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Jcampuzano2 13 hours ago [-]
> “No more hand-written code” and that the game will be “generated with full AI workflows,” employees were reportedly “stunned,” which many hoped the news was some kind of sick joke.
The biggest surprise to me is that they're reporting that the employees themselves are surprised. I don't personally know a single dev who would or even should be "surprised" by this given the current industry state.
This doesn't even really seem headline news worthy. Practically every large company you've ever heard of is doing exactly the same thing right now. And I know very few devs who actually hand-write basically anything right now even if its just an unspoken truth.
At my job it's essentially the same. Everyone is actively encouraged to use AI to move faster and barely anybody writes code by hand.
Note this is not me making a value judgement saying this is good or bad, its just my observation. Having very little hand-written code is quickly becoming the norm.
mycocola 13 hours ago [-]
I think you'd be also stunned about the custom scripting/tooling studios have built for themselves over the years. Like the Blueprint system of Unreal, and plenty of low-code scene editors and map editors.
Since games are fuzzy, it's also important that developers are in touch with the underlying systems of what makes the games games, and that requires understanding those systems -- easily done through writing and modifying them.
bathtub365 7 hours ago [-]
You can also just point an agent at them and the agent will be able to explain them to you, and modify them for you.
b0rsuk 38 minutes ago [-]
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fabian2k 12 hours ago [-]
The statement did include that all art should also be AI-generated, which is a whole other thing. I'd also make a large difference between most code being AI-generated to start with, and actually not writing by hand at all anymore.
ironworks 12 hours ago [-]
This is a critical piece missing from the original article. It would make a lot more sense that game devs and other employees would be "shocked" at being told there would be AI art generated with "full AI workflows"[0].
No hand written code is practically the industry norm now, yet game assets and visuals is still mostly done by hand. The backlash would seem to line up more with Epic encouraging AI generated art, which is incredibly unpopular in the art and game dev communities.
I don't think that matches what I'm seeing. People use AI, but hand written code is still the norm at my company
pylua 10 hours ago [-]
Most people on my project are too. But honestly Claude has gotten good and for 100 dollars of tokens the code is more readable than a humans and I prefer to review it.
For what it’s worth a lot of the code in my company is similar in scope and style. Our design documents are very very thorough and catch edge cases .
I’m not in an ic role anymore but I do feel sad about the loss of handwritten code. It hits at my identity.
As for the article it feels like this is an abuse of ai and is being used for executive cover.
bryan0 8 hours ago [-]
This is interesting but sounds insane to me. At my startup the code has been 100% written by AI agents for the past 6 months. It’s like John Henry vs the Steam engine, time to give it up. The human job which is harder to replace is product manager. Understanding what is valuable to the customer and what the product needs to focus on.
gonzalohm 7 hours ago [-]
In my experience, AI code is really hard to maintain and overly complex which creates unexpected behavior and hard to catch bugs.
I inherited some vibe coded repos in my company and it's been really painful removing all the unnecessary complexity
NichoPaolucci 6 hours ago [-]
Why is it time to give it up? Are you putting out more features than them? Is your startup performing better than their company?
I say this as a person who uses AI for my job, but if someone isn't doing what you are doing and it's working for them, why bother?
12 hours ago [-]
danaris 13 hours ago [-]
Or perhaps the fact that they were stunned should tell you that it's not quite as standard as you think, industry-wide...?
Like, why assume that your experience is necessarily the most authoritative, the most representative, when you encounter evidence that someone else's might be different?
tyromaniac 12 hours ago [-]
I agree. I wouldn't think twice about hearing this about a small SF startup, or maybe even a large company during the height of tokenmaxxing, but its definitely a distruption, and a shocking one at that, for some C-suites to start mandating things like the disallowal of non-AI code.
argee 12 hours ago [-]
> Like, why assume that your experience is necessarily the most authoritative, the most representative, when you encounter evidence that someone else's might be different?
Because it's easier.
tayo42 11 hours ago [-]
Gaming seems like it might as well be a different industry. Theres coding involved but I don't think the typical coder can get into a game dev job. Mostly because of hiring requirements.
nirui 11 hours ago [-]
"Just let AI write all the code" is actually reasonable if (and probably only if) almost all code of the project was generated straight from the prompt and never get checked (but it's function still might).
