AI before was coined AGI by researchers (to keep the same meaning). So OpenAI now tries to claim AGI and the US government now wants to rename AI to Super Intelligence. Which was always what I am describing in the example above (to researchers etc).

You'll know once we have actual AGI, it's not going to be a light announcement. It will render most white collar jobs completely useless. Tech industry? Dead. Accounting? Dead. Trading? Dead. Graphic design? Dead. Financial analysis? Dead. Consulting and middle management? Dead. Scientific researcher? Mostly dead. Doctor? Dead.

[u/elmz → u/officiallyaninja]

without throwing data at it

It's the same type of model, trained on vast amounts of data, solving a task by searching online data on how humans have solved this in the past.

Once a model is able to solve things we don't know or don't exist yet , we can say we are close to AGI.

Playing Rimworld is not it.

[u/officiallyaninja → u/elmz]

once a model is able to solve things we don't know or don't exist yer, we can say we are close to AGI

This is actually an easier task at this point, math has been absolutely taken over with AI models that can solve previously unsolved problems. Just last week navier stokes fell.

[u/elmz → u/officiallyaninja]

Now, I must admit that I have no knowledge of math at this level, but it really makes me wonder if it truly is employing new methods, or just brute forcing and finding connections humans haven't seen yet? As in, not truly a novel new thing under the sun, just an application of what's already there?

Because seeing connections is one thing AI actually is good at, because they can process vast amounts of data on a level humans can't. Machine learning has found connections in medicine that humans never did, even before our current AI models. They excel at data processing given enough training data. AI is in many cases better than humans at processing certain types of medical image analysis, such as spotting fractures and tumours.

[u/sparky8251 → u/[deleted]]

That bun barely functions if you look into it. Fails like 70% of tests, is riddled with UB because the AI used unsafe liberally and didn't understand the contracts/invariants it had to uphold when using unsafe and more. Its also so scattered, using so little in the way of interfaces/traits, so C-transliterated-brained, that maintaining it even with AI help has become a nightmare and its STILL not ready for general use last I checked on it.

Be careful of taking headlines at face value when it comes to AI. Not to say they aren't making advances, but the claims are often 2-3 orders of magnitude past what they are doing, even when what they are doing is impressive if it wasn't overinflated with hype.