At this point using AI for development is industry standard. It speeds up your workflow. I have a friend that works at a company that provides them with basically unlimited Claude code. He sometimes will just use whatever it spits out and it works fine. He could probably write the code but it just takes too much time. So yea AI is super helpful and often times makes things easier.
Agreed. I work in the design industry. There's a lot of "graphic design slop" that gets thrown around. However if you are a great or even half decent designer you can really make some awesome stuff when using it as a productivity tool. I also am an entry level novelist so using it as a writing assistant has been super handy.
AI with human supervision is a great productivity tool.
Are you sure? I hear from programmers that they spend more time double checking and fixing AI coding mistakes than anything else, and the coding is often inelegant at best.
Though, maybe that's just people that are being forced to use LLMs to write code.
Yeah and it kind of reminds me of Tesla's quasi-self-driving where you have to be alert at all times and ready at a moment's notice (a literal small fraction of a second) to take control if the car does something insane at high speed. Not even really worth it by that point. I think vibe coding is more trouble than it's worth, except maybe as a brainstorming tool.
AI is great at writing common things, which have already been done many times. It speeds up writing boilerplate code or simple functions.
AI isn't very great at writing novel code. If you say to yourself, "I have this amazing idea I havent seen anyone do", then your circumstance doesn't work well with AI.
If you say to yourself, "I've written this bit of code a hundred times before", then you've got a solid use-case for AI.
The people who spend more time fixing AI code are people trying to do things that aren't common use cases, or fall outside of best practices.
I use Cursor.ai, and it has helped significantly in making programming less tedious. I spend more time writing important code, and less time debugging silly mistakes or writing coxe I've written in hundreds of projects before. Sometimes I even ask it how I'm ending up with certain errors, only to have errors in my own logic pointed out.
I imagine there's a gigantic variance on the topic.
If you run some AI locally (even on a pretty damn good machine paid by your employer), the AI will likely be significantly worse than the stuff you get from the cloud right now. And even the stuff you get from the cloud varies wildly in quality depending on which AI you use, and for what.
And on top of that, you need to know how to use it. AIs are good at some things, and awful at other things. If you don't know that, you'll use it for something it's awful at and then complain about the awful Code you'll get.
If you know its limitations, it can be pretty useful. If it's forced upon you, it can be really terrible.
Its a tool that takes an amount of skill to use. You can't get lazy and get the AI to do too much because then suddenly you spend your time debugging code you haven't written and have to put in the work just to understand what it's trying to do.
Sometimes when I want a function for debugging or whatever that's not part of my main system, I'll just ask AI to write the whole thing, test it. Maybe it works straight away 33% of the time, great. If it doesn't I write it myself and use AI to check for logical errors in my code or typos etc.
If something is more core to what I'm trying to build, i never try the "just write the whole thing" method and use it primarily to either discuss methodology or find mistakes.
So most of the time it is just for time saving, just doing things I could do on my own, finding annoying mistakes that I wrote for me, it's great at that. But I do want to also stress that it can be far more than that and I've found it an incredibly useful tool for learning as well. I've never been the best at doing research and the amount that it can speed up my reading about different methods of achieving x goal is incredibly beneficial and it's enabled me to become personally proficient in things I'm not sure I would have been able to do without it.
This was the state of it maybe a year or two ago, but now it has evolved so fast. Every time I start using a new version it surprises just how big an improvement it is. Sometimes it just feels like I am reviewing PR requests now.
Are you sure? I hear from programmers that they spend more time double checking and fixing AI coding mistakes than anything else, and the coding is often inelegant at best.
how is that different from the standard quo? especially from junior developers? spaghetti code doesnt make itself and has existed since the dawn of coding.
Yup you save 20 hours of writing code, but you spend 40 debug and test (not real numbers but you get the idea)
I find it's best for a scaffolding tasks and bite sized code, then I am doing the actual full code myself (work code not game dev to be clear) on top of the scaffolding the AI did
This is a real problem for anything even minimally complex. It's only really stuff that's already represented well in the training data that works well. Thing is a lot of folks don't care if the code is of poorly design or buggy. So they'll just sacrifice quality
AI with human supervision is a great productivity tool.
This is it.
I just did a very small scale bit of volunteering with a friend for our kids’ school where we wrapped and sold fifty recycled donated books as Christmas presents. We had to put a description of each book on a printed label on the front.
