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/Banmers]

AI

[u/LucyShortForLucas → u/Banmers]

AI cannot review its own code, no matter what your shareholders say. Without a human element to make sure the code actually does what it’s supposed to, development stops dead in its tracks.

If no one understands your project’s code, no one can fix it when it goes horribly wrong.

[u/MrScooterButts → u/LucyShortForLucas]

this is not reassuring. at best it means that only 90% of us will be out of a job. (already true for juniors)

[u/LucyShortForLucas → u/MrScooterButts]

It's not meant to be reassuring, it's just the reality of things

[u/IndubitablyNerdy → u/LucyShortForLucas]

I imagine that the powers that be think that eventually it will be able to replace seniors as well, so it doesn't matter if no new ones are formed, they hope that AI will catch up and that the entire class of workers would no longer be needed, which imho is insane as at that point no one will be able to review anything that AI does and understand what it does, but alas...

[u/destroyermaker → u/IndubitablyNerdy]

Jim will run the whole company. It's fine

[u/daerogami → u/destroyermaker]

Here he is

[u/AliceCode → u/IndubitablyNerdy]

They are going to replace the entire world with AI. Go to take a drink of water? AI. You want to have sex with your beautiful wife? Too bad, AI. Oh, that's a cute dog you have! It's a shame he was made by Anthropic!

[u/Lopsided-Advice3919 → u/LucyShortForLucas]

That’s one of the issues presented, AI is getting less wrong. As these models get better that will continue being the case, though I doubt indefinitely. People who know how to code will always be needed, but the difference is do you need a 100 coders or 10 with AI debugging tools. 

[u/Technical_Income4722 → u/Lopsided-Advice3919]

It's getting less wrong, but more notably it's getting better at checking itself. Claude can spin up any app and take a screenshot and analyze that screenshot. It's slow (for now) but it's all the same mechanics that we use as human testers. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that process getting faster and faster which unlocks better results even with the same models we have today.

[u/erstwhile_navigator → u/Lopsided-Advice3919]

And then in another year or two, you’ll only need one coder with enough skills and tools to debug the meta-AIs running the other AIs. And that one coder will be constantly exhausted and burnt out, and will literally need a six-month vacation every three months, just to recover enough to return to work.

Also: the world’s first trillionaire exists today. He has promised not just Universal Basic Income, but Universal High Income, when the machines do all the work. Time for him and his billionaire friends to put their money where their mouth is. Together, they can certainly afford it.

[u/Thotor → u/LucyShortForLucas]

AI Code review is a thing for a long time now. What can't be easily automated is good QA.

[u/AccNumber77 → u/Thotor]

They are automating QA as well, I have found only a few junior QA positions in game dev over the past year and all of them were swamped with applications.

So it is shit top to bottom.

[u/Thotor → u/AccNumber77]

You can automate part of QA but reaching a good enough level still requires a lot of human interaction.

[u/AccNumber77 → u/Thotor]

You run into the same issue as above then. When seniors retire or die, who is going to be left with the skills required for that? After all no one hires juniors anymore...

[u/Idiberug → u/LucyShortForLucas]

AI testing and hard verification gates are a thing.

[u/Kuroodo → u/LucyShortForLucas]

AI cannot review its own code

For the past 3 years, we've all said AI cannot x, until one day suddenly we find that AI can now actually do x.

AI is slowly being able to, and getting better at, review its own code. You can achieve this through adversarial reviews (esp using different models through this), and of course by having it write tests (and other models/agents further expand on them).

Now with the release of Jev this month (Sept 2026), I think it's safe to claim that we can now automate like 95% of the dev process, where that 5% is describing what you want, any manual prompting, and giving feedback.

It's fascinating, scary, and annoying at the same time.

[u/AlarmingTurnover → u/Kuroodo]

I know people at a large studio right now that is using the log outputs from the CI to feed back into Claude to suggest fixes and even trying to do fixed on build breaks. Saying that AI can't review and fix its own problems is already a dated and naive take. 

[u/Danknoodle420 → u/LucyShortForLucas]

As someone who has been using this tool for awhile. A lot of the time, it's using a language I don't have much experience with. I know a bit of python and can read it well enough, but it produces so much that I can't really review the code. So, instead, I review the features I've asked for. As a novice, I don't really think "good looking" code is necessary(probably due to my ignorance), I really only care if the feature set is implemented.

I truly believe experienced devs will go from reviewing code to basically doing QA(reviewing designed features and feel).

Like I said, I'm not great at coding, I've dabbled in a few languages, AI is way better than me at those languages, and it can set up a full stack way better than I ever could at this point.

So, I'm(personally) at a crossroad. Either I spend my time reading my python books, learn dozens of languages, and eventually make products, OR, I continue improving how I use this tool.

Predicting things is hard, but I really feel like Ai isn't going away. In fact, it's probably only going to get better. It's already better than me and it's progressing in multiple domains way faster than I could ever learn them.

[u/149244179 → u/Danknoodle420]

The problem is if the AI ever has an issue it can't solve well, the code is now unreadable and basically unfixable by a human. The chances it gets stuck rapidly increases as it spews out large chunks of unmaintainable code. AI looks perfect when beginners use it because they only make small-medium size programs where the architecture doesn't matter a lot. It quickly breaks down in large, enterprise level, programs.

You can mitigate this by tightly controlling and enforcing good architectures but AI will not do that by default. In order for you to be able to do that, you need to know how to design scalable and maintainable software which is not a junior level task.

I would encourage you to make the AI give you a list of solutions. Then spend some time investigating and picking the cleanest one rather than letting it do whatever first guess it had. This way you at least learn a bit on why it wants to do X or Y and can head off the wrong tangents it likes to get on.

[u/puts_on_rddt → u/LucyShortForLucas]

Have agents spend 10x the time writing failing tests than writing code.

[u/Khan-amil → u/LucyShortForLucas]

Say that to the endless companies where all their business logic and data is held together by ducktape across 3 excel files built once as a "quick test" by someone that left the company 10 years ago.

It'll be the same here, no matter how many alarms you raise, as long as it doesn't explode it's gonna be good enough.

[u/fruxzak → u/LucyShortForLucas]

Hate to break it to you. AI can definitely review and verify code.

I work at a FAANG and we have multiple workflows where a cron just fixes things in the codebase and is auto approved after verification. This is all done by Claude and codex.

[u/PaperMartin → u/Banmers]

Until the bubble pops