It's like asking AI to generate HTML pages, then just eyeball it to see if the result fits the spec, all without reading the actual code underneath.
Is it ideal and good quality? Hell no, your HTML page maybe 50MB large and comes with some extra tags that's not even in the W3C spec. But... if you observe the behavior of regular consumers and what cheap shit they got lied to paying for, you'll know that most of them don't know (or maybe even care to know) about quality.
Also there's the fact that most top LLMs can now generate code that works mostly correctly, enough to keep most consumers from complaining, all of sudden it sounded reasonable for a for-profit company to try out this route.
Again, I really don't like where this is going, but I can't ignore what I see.
ozlikethewizard 3 hours ago [-]
A game is not a website though. The ability for subtle bugs that absolutely devastate user experience to slip through is already obviously present. Looking forward to when fixing the game breaking bug means some poor sod picking through absolute spaghetti. Oh wait they can just chuck the agents back at it and tell it to make no mistakes this time.
joshstrange 13 hours ago [-]
Agreed, you've got to have had your head in the ground to be "stunned" by what is largely "industry standard" now.
13 hours ago [-]
tayo42 11 hours ago [-]
Gamers and the gaming industry seem pretty against AI.
AI is generally unpopular with people.
CoolestBeans 12 hours ago [-]
Man even a cursory look of this site which is very much in the Silicon Valley / Big Tech world and very AI forward will tell you that the usage of AI is still all over the place.
torben-friis 12 hours ago [-]
I mean, there's a jump between "use AI tooling" and "you're not allowed to handroll code".
Whether Epic leadership themselves can understand that difference is something I'm not sure of, this might be non technical bigwigs speaking and being ignored at the lower end, but these orders taken literally are a "you can't use the letter A" level of dumb.
jayd16 12 hours ago [-]
I think you're the one in the bubble if you think no one is writing code.
Practically every large company? Is Epic not large? At the least, this team wasn't doing it. Reconsider your perspective.
13 hours ago [-]
slg 13 hours ago [-]
There’s this tendency for a lot of tech folks to think their expertise in tech gives them special insights into other disciplines. Often when this happens, they’ll be doomed by missing many of the details that the old domain experts took for granted. I feel like AI is going to supercharge that. Lots of tech folks will see an AI make a CRUD app and think that means the AI will be equally capable of making art while missing why the overwhelming majority of the art community is against generative AI. The end result will be a lot of mass market art is going to become noticeable worse in the years to come in order to earn some shareholders a few extra cents in profit.
TFNA 12 hours ago [-]
The "art community" is highly fractured to the point where claiming "overwhelming majority" doesn't have the rhetoric impact you want it to have. I have seen a good number of longtime visual artists and musicians express recently interest in generative AI.
Jtarii 12 hours ago [-]
Any artist mentioning that they are using gen AI in their art will instantly generate a massive amount of backlash so I doubt this is a very large number.
literalAardvark 5 hours ago [-]
Only among the chronically online, which is not a very big deal unless it happens to be your niche.
ozlikethewizard 3 hours ago [-]
D list celeb got shat on in public and the gallery took a load of real life shit. The only chronically online stance is thinking the general populace is positive about AI.
I work in IT at a place where the vast majority of activity is not IT related but we have a huge number of systems. I regularly interact with a wide range of disciplines. It is in education sector so it may be somewhat skewed, but I see very little positivity about AI from anyone but us developers. It gets used loads, but even those using it to speed up documents, reports, comms etc are generally negative about it.
nater5000 12 hours ago [-]
This is a bit "misguided" in my opinion.
The folks making these decisions are only "tech folk" in that they work in tech. Really these are professional businessmen who are focused on maximizing profit. If you left it to tech folk to make these decisions, then most of these companies would quickly fail as the tech folk fail to even try to make any money (let alone be able to understand consumers well enough to be able to make money from them).
>Lots of tech folks will see an AI make a CRUD app and think that means the AI will be equally capable of making art while missing why the overwhelming majority of the art community is against generative AI.
