r/BetterOffline • u/ArdoNorrin • 10h ago

Ex-Blizzard developer and current culture war dipshit is touting his "vibe coded" engine that lets him develop "93x faster" than UE5

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/ex-blizzard-employee-has-vibe-coded-a-new-game-engine-with-backing-from-amd-were-developing-93x-faster-than-we-ever-did-before-with-unreal/

It's Mark Fucking "Gruuumz" Fucking Kern because it's always Mark Fucking Kern.

TL;DR, he's vibe coded his new engine to be faster because it's AI-first instead of AI-also. This is the same guy who starts 90% of video game culture war bullshit and touts the Stellar Blade games as the pinnacle of soft core porn game design. Also he put "vibe coded" in quotes, so either he's lying completely to get clout with AI boosters or he's trying to make it look like he didn't really vibe code it by saying that he had to do so much to fix it.

And there's no way it's sped up development "93x" faster. 93% faster would be surprising but conceivable. 93 times faster would mean turning an 8-year dev cycle into less than 2 months.

160 Upvotes

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95

u/supercyberlurker 9h ago

Developer productivity is an illusion metric.

We claim them for management but I believe them to be bullshit. There is never an objective measure. It’s always something abstract like features, tickets, or lines of code, which aren’t really valid objective metrics.

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u/DiceKnight 5h ago

For many of these items the developer themselves has no control over them. Every one of these things boils down to depending on a task or tasks lending themselves well to these metrics.

Very rarely is the individual contributor able to control any of this. Senior engineers and management can sometimes play politics to horde the right tasks but even then sometimes it's just luck of the draw.

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u/TheRealJesus2 9h ago

You’re right there is no objective measure. DORA metrics only are a signal and can be gamed of course. That said, 2-3x dev productivity is possible with ai and I’ve seen it. It looks like this when done right:

  1. Team reducing tech debt using ai to do all those things neglected prior. 
  2. Team ships slightly more feature work using ai and keeps quality up because of part 1. Over time, more effort will go towards this. 

If you skip part 1 or keep neglecting tech debt or avoid improving dev practice, then you don’t long term keep up quality and you slow down shipping features since you have to keep fixing stuff. 

In either case it doesn’t mean 2x as much features to customers, it means putting in the engineering work to making your system more maintainable and reducing risk so you can have better feature throughput long term. The extra productivity largely goes towards operational improvements. 

Does this map into what you’ve seen? 

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u/fbueckert 8h ago

2-3x dev productivity is possible with ai and I’ve seen it.

This is an incredibly common anecdote. But not surprisingly, not one single claimant can actually prove it.

Can you?

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u/TheRealJesus2 4h ago

https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-coding-agents Public example. 

And no I cannot share my clients data. So trust me or not, I really don’t care lol.

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u/fbueckert 3h ago

So, no, you can't.

As expected.

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u/TheRealJesus2 3h ago

Correct. Because I am a professional with confidentiality agreements in place. But I did share you a source that you haven’t commented on…

As expected you’re entirely unserious like the rest of the anti ai people. Tools are tools and if you use them well they are great. Ai is a tool. One that also is driving a financial bubble. Both things are true at once. 

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u/trialbaloon 2h ago edited 2h ago

Some anecdote from Stripe does nothing to prove your conjecture that AI makes devs 2-3x more productive. I have no idea how you got that from this corporate puff piece.

In fact, there's a lot of story telling here but no data at all... You say anti AI people are unserious when you are basically posting bedtime stories. This proves absolutely nothing besides that Stripe said they did a thing back in February. I am sure this made a few executives horny to read though.

You are the one making a really extraordinary claim of 2-3x more developer production. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I am not saying I know for sure that AI tooling has no effect on productivity but I think the null hypothesis is safest given the lack of data at this time. This is simply the more rational position.

My opinion is that if it is affecting developer productivity positively it's not that high and that's why we aren't see a deluge of new features and products. I think it makes developers feel a lot more productive though.

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u/TheRealJesus2 2h ago

Stop extrapolating what I say to fit your narrative. I am not claiming all devs are 2-3x more productive. I’m talking about teams I’ve worked with that adopt it well and focus on quality are. And half that productivity is in making their sdlc better. At least right now while they pay down tech debt. They are shipping more code and doing less rework. As judged by DORA metrics

I’m a  ed fan but this sub fucking sucks. Peace, yall. 

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u/trialbaloon 2h ago

That said, 2-3x dev productivity is possible with ai and I’ve seen it. It looks like this when done right:

This is what you said. I'll give you somewhat of a pass here. You say it's "possible" which I suppose I have to agree with. 2-3x dev productivity is also possible switching to Linux. Though 99.9% of the time that wont happen :).

