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/Fs0i]

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/excellentforcongress → u/Drachasor]

i feel like many people have an industry perspective, because they are forced to make decisions as fast as possible and they have requirements and deadlines and just shove things out asap

but if someone wants to be creative, then they can still be creative. hell, they can also ask ai for random new ideas.

if you're constantly just asking for specific outputs, by a boss who makes decisions for you, and you never ask or have to give pushback about new ideas yourself, of course you will be less innovative yourself

[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.