It's less about thinking that the technology that can quickly spin up an app could be used to quickly spin up some art and more about the ROI. Actual tech workers could probably leverage AI very effectively in "unoffending" ways, but they're really not the ones calling the shots. It's the MBAs who recognize that the quality of the product really doesn't matter if they can make the product cheap enough.
>The end result will be a lot of mass market art is going to become noticeable worse in the years to come in order to earn some shareholders a few extra cents in profit.
Brother, we're already living in this reality.
The article this thread is about provides the perfect example: Epic Games is working on a Disney game. These are two companies which are the epitome of generating "art" so efficiently that they're almost just generating the profit directly. Switching out some engineers for AI isn't going to make much of a difference in the end product.
For a specific example, "Star Wars" has been closer to AI generated "art" than it has been to actual "art" for nearly half a century at this point. It was just that back in the day you needed a bunch of nerds to produce the specific kinds of characters, settings, scenes, etc., needed to sell the underlying products. Now you can just use AI. But don't mistake the fact that it was humans working on it with it being "art." It's all driven by algorithms at the end of the day.
For what it's worth, those who actually appreciate "art" aren't the target audience. They never were. It's currently hip to hate AI, but the consumer base these companies target really do not care. They want slop. They wanted it before and they got it before, and they still want it now and they're going to get a lot more of it now.
mcphage 9 hours ago [-]
> The end result will be a lot of mass market art is going to become noticeable worse in the years to come in order to earn some shareholders a few extra cents in profit.
I agree, but I think pretty much everything will get noticeably worse in the years to come. It has happened to a lot of civilizations: they had some high level of skill in beautiful pottery, and then over the generations that skill disappeared. Probably because they were cheaper.
dpiers 12 hours ago [-]
"No more hand-written code"
Isn't this the new norm for every modern tech company?
Claude Code can help me write and review code faster and better than a human possibly could. I spend my time drafting requirements, steering agents and reviewing diffs instead of writing code manually.
AI is changing knowledge work. Dressing that up with ragebait (game dev, Disney, layoffs) doesn't change that or the fact that the video game industry has always been brutally fickle and hit-driven. The Epic layoffs earlier this year had far more to do with the decline of Fortnite's popularity than AI.
equinumerous 12 hours ago [-]
How do you avoid the spaghetti code that (in my experience) most AI models spit out? Sure you can steer it, ask it to make it better, etc... but it's easier to me to be in the driver's seat. Doesn't mean AI isn't useful, but whenever AI designs a feature end-to-end, everything is tightly-coupled, the wrong abstractions are picked, and fundamentally the code is not optimized for human understanding. I don't really understand how people can tolerate this kind of code (assuming they read it, which I think they do not). Just take the Claude Code CLI as an example - is there anyone in the world that knows how that spaghetti machine works?
I agree that AI is very useful in reviewing PRs and searching for bugs. It's definitely a game-changer there. But a human still needs to understand the code and take responsibility for it.
atworknow 12 hours ago [-]
>How do you avoid the spaghetti code
You don't. This is demonstrated by
>Claude Code CLI ... is there anyone in the world that knows how that spaghetti machine works
Having a very active, and happy user base.
Now this a simplistic view, and I think even heavily AI first dev teams still glance at the diff to make sure things aren't going too awry or ask questions. But the concept "spaghetti code" and "optimized for human understanding" are assumptions being revisited entirely in 2026.
equinumerous 11 hours ago [-]
I am not trying to get into a flame war, but I have seen a lot of complaints about Claude Code, not to mention their huge backlog of bug reports (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues) on GitHub. Just because they have lowered the bar for software quality and people have accepted it, does not mean that they are delivering quality software. I know at the very least we agree that these ideas are being re-explored in 2026, but I don't see evidence that it's a positive improvement for software development/quality. How many sites or services does one use on a daily basis that are just broken? Is that really the best our industry can aspire to?
