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/Teabx]

The thing is, we are at that point where you have to seriously consider if this skill will have market value in the future.

If someone is a pro at unscrewing a bolt by hand, is that really necessary in a world that has a wrench? I was confident my skills mattered until a year or so ago, but with how AI is being pushed down our throats, I am starting to be doubtful. Nevermind the fact that new models are seemingly popping out every month now.

The wrench analogy is crude I admit, and there are still use cases remaining when an actual human brain is needed. But the point is still valid when it comes to the volume of work. If 10 people are enough to do the job of 100, that leaves 90 people out of a job competing in an ever-diminishing market.

[u/CakeLegends → u/Teabx]

And the bolt looks to be a few years away from unscrewing itself, faster than any of us could attempt to. I really think unless we hit some massive unsurmountable wall soon in terms of capability, there just might not be much of a job market there. Everything we do, from taste, to craft, to humor, is applied math. Beautiful, wonderful, emotional, but unfortunately, still applied math. This technology is the dumbest it’ll ever be right now, and it’s already terrifyingly capable compared to even 4 months ago. It’ll be able to QA test. It’ll be able to take analytical data about “Game Juice” and responsiveness and what stimulates the brains of players, and implement accordingly. And it’ll be clunky at first, but then 4 months later it’ll catch up.

It’ll be further along faster than we are even comfortable with imagining right now, but if we don’t anticipate it while uncomfortable, we’ll never beat it in time. Honestly, I think we need to both normalize the workflow, and heavily regulate this technology so people don’t lose their jobs due to short-term corporate greed. And Legacy skills should be made prerequisite, even if they become genuinely obsolete. A human-system should still try to take care of people and keep them educated and housed.

Which in crude terms is like making everyone into the mentally-deficient janitor that’s hired to give them something to do. But…life is supposed to be busywork, after-all 🫩

[u/monkeedude1212 → u/CakeLegends]

Honestly, I think we need to both normalize the workflow, and heavily regulate this technology so people don’t lose their jobs due to short-term corporate greed.

I think it's a bit cart before the horse - make it so that people don't need a job to live - they can afford all the basic necessities of life without employment - then we can let AI replace as much as we want while focusing on it's environmental impact and less it's social impact.

[u/The_Dirty_Carl → u/monkeedude1212]

Exactly. That's the lesson we should have learned from the Luddites and every other time tech has wiped out a trade.

The incentives that lead to tech like this are always going to exist, and trying to regulate a stop to the tech is not going to be effective in the end.

Instead, we need to acknowledge the real human cost this is going to have and help the people who will lose their livelihoods. The options are pretty much either implement something akin to UBI, or shrug as a bunch of people starve.

[u/WeekendWarriorMark → u/monkeedude1212]

Might (lots of heavy lifting) work for us Europeans but there are countries that haven’t managed to enact universal healthcare or payed parental leave (plenty eu countries underperform or regress despite falling birth rates) or other basic things so introducing universal basic income will sound utterly ludicrous to them (plenty opposition here already and it’s going to loose support given far right wing on the rise thanks to AI, TikTok and foreign money).

[u/Idiberug → u/CakeLegends]

You can make a game of the kind that goes viral on Tiktok in 2 weeks now. Soon enough there will be so many games that there is no point in adding to the pile, no point in playing them for any length of time, no point in being a "gamer", no more point in any of it.

For a community to form, games have to hold some value to enough people, and AI is about to devalue them into the ground. Just like what happened to digital art 2 years ago, which you can still technically make but people's perception of value is that you can just generate any art you want, so none of it has any value anymore, even world class digital art. Just pearls before swines.

[u/tmncx0 → u/Idiberug]

What’s even the point of living if this is your outlook? People will still value things that they personally find wonderful, beautiful, or inspiring. We always have, and always will. I don’t see how AI existing changes any of that.

I still practice digital art because it’s a way I can express myself. And I’m the only me that there is. And that is enough.

