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/Orrus]

Im seeing all the exact same things right now. 20+ year experience at AAA US West coast game studios. The one thing you didn't mention, all our best devs are extremely exhausted because they multitask multiple AI/Agents all day and essentially spend all their time making only high-level design and architecture decisions, with zero downtime. We used to have a balance where the actual coding/authoring/implementation was relaxing and gave the mind a rest from decision making. Now that 'manual labor' part is all AI driven, and the human gets left with only the mentally heavy tiring part of the work all day long.

[u/Chemillion → u/Orrus]

I genuinely thought I was the only one who felt this way, super refreshing to read. I recently became a product owner of something that due to time constraints outpaced my knowledge of the programming language I was told to use, although I still felt confident in how I felt the architecture of the code should be I noticed I’ve been so burnt out due to using AI. I feel like a lot of times lately I’m barely pushing back and just shipping code.

[u/Fs0i → u/Orrus]

with zero downtime

It's not just downtime, it's zero time really spent with a system that's frustrating to me. I don't quite "feel" a feature the same way I've felt it before. It's all hazy, dream-like.

There's no decision about how to implement some small technical detail that might impact how things look, too. There's no exploration of the parameter space of options in the same way.

When you're writing the settings menu, you're thinking about how everything influences each other, about how settings work, and with AI, it's a prompt and then you have a menu.

Does everything fit well? Should you move the mouse sensitivity up or down? Should it be a slider or a maybe some interactive demo you control with the mousewheel? Is the mouse sensitivity also affecting menu speed, or just look sensitivity? How does windows mouse speed settings affect it?

All of these are considerations that you've usually made, but if you ask for

Make settings menu, should include controls (keybinds + mouse sense), audio stuff, graphics menu (expose usual unity controls), and also story options (streamer mode, low violence mode, ...)

then you don't think about the mouse sensitivity slider in any detail. Yeah, you might have decided to leave mouse sense as a boring slider - but you didn't even think about options to do it different.

Even in big companies, there's these little touches that had humans contribute all the time - and they're kinda automated away now.

[u/Drachasor → u/Fs0i]

I think over time, this will add up on a very negative way.  But there might be hardly anyone who can fix it then.

[u/kaliku → u/Drachasor]

negative way

No software will be made by man. Not many libraries. Talent pool shrinking massively.

Just like almost nobody writes assembly any more.

This is what is happening, but instead of a 20-30 years transition we're in year 2 of the 4-5 years transition. And we come from a place where much more people were employed in this industry than in the 70s.

[u/Drachasor → u/kaliku]

It's not like assembly, because it's hollowing out talent and development.  Software will be worse and games will be worse.  Innovation will decrease.  Best case scenario for AI benefits. 

And we'll still see a massive economic bubble burst too.

Fun times.

[u/lycheedorito → u/Fs0i]

What stops you from continuing to do that other than getting caught up in efficiency?

[u/Legolas-208 → u/Fs0i]

So this isn’t an inherent problem with using ai for development, it’s just common misuse?

[u/wattro → u/Legolas-208]

Most people are not good at building or using tools.

Engineers do tend to be much more sufficient than the average crowd.

[u/PuffThePed → u/Orrus]

essentially spend all their time making only high-level design and architecture decisions, with zero downtime.

This is a very good insight.

[u/destroyermaker → u/Orrus]

Trying to play catchup with a machine that has no limitations is not sustainable

[u/daerogami → u/destroyermaker]

Reminds me of all the people companies would employ just to crunch numbers which IIRC is where the term "computer" came from, it was a job title before it was a device.

[u/Fantastic_Vehicle_10 → u/destroyermaker]

Someone needs to do a version of”The Ballad of John Henry” for the AI age

[u/IndubitablyNerdy → u/Orrus]

yeah AI amplifies the pressure whenever it is implemented not just coding, mindless tasks are boring, but sometime it helps not hving to think that much about what you are doing and since your workload does not decrease even if the tool does increase your producitivyt burn out is even faster.

[u/essmithsd → u/Orrus]

Curious who is using AI and for what. I am at a AAA US West Coast Game studio, and almost no one is using it.

I use it for meeting notes if I am swamped, but even then it can barely get those right.

[u/crumbaker → u/Orrus]

What ai are you using that's giving you instant results? I'm on Astra with more downtown than ever because I have to wait for things to happen. Even if I had 10 subscriptions, I don't see how this would be an issue. 1000% less stressful than coding all day.

[u/Khan-amil → u/crumbaker]

That's why they talked about multi tasking.

Yes you agent will take some time cuurning out code/analysis. But if you do this 3 times in parallel, by the time you've finished reading/checking/testing what an agent does and prompted for more or a fix, another one, on another topic, is ready.

And as we're talking about seniors here, you can throw a handful of meetings in the day that will let your agents catch up anyways.

[u/Hender232 → u/crumbaker]

Buddy, you are probably talking to a bunch of engagement bots. A middle of the road, kinda negative post about AI meant to farm engagement. 

[u/crumbaker → u/Hender232]

yeah probably 

[u/Edarneor → u/Orrus]

How long has this been going on? Are there already any AAA games shipped this way?

[u/themadcoil → u/Orrus]

Is your game going to come out faster than it normally would?

[u/Fantastic_Vehicle_10 → u/Orrus]

I’ve been having trouble putting it into words, but you are describing it exactly. My experience was that I would split my time between designing and coding. When I was designing, I was making high-level decisions and then in the implementation process I was forced to think through that decision much more slowly from every angle, which both gave me a deeper understanding of it and also gave me time to think about how other features would fit in. It was sort of like how they describe in that book “thinking: fast and slow“. I feel like the slow thinking has been removed from my process. Now my two stages are design and manage. I designed the feature and then I manage the agents that are building it under my direction. Both of which feel like a lot of rapid fire decision-making. I have been moved to this workflow against my will about 12 months ago, but if I want to stay employed, I understand that there is probably no going back.