EDIT: also, from the software engineer perspective, it is an order of magnitude more tedious to maintain software projects that lack quality, consistency, or standards. If I could measure the effect of AI vibe-coding in terms of personal pain, I would say it makes software development more painful when code is not well thought-out. There is a way to use AI responsibly, but I see more often people taking shortcuts and throwing "engineering" out the window. It's possible to ship quality with AI, but that's not the path of least resistance.
dpiers 7 hours ago [-]
You should see the spaghetti code that humans working 70 hour weeks for months on end to meet a launch date have pushed out.
You can be in the driver seat while delegating implementation to agents. You can use agents to generate documentation and refactor architectures. You can ask an agent to explain a feature and then work with it to plan how to extend it.
You don’t have to type the code to be the architect.
bitwize 10 hours ago [-]
> How do you avoid the spaghetti code that (in my experience) most AI models spit out?
That's the neat thing—you don't.
Frontier models, especially Opus 5.5, have vastly stepped up their game in terms of code quality. Furthermore, the sheer volume and speed of code they produce has meant that humans just don't have time to read and review the code even if it were the most well-written code in the world. The frontier is now structuring your loops, graphs, and evals in such a way that agents with a fresh context review the agent-produced code looking for bugs and errors. If humans review anything, it's an agent-produced summary of the code changes.
Business people now expect speed of delivery that humans can't match. Humans are now the bottleneck; agents will step up to replace them.
equinumerous 8 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry, as someone that uses agents daily, I just don't buy it. When the whole thing collapses into a pile of junk, someone is on the hook, and customers are unhappy. I don't find this approach to engineering to be a sane way of going about things (and if I'm proven wrong, then I would expect the whole software engineering process to become fully automated and repeatable, which has not yet happened).
12 hours ago [-]
vinyl7 12 hours ago [-]
If it is, then I see a wide opening for a modern tech company that produces high quality artisanal hand crafted software.
I'm a big fan of the advice "See what everyone else is doing, and do the opposite"
omega3 11 hours ago [-]
Make a fantastic game, 95+ on metacritic, no mistakes
whateveracct 13 hours ago [-]
i miss the days when my text editor was a blackbox to those above me in the org chart.
avh02 13 hours ago [-]
Omg I've been thinking about this... You have to use company provided tooling and they're sure to log every single thought of yours.
bob1029 12 hours ago [-]
Code is not the hard part of game development.
Contemporary AI is absolutely trash at things like scene graph management and lighting concerns. It also doesn't do physics, materials, SFX or "fun" very well.
Do not let the apparent visual progress of diffusion models conflate things. Unless we intend to run the entire game via diffusion models (which is certainly possible), I don't think this represents a reasonable baseline against which any amount of AAA art capacity can be compared. The number of units is here is effectively zero. A single AAA artist is infinitely more productive than GPT6 because they can produce and iterate content that the model simply cannot.
Does Disney really need a bunch of random dudes to prompt Claude for them?
arealaccount 13 hours ago [-]
This is why I haven’t been able to play split screen Fortnight with my son for the past several seasons.
You used to be able to do a trick where you login with one controller, then log back out with another, then back in with the first (thanks reddit for finding that), but now that doesn’t even work.
Elsewhereindeed 13 hours ago [-]
That sounds like a bug and not a feature.
arealaccount 12 hours ago [-]
I mean my son is the type of person that will “do anything” to get some stupid skin, seems like they would want him able to play
Edit… oh wait you said a bug, yea agree
DiabloD3 12 hours ago [-]
Normally I'd say this is a weird way for a company to announce bankruptcy, but no, this is pretty on-brand for Epic.
Madmallard 13 hours ago [-]
Skull Emoji
Game dev seems like one of the worst places for LLM code
Maybe some of the generic scaffolding and tooling you could use it for, but any game mechanics and effects you want to make artistically represent your game will just turn into sloppa when generated by an LLM unless you just have it make the generic functions that you fully specify then manually tweak yourself
but how much faster will that be to someone that actually knows what they're doing?
free_bip 5 hours ago [-]
I agree. The primary gotcha about game development, that differentiates it from ordinary software development, is that the desired outcome is "fun" / "entertainment". That is not a verifiable outcome. You cannot make a unit test for fun. LLMs don't understand what "Fun" is because they've never been taught what code is and isn't fun.
ncr100 12 hours ago [-]
From direct experience it's just fine to carefully, thoughtfully do gamedev coding with AI.