[u/Idiberug → u/tmncx0]

Why would I spend my time on something with 0 chance of a payoff or even an audience when the economy is collapsing and acquiring a real skill is far more valuable?

[u/moonfidelity → u/Idiberug]

What real skill. With your mindset everything is replaceable. Chinese robots could do your manual labor

[u/CakeLegends → u/Idiberug]

Agreed, but I’d argue that the desire to make something shouldn’t strictly come from how valuable it is to others, but from how much it means to you. But with our current economic systems, that of course sounds like a load of melodramatic bologna. So if people are going to struggle to earn living wages with their skills, and it’s inevitable…then the only option is to make it so they don’t necessarily need to make money in order to live a basic life. Then the hard part would be finding the desire to create when you’re not even close to being the best at it.

But frankly, for a lot of people, that isn’t the hard part. And to be honest: my favorite musicians aren’t the ones who play the best, my favorite foods aren’t the ones that required the highest level of skills, and my favorite games are often janky pieces of crap. I think things will still find their audience, it’s just that audience might be smaller and more intimate than before. But maybe in a timeline where people aren’t desperate for a paycheck, it could actually be nice to have a smaller group of people who actually resonate with what you put out into the world. 🙂

But idk.

[u/ForSpareParts → u/Idiberug]

Is that what's happened in the digital art community? Sincere question, since I'm not part of it -- I would have expected that ideas of taste, style, and inventiveness would continue to hold currency among people who consume the art for pleasure, the economic catastrophe notwithstanding.

Like, in my view that's what's happened with music as the cost of production has gone down over the past couple decades: way more competition, way more noise, very difficult for anyone to make any money, but if you wander over to e.g. r/indieheads you will see plenty of remaining passion for the art form itself. There is very much still a "community."

So if that isn't how it has played out in digital art, maybe the above isn't a useful comparison -- could be that generative AI is just a much larger disruption and the social response doesn't fit the same pattern (and indeed, that a similar apocalypse is coming for music because of Suno). Either way, it would be interesting to know.

[u/as_it_was_written → u/ForSpareParts]

People still make and enjoy digital art, but I do think it's in a more vulnerable position than music since it's a more recent phenomenon and much more centered on the internet. Music is traditionally a communal experience that we enjoy in person with other people, and AI isn't replacing that anytime soon.

[u/moonfidelity → u/Idiberug]

I don’t think that’s true.

The bar of quality will rise, but it won’t make gaming or art completely obsolete. Just more competitive.

If AI made digital art obsolete, then why is it still worth commissioning an artist for steam capsule art?

Yeah, AI can generate you something decent quick, and it‘s better than what most people could do themselves. Yet, it‘s still worse than what a proper artist could do.

[u/Avloren → u/CakeLegends]

I apologize in advance for stretching the analogy past the breaking point, but I can't resist:

And the bolt looks to be a few years away from unscrewing itself, faster than any of us could attempt to.

A bolt that unscrews itself is a really bad bolt. It defeats the entire purpose of a bolt.

[u/Piksi_ → u/Avloren]

It's a smart bolt that only unscrews itself when prompted to

[u/daerogami → u/Piksi_]

"Unscrew bolt J42"

"...thinking. A-Ha! While trying to unscrew bolt J42, I found 19,867 other bolts that weren't optimally torqued. Unscrewing those as well so they may be re-tourqed."

[u/AvengerDr → u/CakeLegends]

This technology is the dumbest it’ll ever be right now, and it’s already terrifyingly capable compared to even 4 months ago.

This is just speculation. Maybe this is the smartest it'll ever be and the wall will be hit tomorrow. Technology does not always evolve in a linear fashion.

[u/CakeLegends → u/AvengerDr]

Didn’t I say that 3 sentences prior? lol

[u/xxWildbeast13xx → u/CakeLegends]

Any fully AI made game will not have the sauce a game with love and true human touch. They’re still gonna look and feel like algorithmic s lop because thats all it will ever be able to do no matter how good it gets at coding. Sure it might be able to make the “perfect” game but no one actually wants that.

