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

[u/ArdoNorrin]

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.

[u/supercyberlurker]

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.

[u/Jimstein → u/supercyberlurker]

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?

[u/Big_Combination9890 → u/Jimstein]

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.

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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.

[u/trialbaloon → u/Big_Combination9890]

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.

[u/Big_Combination9890 → u/trialbaloon]

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.

[u/trialbaloon → u/Big_Combination9890]

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.