Madmallard 47 minutes ago [-]
How much time does doing it "carefully, thoughtfully" save over just not using AI?
I know Jonathan Blow has recently said in the last couple weeks that he just doesn't even really bother
gazebo2 12 hours ago [-]
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yonaguska 12 hours ago [-]
I've always wanted to get into game dev but never did for lack of time or sustained interest. I tried to slop together some ideas and mechanics that I've been toying around with in my head for years now. And llms have no concept for the nuance that goes into actual enjoyable mechanics. Maybe it's just me, because I never put the time in myself so I can't get the results out that I want.
gazebo2 12 hours ago [-]
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PunchyHamster 13 hours ago [-]
Gonna be interesting flop
pfdietz 13 hours ago [-]
Epic will blame the workers and say they sabotaged it, I predict.
bigyabai 12 hours ago [-]
> Developers on the game, a shooter featuring characters from the Marvel and Star Wars franchises, were instructed to implement an “AI first” production model using tools such as Anthropic’s Claude. Humans will then manage and guide that work. “No more hand-written code,” one of the game’s directors told staff in an internal message reviewed by Bloomberg. The director added that all art for the game would be “generated with full AI workflows.”
This sounds nigh-indistinguishable from the catastrophic waste of capital that Concord turned into.
jongjong 12 hours ago [-]
I think a lot of these devs are too proud. Personally, I'm glad to have AI coding now. After 15 years of professional experience, it was becoming repetitive.
Also, my goal since I graduated university, was to become a software architect but the position had become rare and mostly existed in bureaucratic organisations.
Now with AI, every developer is essentially a software architect.
My university major was 'software design'. When I came out of uni, I was shocked to learn that nobody cared about software design. Now software design is all any engineer has left to care about.
tines 12 hours ago [-]
For now.
Melonai 11 hours ago [-]
I do understand the feeling, though I genuinely can't help but feel jealous! I've spent most of my teenage years learning everything I could about software, with a particular focus on low-level systems programming, small finicky cache line optimizations, SIMD, DOD, and the year I enter the workforce ChatGPT comes out and suddenly all that stuff is "solved".
I genuinely don't hate AI, I have to use it every single day, but... I really wish I got some more years like you until I got sick of the normal workflow... :') I was simply born late for that. Maybe this comes off whiny, and it is to some extent, but I do hear this from other people in my cohort a lot and it genuinely pains me.
jongjong 8 hours ago [-]
What you learnt is still useful in terms of training your mind to think critically.
To summarize 15 years of experience for you: You keep learning non-stop the entire time and after 15 years, you've got a really good high level view and you've built up an intuition for how to separate code in a way to minimize complexity whilst maximizing maintainability, reliability and performance... But you still miss stuff, miss some security vulnerabilities; because complex projects give you so many things to think about, it's a struggle to attend to everything. The one real advantage is that what you miss is generally easy to fix (thanks to your design intuition).
Even after 15 years, though, my feeling is that I'm still not skeptical enough. Solving problems with software is really hard. The more experience I have, the harder it appears to be. I'm a much better coder now than I ever was by an order of magnitude but I trust my own code less than I ever did. AI is can help a junior a lot; you just have to be humble about your output and be very critical of it.
taneq 12 hours ago [-]
How many software architect roles are there in a typical company? How many are needed per product?
hypfer 13 hours ago [-]
Arguably, that game is the right testing ground for this kind of development pattern.
Ashes to ashes. Slop to slop.
12ajsh7 13 hours ago [-]
Are they trying to get bought by MBS like Electronic Arts? They know that AI figures from Slop Wars will be hated by gamers. But MBS buys any crap.
bitwize 9 hours ago [-]
Just wait until Anthropic decides to get into the gaming space.
Names changed/hidden to protect the guilty. Early this year, the CEO of a company I'm familiar with in a highly regulated industry announced a companywide initiative, let's call it "Operation Rapidash". Total AI transformation. AI all the things by 2027. Recently I learned that both major frontier labs are starting to roll out their own technologies for this highly regulated industry. Any guesses where the training data for this specialized knowledge might have come from? Anyone? Anyone?