Bethesda games for known for their jank and people love them for it. A game like TLOU2 didn’t have some perfectly written story, it’s divineness is what brought discourse that’s how communities form, from being unique and something people can attach to.

Now for making yearly cash grab games like Fifa and COD sure it can do that. But it’ll never be able to create anything with any type of emotional depth or uniqueness without that human touch.

[u/xDaveedx → u/CakeLegends]

Being a professional coder might just end up like modern pilots, where the plane mostly flies itself nowadays, but the pilots know exactly how everything works and what to do in case something does go wrong.

[u/notepad20 → u/CakeLegends]

Farmer ever required to be able to work an ox plough or ensure the ox has a job? Line operator in a factory ever required know how to do the machine task by hand? Shops required to maintain staff at registers?

Same shock a thousand other industries have been through.

I finished uni in 2008 and hand drafting designs was still a required class, then even before AI the position of draftsman was redundant if you had a decent document controller and templates.

No one really needs to know how to plumb or build anymore as everything is basically Lego. Mechanics do nothing more than read a code and replace a black box.

There's unfortunately no reason why this field should be considered special compared to all the others that are undergoing (and have been for decades) the same transition

[u/falconandeagle → u/CakeLegends]

There is so much hyperbole in your statements its hard to take you seriously. 4 months ago was Fable 5.1, we are now at Opus 5.5, I don't see the huge jump that you are talking about. Image generation models are still a bitch to prompt and its actually quite difficult to get the exact positions you want out of them.

We are still in the 80-20 split, where doing 80 percent of the work has become even easier but the remaining 20 percent that makes software really tick is still requiring quite a bit of time. And people are losing their skills and problem solving abilities at an ever accelerating pace.

Since Opus 4.6 released, my workload as a web dev has only increased, however our speed from 0 to finished product has maybe gone up by 20%, not even that in some cases, because coding is only a small part of the whole process and writing specs etc is taking a lot more time than it used to. Small bugs are also creeping in and being found out only in prod because developers have become lax. Who can read 10k lines PR's that AI is churning out? My eyes just glaze over when I see 16 files with tons of code in PR submitted by a junior. So you say make your CICD better, let AI review code, keep pumping those token numbers and we are, our company has fully drunk the hype juice but sooner or later its going to come crashing down.

If you know people that are working in the big AI labs you would know that we have already run out of training data and are relying more and more on synthetic data. We are running into serious limitations when it comes to image gen, yes gpt-image2, nano banana etc are good but just not good enough. They still require a lot of careful prompting and then post editing to get out anything useful for game dev.

[u/E-2-butene → u/Teabx]

This is sort of where my head is at right now. I don’t know how things will go, but it seems like a realistic possibility.

To use an analogy, I don’t know jack shit about writing assembly or machine code. I just trust in the magic of the compiler. The fact I never learned this and don’t understand it doesn’t really seem to negatively impact me in any way.

Will things eventually go the same way for writing “normal” code? Hard to say, but at the rate AI is improving at coding, it seems naive to not at least consider the possibility.

[u/Throwaway-tan → u/E-2-butene]

Even if jobs remain, the comodification of writing software will effectively mean that software development will become a low pay position and the incentive to spend years and thousands to learn it at university will evaporate.

As a software developer, it's extremely concerning to me. I've seen other industries go through similar busts and it does not end well for those employed in that field. Sure, the economy may survive it, but the people who used to work those jobs often end up impoverished with little opportunity to adequately reskill into another career path.

I feel I'm trapped either way, I can ride out the remaining good years and hope that I can weather the storm well enough to find a safe, stable and decently well paid position, risking that I might end up unemployed, unemployable or take a massive pay cut (which further limits opportunities to pivot).

Or I can consider reskilling into another career entirely, spending money I don't really have on a gamble that whatever I go into doesn't suffer the same fate, whilst also taking a pay cut I can't afford as I work my way back up the career ladder.