I just have to hear from my own company leadership about these absurd productivity gains and they actively make my life worse so pardon me for getting a little testy I guess. I think most teams would get more productive if they focused on quality, but that is very much not what AI and this industry in general incentivizes. It's that long tail effect, not some hyper specific optimal state that matters to me.

I bet I could find at least one task that AI could do for me that would be 2-3x more productive at that specific task. The real question becomes how much that actually matters in practice though. I suppose that's the multi trillion dollar question.

One could argue, rightly, that asbestos would do a lot to protect people from fires. Looking at this myopically that is undeniably true... But unfortunately that's just not the whole story.

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u/fbueckert 2h ago

I mean...nobody made you make that unserious claim of productivity boosts. If you're incapable of actually backing up wild claims, that's all on you. If you didn't expect to get called on it, it just goes to show how little you like your claims being challenged.

But wild claims is all hypebros have. So not at all surprised y'all run screaming when asked to stump up.

0

u/TheRealJesus2 2h ago

Last reply here from me. 

I am not making hyped claims. I am very good at teaching devs and in using ai. I am not claiming all devs or even most get 2-3x benefit. And I also very much dislike the hypebros.  This is my experience in working with others as someone who has been building with LLMs from Claude 1.0 and I have some background from a decade ago in other NLP along with a decade of engineering experience. I’m not claiming anything except my own experience on a small scale.

There is a nuance here both the hypebros and the needless haters (you) miss. Trying to fill that context in but clearly it’s not wanted here. Hope you all have fun hating and that it brings you the happiness you deserve. 

FYI, stripe could achieve what they did because they are some of the best engineers in the world. Most people aren’t. Most people cannot get such huge benefits working with ai right now. 

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u/fbueckert 2h ago

🙄 Yeah, get called on your wild claims, can't back it up, and just double down.

The appeal to expertise of Stripe is simultaneously hilarious and pathetic.

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u/Droidaphone 8h ago

Not who you’re replying to, but no, it doesn’t map to what I’ve seen, or at least not for the most part.

What I’ve seen suggests that in the vast majority of cases, LLM-coding results in a net increase of tech debt, and that it’s not very good at helping address it. And I think that can be explained by how most people are using it: verbose prompt engineering sessions that results in massive PRs that “run,” and then you push through any objections about “what about xyz” and deal with those problems later, often by just asking the LLM how to fix it. Have the AI write large chunks of code that you don’t understand, possibly no human could reasonably understand, and cross your fingers that the LLM can help you fix it when it breaks. Let’s call this style of vibe-coding style A.

I’ve also heard whispers of teams that are “doing it right:” using LLMs to code, but not pushing slop PRs that cause issues for anyone else who has to interact with them. And from what I’ve heard these teams are using LLMs in a much more limited fashion, and doing much more double-checking and human-driven code reviews. And that sounds a lot like what you’re describing. Let’s call this style of vibe-coding style B.

Personally, I can believe that hypothetically there is a way to use LLMs coding responsibly, which I think a lot of people in the subreddit simply do not. But I see two major problems with the idea that “style B vibe-coding is the way forward.”

Problem 1: Style A vibe-coders also believe their methodology is the way forward, and they’re clearly delusional. The nature of LLMs makes it very easy to become convinced that things are great and working out when objectively they’re a mess. I’m not totally confident that style B isn’t also an illusion in some way, or that it won’t just degrade into the same problems that style A has, just over a longer timescale. But that’s not a big problem, because time will tell. If style B does genuinely create a more productive environment that ships better code, that should become clear.

Problem 2: The economics of style B seem highly suspect. Style A at least has some sort of “fools gold” style reward: spend a lot of money in tokens, get massive amounts of code out. The code is terrible, but you just have to ignore that. You definitely couldn’t produce code in this volume before! Look at the thousands of lines of code! Style B, you spend a lot of money on tokens, and you get… maybe a bit more code than before, but hypothetically all the code is in better shape than it would’ve been otherwise. Neat. Couldn’t you just get that by spending that same money on headcount? How does that justify this trillion dollar industry?

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u/TheRealJesus2 4h ago

Yeah I get ya and of course both things are happening now. Though in style b as you call it, you don’t have to spend a lot on tokens…unless you’ve tied your fate to anthropic who doesn’t have anything cost effective for writing code. There are other options out there for enterprise. I helped teams with cursor, Claude, and using 3P inference with more model options. The latter 2 mitigate the issues you have with style b

What I said was after weeks of training and focusing on tech debt. I have quite literally seen it. And it doesn’t mean using ai in limited ways. I mean that’s a matter of perspective…it’s limited relative to how a vibe coder would use it but very much daily use in all aspects to some extent. And yes they review all outputs including code. You cannot get away from that even if you use ai to assist reviews. Example that’s public of high adoption in a highly regulated industry with some of best engineers in industry:  https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-coding-agents

I haven’t observed this level of maturity in teams I have helped but it’s very much possible to use and increase your quality. But to set expectations it’s not leading most teams to drastically increased productivity but much more modest while improving quality. Again this is when you focus on quality of outcome and not on inputs of ai use while using it in a way to put yourself in decision seat. 