Of course, it's not just them, it's anyone with an Operation Rapidash. Committing to AI development is allowing the labs to distill your business out from under you. We're looking at a future where not only people formerly hired for their expertise become peripherals to the machine, but the entire industry becomes a peripheral to the frontier labs.
But you'll have a couple amazing quarters before jumping out and deploying your golden parachute.
PunchyHamster 11 hours ago [-]
Gonna coin a new term here, AAAI Slop
avaer 12 hours ago [-]
I don't think this strategy will flop.
AI is perfectly capable of doing all of the coding for games now, especially if you have your own engine (which Epic does), build around harnesses (which Epic does), and treat the job of making games like a job not a side-slop (which Epic does).
Maybe this will bring quality down, but I don't think so, at least not more than the usual crunch + Disneyification.
Either way, the more interesting effect of this is not Epic making another IP licensed shooter, but more people making/modding into existence the games they want. This is already happening. And that's probably what was the genesis of this policy from Epic.
tines 12 hours ago [-]
It won't bring quality down, it'll just be the end of human understanding.
sick_of_slop 12 hours ago [-]
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aunty_helen 12 hours ago [-]
Search YouTube: opus 5.5 game
The future is now old man
Jtarii 12 hours ago [-]
The gap between generating a game, and generating a game that anyone wants to play is still colossal.
In a similar way to how it can generate music, but its still the most mediocre trash you have ever heard.
The biggest surprise to me is that they're reporting that the employees themselves are surprised. I don't personally know a single dev who would or even should be "surprised" by this given the current industry state.
This doesn't even really seem headline news worthy. Practically every large company you've ever heard of is doing exactly the same thing right now. And I know very few devs who actually hand-write basically anything right now even if its just an unspoken truth.
At my job it's essentially the same. Everyone is actively encouraged to use AI to move faster and barely anybody writes code by hand.
Note this is not me making a value judgement saying this is good or bad, its just my observation. Having very little hand-written code is quickly becoming the norm.
Since games are fuzzy, it's also important that developers are in touch with the underlying systems of what makes the games games, and that requires understanding those systems -- easily done through writing and modifying them.
No hand written code is practically the industry norm now, yet game assets and visuals is still mostly done by hand. The backlash would seem to line up more with Epic encouraging AI generated art, which is incredibly unpopular in the art and game dev communities.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/10/report-epic-games-goe...
For what it’s worth a lot of the code in my company is similar in scope and style. Our design documents are very very thorough and catch edge cases .
I’m not in an ic role anymore but I do feel sad about the loss of handwritten code. It hits at my identity.
As for the article it feels like this is an abuse of ai and is being used for executive cover.
I say this as a person who uses AI for my job, but if someone isn't doing what you are doing and it's working for them, why bother?
Like, why assume that your experience is necessarily the most authoritative, the most representative, when you encounter evidence that someone else's might be different?
Because it's easier.
It's like asking AI to generate HTML pages, then just eyeball it to see if the result fits the spec, all without reading the actual code underneath.
Is it ideal and good quality? Hell no, your HTML page maybe 50MB large and comes with some extra tags that's not even in the W3C spec. But... if you observe the behavior of regular consumers and what cheap shit they got lied to paying for, you'll know that most of them don't know (or maybe even care to know) about quality.
Also there's the fact that most top LLMs can now generate code that works mostly correctly, enough to keep most consumers from complaining, all of sudden it sounded reasonable for a for-profit company to try out this route.
Again, I really don't like where this is going, but I can't ignore what I see.
AI is generally unpopular with people.
Whether Epic leadership themselves can understand that difference is something I'm not sure of, this might be non technical bigwigs speaking and being ignored at the lower end, but these orders taken literally are a "you can't use the letter A" level of dumb.
Practically every large company? Is Epic not large? At the least, this team wasn't doing it. Reconsider your perspective.
https://metro.co.uk/2026/05/13/very-sad-eastenders-jake-wood...
