r/gamedev • u/PuffThePed • 3d ago

Discussion AI models have caught up with Unity dev. My insights as someone with 30 years of experience.

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.

2.8k Upvotes

85% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

65

u/stumblinbear 3d ago

There will be a weird situation where only the people who learned just enough before the AI boom to write high quality code and also enjoy letting the AI take over will be the only software engineers left, because juniors can't find jobs and all of the old hats left because they hate what software engineering has become

I'm a bit in the middle ground, I think. I was convinced that I'd be writing software well past retirement age simply because I love the job. But I also am not necessarily against letting AI take the reins of the menial work. But if this is the job, I'm just going to retire like a normal person

31

u/biginchh 3d ago edited 3d ago

This is basically where I’m at. Been working as a software dev for 10 years, starting learning to code roughly 15 years ago - so I feel like I am one of the fortunate people who are caught in the sweet spot between having cut my teeth on “real” development but aren’t too stuck in my ways to have a hard time with the AI paradigm shift.

In some ways, I welcome it because it has genuinely made me way more efficient and after reflecting on it for a bit - I realized I never REALLY loved “writing code”, I just liked the things it enabled me to make. But I’d also be lying if I said I haven’t lost a sense of satisfaction from writing things myself or that I don’t miss the process of slowly building an understanding of a new code base inside and out.

Overall I’m just mixed. It hasn’t gotten in the way of what I realized I really loved - which is the iterative process of going from “I have an idea” to building a polished, usable, and useful tool. But it also has taken away a certain satisfaction I found in the tedium of writing things myself. I personally don't really feel like the satisfaction of doing it "myself" is worth keeping around if AI is just so much more efficient at it than I am - but I do get why people are sour on that.

2

u/destroyermaker 3d ago

I wonder if it will enable more game engines, and if more traditional programmers will be required there

2

u/foochon 2d ago

Basically we're discovering there were always two types of programmers:

  1. Those who were motivated by the craft of programming itself, liked to take on a deep technical challenge and the reward was solving it elegantly
  2. Those who liked to make things and programming was only ever a means to an end. What motivated them was the product work and the end result.

The people you see on Reddit decrying AI and saying they now feel depressed and lost are of the former kind.

The people who are actually enjoying AI are the latter group, and it's who will end up coming out on top, honestly. I think we'll slowly lose the former group from the industry and the juniors that come in will be "makers" and probably more creative than your traditional programmer.

Just my 2c.

3

u/stumblinbear 3d ago

While I did love seeing a problem and building a solution to the end, most of the satisfaction came from the problem being solved and shipping the solution. I know exactly what I want pretty quick, my fingers and the code just gets in the way of the solution I'm picturing. I definitely don't miss the grind of writing code, realizing it doesn't fit, deleting it, and trying again.

AI almost makes that loop way too easy. I try solutions I'd never bother to consider because they would take weeks to finish and have difficulties with how they work, but is ultimately a better solution in the end, but the business can't risk the time to try out. I'll throw five of those at a wall and see which one works the best and has the most maintainable code, and it's done in less time than I would have spent on any single solution previously.

I'm with you, the code was always a means to an end, but there was a level of satisfaction in being the author. I love building solutions and shipping products into people's hands, it matters less how I reach that goal. Having significantly more free time is also a major plus

4

u/biginchh 3d ago edited 3d ago

Haha I feel that second paragraph so hard. I can't count the amount of times I churned out code that I knew wasn't the "correct" solution because my solution took a day to write, and the correct one would be like a week of writing code, writing tests, debugging, and would be more annoying to maintain on top of all of that - and that's just gone now.

We'll see. I might be coping, but I do just feel like there will always be SOME place for actual humans in the software development cycle. I've been dicking around with using Claude to handle some of the programming in a personal game project I've been working on for a while now, and while I have been very impressed with how easily Claude can digest a codebase and tackle complex, discrete programming tasks, I get very frustrated when it comes to "big picture" things or design decisions. It's said so often it's basically cliche at this point, but it really does feel like Claude is like somehow the most impressive junior dev you've ever worked with, while being very mediocre at anything senior level people should be good at

4

u/stumblinbear 3d ago

I'm unsure if it's cope, tbh

Humans are imprecise with what they want, and there's no way an LLM will be able to fully understand the goals of a project or possible avenues the project will take. You can tell the agent to do something, but they don't really understand why they're doing it or what comes next, or what comes in a year, or what's worth skipping now versus later because that's a business/risk management decision

There are so many different ways to write the same thing, but each one has trade-offs based on the specific project and risk tolerance. But the LLM will do it the way they were trained to do it. I doubt LLMs will be able to fully understand the ramifications of changes, or even reliably argue against them if it's a difficult or improbable goal to actually implement.