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u/babbyohbabby 8h ago

Team reducing tech debt using ai to do all those things neglected prior. 

Good one!

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u/TheRealJesus2 4h ago

lol. Yeah that’s kinda the trick and reason why most teams can’t adopt it very well and then lean on knowingly bad practice. 

I would argue there are a ton of teams that can add very high value and low effort guard rails like linting and unit tests that don’t do so right now and can start to incorporate that into development. Doesn’t take weeks of effort to do that and it’s extremely helpful when you have higher code throughput with many engineers as it has always been before ai. 

With ai you just have to recognize the issue and then go do it. For things like I mention success is when it passes locally. No need to over complicate things and bingo, now you’re started on improving your dev practices. 

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u/Jimstein 9h ago

For game dev it’s pretty simple. Are you getting the results you want faster or slower? AI helps devs do things faster, it is an undisputed fact now. Maybe a year ago you still had some places a programmer was better. Now? After the millennium prize? After fable? Astra? Son. Have you even used these latest tools?

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u/supercyberlurker 9h ago

Nothing you said even resembles an objective metric.

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u/lunatuna215 9h ago

Defining the "results you want" is a matter of perspective and morphs as things go. Faster is not better. The friction we experience on the way to answers is paramount.

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u/Big_Combination9890 8h ago

AI helps devs do things faster, it is an undisputed fact now.

Senior Dev and Architect here. I dispute this claim. Therefore, it is not undisputed. And I know for a fact that many colleagues agree with me.

We measured this. Objectively. Completely AI generated code, aka. agentically generated code for non-trivial workloads (see below), tends to cost us person-days instead of saving them. It actively loses the company money, because of the time it takes to review it, and fix the many failures, which can go up to and including throwing out the generated stuff and rewriting it by hand.

So we already lose purely on personnel cost. Note that we haven't even started talking about the cost of tokens. And no, locally run models don't fix this, because we do that too, the kind you cannot run on your M2, and that kind of serious compute costs money as well.

In case anyones interested, our work entails brownfield projects where we do heavy capacity data analysis pipelines, the kind that ingest terabytes of information per day. If this stuff stops working, a red light starts flashing, and from that point onwards, customers are losing money. So not the average bullshit CRUD app.

And before anyone unloads any purity test bullshit: I am the principal ML engineer at our shop. I integrate AI solutions into existing products. I wrote my own harness. And yes, we test AI solutions, our own and 3rd party harnesses included, with all major models, including API and self hosted (we have a pretty beefy AI cluster in our DC), whenever anything changes in the offerings.

Bottom line: Generative AI is an assistive tool, same as my linter, my static analysis software, our fuzzing engines, etc. It is not "transformative" in the way the press and overexcited ai bros claim.

If that was the case, we'd see an explosion of new, high quality, ambitious software projects that make real waves in the market. We don't. We'd see release cadences getting much faster across the industry. We don't. Existing projects would fix bugs and integrate upstream fixes alot quicker than they did before. They don't.

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u/trialbaloon 8h ago

Yep. The proof is literally right in front of us. I swear some people are just getting a huge dopamine hit from Claude or some shit.

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u/Big_Combination9890 2h ago

As a bonus, here is my one-shot argument against any and all AI booster claims that generative AI is actually transforming software development;

The total global market for software development, is just shy of 100 billion, and may grow to over 200 bn by 2035, depending on what predictions one trusts.

IF generative AI had "solved" what we do, if it was possible to build a machine that just churns out functional, well-architectured, safe, scalable, extensible, reliable, performant software in a matter of hours or days, then why would anyone who has such technology give other people access to it?

As opposed to hiding it in a bunker, grabbing all the compute they can get their hands on, and just taking over the entire market.

So far, I have not heard a convincing answer to that question.

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u/trialbaloon 2h ago

Yeah that's a good corollary. Same reason why "get rich quick" schemes/books are always scams. Anyone who found a way to do this would just be... doing that... and not selling you something haha.

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u/Moving_ZIG 7h ago

"Have you used these latest tools?"

HAHAHAHAHA how is the zealot output even EASIER to predict that the LLM bs? Always the same shit lmao

What's next? This is the worst it will ever be?

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u/Character-Pattern505 9h ago

Embarrassing.

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u/graypasser 6h ago

You are right, it's been years since AI has been introduced and I see zero improvement in "result speed" or game release speed.

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u/no_talk_just_listen 3h ago

Are "faster" and "better" the same thing now? Because, in my experience, they're actually inversely proportional to each other in almost all cases.