I work in IT at a place where the vast majority of activity is not IT related but we have a huge number of systems. I regularly interact with a wide range of disciplines. It is in education sector so it may be somewhat skewed, but I see very little positivity about AI from anyone but us developers. It gets used loads, but even those using it to speed up documents, reports, comms etc are generally negative about it.
The folks making these decisions are only "tech folk" in that they work in tech. Really these are professional businessmen who are focused on maximizing profit. If you left it to tech folk to make these decisions, then most of these companies would quickly fail as the tech folk fail to even try to make any money (let alone be able to understand consumers well enough to be able to make money from them).
>Lots of tech folks will see an AI make a CRUD app and think that means the AI will be equally capable of making art while missing why the overwhelming majority of the art community is against generative AI.
It's less about thinking that the technology that can quickly spin up an app could be used to quickly spin up some art and more about the ROI. Actual tech workers could probably leverage AI very effectively in "unoffending" ways, but they're really not the ones calling the shots. It's the MBAs who recognize that the quality of the product really doesn't matter if they can make the product cheap enough.
>The end result will be a lot of mass market art is going to become noticeable worse in the years to come in order to earn some shareholders a few extra cents in profit.
Brother, we're already living in this reality.
The article this thread is about provides the perfect example: Epic Games is working on a Disney game. These are two companies which are the epitome of generating "art" so efficiently that they're almost just generating the profit directly. Switching out some engineers for AI isn't going to make much of a difference in the end product.
For a specific example, "Star Wars" has been closer to AI generated "art" than it has been to actual "art" for nearly half a century at this point. It was just that back in the day you needed a bunch of nerds to produce the specific kinds of characters, settings, scenes, etc., needed to sell the underlying products. Now you can just use AI. But don't mistake the fact that it was humans working on it with it being "art." It's all driven by algorithms at the end of the day.
For what it's worth, those who actually appreciate "art" aren't the target audience. They never were. It's currently hip to hate AI, but the consumer base these companies target really do not care. They want slop. They wanted it before and they got it before, and they still want it now and they're going to get a lot more of it now.
I agree, but I think pretty much everything will get noticeably worse in the years to come. It has happened to a lot of civilizations: they had some high level of skill in beautiful pottery, and then over the generations that skill disappeared. Probably because they were cheaper.
Isn't this the new norm for every modern tech company?
Claude Code can help me write and review code faster and better than a human possibly could. I spend my time drafting requirements, steering agents and reviewing diffs instead of writing code manually.
AI is changing knowledge work. Dressing that up with ragebait (game dev, Disney, layoffs) doesn't change that or the fact that the video game industry has always been brutally fickle and hit-driven. The Epic layoffs earlier this year had far more to do with the decline of Fortnite's popularity than AI.
I agree that AI is very useful in reviewing PRs and searching for bugs. It's definitely a game-changer there. But a human still needs to understand the code and take responsibility for it.
You don't. This is demonstrated by
>Claude Code CLI ... is there anyone in the world that knows how that spaghetti machine works
Having a very active, and happy user base.
Now this a simplistic view, and I think even heavily AI first dev teams still glance at the diff to make sure things aren't going too awry or ask questions. But the concept "spaghetti code" and "optimized for human understanding" are assumptions being revisited entirely in 2026.
EDIT: also, from the software engineer perspective, it is an order of magnitude more tedious to maintain software projects that lack quality, consistency, or standards. If I could measure the effect of AI vibe-coding in terms of personal pain, I would say it makes software development more painful when code is not well thought-out. There is a way to use AI responsibly, but I see more often people taking shortcuts and throwing "engineering" out the window. It's possible to ship quality with AI, but that's not the path of least resistance.
You can be in the driver seat while delegating implementation to agents. You can use agents to generate documentation and refactor architectures. You can ask an agent to explain a feature and then work with it to plan how to extend it.
You don’t have to type the code to be the architect.
That's the neat thing—you don't.
Frontier models, especially Opus 5.5, have vastly stepped up their game in terms of code quality. Furthermore, the sheer volume and speed of code they produce has meant that humans just don't have time to read and review the code even if it were the most well-written code in the world. The frontier is now structuring your loops, graphs, and evals in such a way that agents with a fresh context review the agent-produced code looking for bugs and errors. If humans review anything, it's an agent-produced summary of the code changes.
