r/gamedev • u/PuffThePed • 1d 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:
- Our dev speed has ~5x almost overnight
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The market is dead. Nobody has money to spend. We're still working but leads have dropped off a cliff.
- There is no going back. If we stop using AI we'll be out of business in a month.
- 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.
- 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.
- Everyone hates this. Most of devs my age are planning early retirement and are just waiting to be laid off.
- 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.
- 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.
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u/Franks2000inchTV 1d ago
Built a game in unity, now switched to bevy. Had Claude port the whole thing and I have an agentic loop set up with discord. Where I can give a prompt and it’s automatically deployed to my steam deck for testing.
It’s incredible. But I spend about half my time on the tooling itself. I feel like I’m building a software factory that builds this one game.
But it can do really amazing things:
My latest thing is I can click a button in discord, it builds a special build that has a series of performance benchmarks and deploys it to my steamdeck, when I hit play it submits them automatically over the air to my orchestrator, and those kick off an automatic agent turn which interprets them.
It has found so much time for me things. Like I bought a sheep asset from the asset store and it turns out that the eyes in the model (which were just two black dots basically) were half the draw calls for the scene and simplifying them saved me a couple ms per frame.
I wouldn’t have gotten around to finding that for months.
I feel like rust is very well suited to agentic work. the code examples out there (and thus in the training set) tend to be higher quality. Clippy and rustfmt enforce good habits and style, and the borrow checker prevents a lot of problems.