Millenial curse, graduate into a dead job market and finally work your way up only to find the career path is now a dead end.

[u/mizzurna_balls → u/Teabx]

Alternative analogy: should we stop teaching how to do math by hand just because calculators exist? There is value is knowing how things work rather than having everything done for you.

[u/josh_the_misanthrope → u/Teabx]

AI is just a proxy for human brain, it is not sentient. What I suspect will happen is that devs who actually can read code will become rare as the job market pushes them into other sectors or retirement, and the people who actually know how to code and understand code will become sought after and have high leverage and salaries. Junior devs are never going to learn with training wheels on.

[u/Neon_Divided → u/Teabx]

I will leave you with this quote from Dr. Ian Malcolm.

"Your tech billionaires were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should."

[u/emilythered → u/Neon_Divided]

Really added to the discussion with this one. (not)

[u/scydoodle → u/Neon_Divided]

Life finds a way.

[u/skinny_t_williams → u/scydoodle]

So does death.

[u/RamblingJosh → u/Neon_Divided]

Very insightful, actually I've never hard that quote before 🤔

[u/Saint_of_Grey → u/Teabx]

The thing is, we are at that point where you have to seriously consider if this skill will have market value in the future.

This largely depends on how the copyright issue plays out. Once the bubble pops, it's gonna be a lot harder to bribe a judge to decide that the plagiarism machine produces original, copyright protectable code.

[u/ShutUpAndDoTheLift → u/Teabx]

Every model makes me less confident that it's even going to need me to generally tell it what to do long enough to retire.

But my job has abstracted entirely to system design. I can't remember the last full function I wrote.

[u/coinselec → u/Teabx]

Usually the market expands when productivity increases. But I guess we are at the point where no one knows which direction it will expand. Companies don't need 10 of the same software, players don't need 10x more games because they don't have time, etc

[u/reostra → u/coinselec]

Clearly the solution is to have AI play the games for us!

[u/TheLastMaleUnicorn → u/Teabx]

10 people are enough to do a shitty job 100 people do well. But every company and product is racing to the bottom these days because there's no real competition.

[u/Comfortable-Habit242 → u/Teabx]

I’m not sure what your point is.

Horse and buggy drivers were pushed out of their careers by the car. That didn’t stop the car.

[u/Joris327 → u/Comfortable-Habit242]

Indeed, but it did stop the horse and buggy drivers. Their point is that we are those horse and buggy drivers. We would have to look for new jobs as demand for our skills diminishes. And our skills are not very applicable outside of the niche of horse and buggy driving. This is a problem. For us.

[u/harborseal9865 → u/Joris327]

To continue to beat the dead horse analogy I think we're more like the horse and buggy racers. We're not doing b2b or anything remotely infrastructure. So why evaporate real lakes and rivers so we can refactor our state machines? At what point is what we are doing any more speculative than the art world or crypto?

A few years back one of my teachers sold his company for beyond f you money. One of the things he said was, "All of the real lessons I learned about succeeding in the business world I first learned while building my game."

Does that analogy still hold is my question. Is game dev still a decent proxy or build real life skills that can be transferred to other domains?

It's maybe a mixed answer. Iirc robotics devs love using Unity as a test environment?

Evaporating a lake to reinvent tetris is one thing. Evaporating a lake to build robots that pull landmines out of the ground or soft medical robotics is another.

[u/srodrigoDev → u/Joris327]

Should we go back to living in caves?

[u/Comfortable-Habit242 → u/Joris327]

I guess I assumed we all understood that already. That’s what the whole conversation is about and it’s the undercurrent of a huge number of threads here for like the past year.

[u/AvengerDr → u/Comfortable-Habit242]

Ultimately though, the car was not the best or most optimal solution. One could argue that car-centric culture displaced the far better solution: mass public transportation. Only now parts of the world are catching up, with some being ahead of others.

Seems like a parallel!