[LarsDu88]

I started building a VR game during COVID and released it 2024. When it released, I was using GPT and Copilot to add a lot of quality-of-life stuff (like visual juice) faster.

Yesterday, I finally got around to setting Opus 4.8 on the codebase. It was able to find and correct numerous subtle performance issues.

Features I could no longer spend time implementing, it could one-shot in roughly 10 minutes (not without issues). I could also fan out agents to work on multiple things at once.

One thing I found is that the knowledge I gained from doing things by hand greatly helped reject bad AI generated ideas. For example, my game is a starfighter flight sim and one idea was to tick AI collision detection checks lower the further AI ships were away from the player, which for a flight simulator leads to a lot of crashing into the terrain. A great idea for an FPS, but a terrible idea for a flight sim where enemy ships are often very close to the terrain.

My takeaway is that we are in a golden era where we currently have projects that are half human coded, where AI can pickup the slack. But soon we will be in the Dark Ages where AI generates all the code, and the end result will be much worse as the devs begin to lose an understanding of what they are creating.

[Zarathruster]

I recently tried to learn gamedev with Claude as a tutor of sorts. It didn't end well. Claude confidently led me off a cliff and I had throw the whole thing in the trash. It seems there's just no shortcut around learning stuff the hard way. When I've got enough reps in to be able to tell smart vs. stupid decisions, I imagine it'll be a lot more useful, but at this point I suspect AI is far from being good enough to get us into your described Dark Ages.