[gambiting]

I'm an engine programmer in video games on a big project - recently I'm mostly just fixing bugs. And Fable has been absolutely phenomenal in those 2 days we had it lol. It was genuinely the first time I didn't really have to reproduce a bug to fix it - Fable was able to really understand the code and interconnections between the systems to reason why it might have happened and fix it. Opus really struggles with that in my experience, or it munches code for 2 hours only to come up with a completely wrong explanation, like, wrong if you think about it for more than 2 seconds. TBF I only had 2 days to play with fable, but it was incredible in that time - can't wait to have it back.

[apatheticonion]

Something I wonder about in this domain is if this is the fault of the language.

Game development is usually in C++ or C#. With C++, bugs are a nightmare to find. C# less so, but there are still memory leaks possible.

I've been writing Rust for a few years now and it has been absolutely phenomenal. I get the performance of C++ and the only thing I think about when developing is the logic itself.

There aren't any mature game engines that use Rust (Bevy is rapidly improving, but it's no Unreal/Unity) - though you can compile Rust to a dll so it can be consumed by Unreal/Unity.

Due to the language constraints of Rust, I have found that LLMs need to work _way_ less to figure out bugs and render out code. The compiler gives very specific error messages and if it compiles, it works.

[gambiting]

So....just from my personal experience.

When we started getting access to Claude last year, it was barely competent at C++. Like someone who read a book about C++ but never actually wrote any, or had to debug any issue. It would confidently declare things which any C++ programmer could tell you were bollocks straight away.

But....now it's able to reason about things like memory management, thread safety and second order effects when multithreading very very very well. It's honestly incredible how well it can understand C++ code and figure things out. Opus is already pretty good(although far from perfect) but Fable was just something else. I could give it a description like "It was reported that only sometimes(1/20 repro) when the user opens the inventory and closes it, they can't move the camera afterwards" and it was able to find out both the inventory camera control and input code and pinpoint the exact race condition that could lead to this situation.

[throwaway2037]

Do you need to push internally to get access to these LLMs for writing code, or is mgmt aggressive and supportive?

[gambiting]

We have unlimited access to Claude and its use is very much encouraged across the entire organisation.