Business people now expect speed of delivery that humans can't match. Humans are now the bottleneck; agents will step up to replace them.
I'm a big fan of the advice "See what everyone else is doing, and do the opposite"
Contemporary AI is absolutely trash at things like scene graph management and lighting concerns. It also doesn't do physics, materials, SFX or "fun" very well.
Do not let the apparent visual progress of diffusion models conflate things. Unless we intend to run the entire game via diffusion models (which is certainly possible), I don't think this represents a reasonable baseline against which any amount of AAA art capacity can be compared. The number of units is here is effectively zero. A single AAA artist is infinitely more productive than GPT6 because they can produce and iterate content that the model simply cannot.
You used to be able to do a trick where you login with one controller, then log back out with another, then back in with the first (thanks reddit for finding that), but now that doesn’t even work.
Edit… oh wait you said a bug, yea agree
Game dev seems like one of the worst places for LLM code
Maybe some of the generic scaffolding and tooling you could use it for, but any game mechanics and effects you want to make artistically represent your game will just turn into sloppa when generated by an LLM unless you just have it make the generic functions that you fully specify then manually tweak yourself
but how much faster will that be to someone that actually knows what they're doing?
I know Jonathan Blow has recently said in the last couple weeks that he just doesn't even really bother
This sounds nigh-indistinguishable from the catastrophic waste of capital that Concord turned into.
Also, my goal since I graduated university, was to become a software architect but the position had become rare and mostly existed in bureaucratic organisations.
Now with AI, every developer is essentially a software architect.
My university major was 'software design'. When I came out of uni, I was shocked to learn that nobody cared about software design. Now software design is all any engineer has left to care about.
I genuinely don't hate AI, I have to use it every single day, but... I really wish I got some more years like you until I got sick of the normal workflow... :') I was simply born late for that. Maybe this comes off whiny, and it is to some extent, but I do hear this from other people in my cohort a lot and it genuinely pains me.
To summarize 15 years of experience for you: You keep learning non-stop the entire time and after 15 years, you've got a really good high level view and you've built up an intuition for how to separate code in a way to minimize complexity whilst maximizing maintainability, reliability and performance... But you still miss stuff, miss some security vulnerabilities; because complex projects give you so many things to think about, it's a struggle to attend to everything. The one real advantage is that what you miss is generally easy to fix (thanks to your design intuition).
Even after 15 years, though, my feeling is that I'm still not skeptical enough. Solving problems with software is really hard. The more experience I have, the harder it appears to be. I'm a much better coder now than I ever was by an order of magnitude but I trust my own code less than I ever did. AI is can help a junior a lot; you just have to be humble about your output and be very critical of it.
Ashes to ashes. Slop to slop.
Names changed/hidden to protect the guilty. Early this year, the CEO of a company I'm familiar with in a highly regulated industry announced a companywide initiative, let's call it "Operation Rapidash". Total AI transformation. AI all the things by 2027. Recently I learned that both major frontier labs are starting to roll out their own technologies for this highly regulated industry. Any guesses where the training data for this specialized knowledge might have come from? Anyone? Anyone?
Of course, it's not just them, it's anyone with an Operation Rapidash. Committing to AI development is allowing the labs to distill your business out from under you. We're looking at a future where not only people formerly hired for their expertise become peripherals to the machine, but the entire industry becomes a peripheral to the frontier labs.
But you'll have a couple amazing quarters before jumping out and deploying your golden parachute.
AI is perfectly capable of doing all of the coding for games now, especially if you have your own engine (which Epic does), build around harnesses (which Epic does), and treat the job of making games like a job not a side-slop (which Epic does).
Maybe this will bring quality down, but I don't think so, at least not more than the usual crunch + Disneyification.
Either way, the more interesting effect of this is not Epic making another IP licensed shooter, but more people making/modding into existence the games they want. This is already happening. And that's probably what was the genesis of this policy from Epic.
The future is now old man
In a similar way to how it can generate music, but its still the most mediocre trash you have ever heard.