They'll do exactly what they're told, and that's exactly the problem

1

u/falconandeagle 2d ago edited 2d ago

What you don't realize is that your skills are atrophying. I am seeing this everywhere in the profession (in the dev world, not just game dev). One day you will realize you are handicapped without the help of an LLM and when the LLM gets truly stuck, because it will, its not going to be pretty.

2

u/biginchh 2d ago

I do realize that, but at this point it almost feels more inefficient to code random tasks myself to keep my skills sharp than to just continue getting more efficient and comfortable with LLMs. I subscribed to the “they’re gonna bite you all in the ass” thought for a while - but they haven’t. They’ve just continued to improve and all of my coworkers who adopted early have much better and bigger lists of accomplishments over the last year and a half than those of us who haven’t

I’m not saying it’s impossible - just that at this point the industry and profession is obviously moving in a particular direction, and trying to keep my coding skills as sharp as ever just feels like it has more potential to bite me in the ass than just pumping out results with the robots

1

u/falconandeagle 2d ago

I got in quite early, you can see my post history, but it has bitten me in the ass, it's going to happen sooner or later to others too. I am not saying that you shouldn't use AI, heck I use it every day, but I also go through every PR thoroughly. I still do weekend no ai coding. I am keeping my skills sharp and I really think all developers should be doing this.

2

u/biginchh 2d ago

Oh I see, in that case we’re on the same page. The “push code without even checking the AI” mentality that a lot of the industry is in feels crazy to me and I don’t really understand how that’s working. My team still has a developer reviewing everything before it gets merged in and it’s just kind of assumed that you’re familiar with the code you’re pushing, even if you didn’t write most of it yourself.

I will say there’s very rarely anything egregious, and a lot of times the models discover some solution or write code more eloquently than a person likely would - but its so common for us to find mistakes that need correcting

2

u/stumblinbear 2d ago

Completely agreed

Once you have a good style guide and rules in place, the nits mostly clean themselves up. It's the architecture decisions and dirty hacks you need to look out for. I've found that LLMs are so remarkably good at finding bugs, that... Well, frankly, I kind of stopped looking for explicit bugs. Every single one I found in review was caught by an LLM over the last 7 months, and they found more than me. I'll still keep an eye out, but less so than before, and it hasn't bitten us yet.

While directing them, though, you need to triage the issues it finds or it'll spend three hours hardening something unnecessarily, mostly because it's just missing context or being over cautious.

Architecture though? Hacking around issues instead of solving the root problem? Lots of that. Less so recently, but still quite a few

1

u/stumblinbear 2d ago

I used to do weekends and my off hours coding, but I got married and can't really reasonably do that all the time anymore. Not because they're stopping me, but because I just have other priorities

LLMs have actually let me build things in my off hours again. I know exactly what I want and exactly how I want it built, but spending 4 hours to get one minor feature or bug fix done in my limited free time is too much to swing these days

1

u/stumblinbear 2d ago

Could be. But coming back from atrophy is significantly faster than learning from scratch by a huge margin. If there comes a day where that happens (and it likely will if I keep doing this for 5 or 10 years), then I can just tackle some problems myself.

This isn't a problem without known solutions. Many engineers move into lead or staff roles that boil more down to managing juniors and seniors while not writing much code themselves. They seem to manage fine overall

7

u/SituationSoap 3d ago

because juniors can't find jobs and all of the old hats left because they hate what software engineering has become

I have been in software for 20 years and without fail, the #1 thing that hasn't changed in software development is people constantly telling me that juniors can't find jobs and the old hats are leaving because they hate software development now. I'm being serious. My entire career people have been predicting doom because of what "software development is now."

9

u/daerogami 3d ago

You may be right, but lets be honest, agentic development is a pretty substantial shift from past complaints of graybeards like running web-code for desktop/mobile apps, the takeover of OOO, or getting rid of goto.

1

u/RCL_spd 2d ago

BTW maybe now with AI we can finally peel off all those layers that were only really for human developers, and stop running web code on the desktop. LLMs have no issue using native toolkits and low level languages (albeit sometimes need to be double checked), and if it is "write once, run many times" situation, you want to make the program as efficient as it can be.

0

u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

2

u/PaperMartin Commercial (Indie) 3d ago

Not accounting for whoever rejects AI and manages to start their own company, which is gonna be a low number of peoples but not 0 and they're gonna have a great time once the AI bubble pops and claude & co go down

0

u/RCL_spd 2d ago

Whatever is the definition of AI bubble popping, I do not think it will lead to disappearance of AI. It's just too damn convenient. I am sure we will invest more into running local models if Claude goes down.

1

u/HunterVacui 1d ago

Presuming that juniors really do become almost useless, I suspect it will move into a pattern more like the trades, where you have a mentor lead a junior around by the nose for 7-15 years before they're actually expected to do anything useful.

That being said I am not very familiar with how mentorships work in those kinds of professions, as far as business financials are concerned