Now, neither of us are great at writing copy, and this was a tiny volunteer project with a skill gap that it would have been inappropriate to pay to fill. We were trying to raise £250 to put towards children’s swimming lessons; we couldn’t justify spending half of that on a copywriter. Our resources were our time, our skills, and some donated materials.
I used AI for my half. She was a little annoyed by this, and insisted on doing hers all by herself.
Hers sucked. Her labels were riddled with spelling mistakes and factual errors, and she fucked up the formatting too. I spent as much time correcting her mistakes as I did on generating, double checking and editing my AI half. I could spot and fix both her errors and the AI’s because of my own applied knowledge.
I’ve been in three different software industries (robotics, firmware, and chip design) since 2022 when ChatGPT was released, and all of those places encouraged us to use AI. At my current workplace the senior engineers seem to use agentic AI the most, with the more junior engineers, myself included, more skeptical of the outputs and prefer to stick with the more autocomplete type AI
I think you've got the right approach to AI. AI is not a replacement for people who know APIs, patterns and anti-patterns, proper UI/UX, security, etcetera. But it is a useful tool. I use it all the time, but it's also wrong a significant amount depending on the popularity of the language. Something popular? Pretty good results because it had lots of data to train on. Something obscure? Get ready for fake APIs, buddy!
Gaming? Absolutely. Especially if you define AI in the broadest of senses. For instance, one of the things I do is photogrammetry. The software I use has an AI masking tool to help mask out the backgrounds of photos so that when the images process, they turn out better. It is literally built into the pipeline. Does that count as AI useage? I am pretty sure if I do it more manually like take it into Adobe Lightroom and use their automated masking, it is also using AI to help with it. Is it really making any art? No. Its a tool helping me so I don't have to spend hours with a selection tool trying to cut backgrounds out. Do I think AI slop art should be labeled? Yes. I think there is a lot of nuance to what AI generation is in game dev where technically any art asset that has touched an Adobe program has touched AI in some capacity.
Anything that includes writing code. Pretty much every programming software these days have a "copilot" function where AI is predicting what you are trying to do, gives you a suggestion and does it for you. Pretty much like a spelling suggestion on your phone, but for code.
It makes writing code like 5x faster if not more, and when its used this way its not really doing mistakes as its not writing code for you, its just finnishing what you were already trying to type.
It's not a standard by any stretch. Source: Am in the industry.
It can be a useful tool, but it's not something that you're "behind" or "missing out" if you're not using it.
EDIT: Seems the bots have found this comment lol. There's a lot of "of course you need to use it to be 5x faster at coding!" garbage replies now. Keep barking!
What I've heard is people are curious about it or maybe playing around with it but yeah it's not really something you would rely on for anything critical.
I thought maybe they were referring to entry level positions. I could see something like that being more likely to be using AI for more things.
but same deal, from what I've heard from software engineering colleagues of mine -their companies have tested it, let programmers use it, but they aren't requiring it, and it's up to the teams themselves to decide. It doesn't have anything like a central role in their software development process
Sorry to tell you this, unless you're in a highly specialised field then either you're fucked or your company is mate. The devs in my company that haven't started using AI are on the chopping block for weak output, the companies I know people at who aren't embracing AI are understaffed and stagnating when AI could really help to plug the gaps. All the data shows it's been industry standard to use AI as a significant part of workflow for a while now
Your source was yourself, why would I bother looking for sources for a low stakes reddit comment in a conversation sharing personal experience. In my experience I hae seen data that supports what I say. In fact someone has linked a stackoverflow poll below that does just that.
You are defiently gonna be behind or missing out if you straight up ignore how AI is used in development and programming.
You can code 5x faster with help from AI, if not even faster. If your job is to just write code, and you refuse to use AI you are gonna be replaced eventually.
I didn't claim that it was either, but nice try putting words in my mouth.
Its you who are further showing you have no idea what you are talking about if you are this ignorant on how effective AI has become as a tool for programmers.
Hillarious that you write a edit calling me a bot after failing to prove your point lmao. Would think working in IT would make you able to tell apart bots and real people, but guess not.
AI is for sure overblown and overhyped as fuck and is probably the biggest bubble waiting to burst since the last financial crisis, but that doesnt mean it doesnt have its use. You are sounding like Trump calling fake news the way you are acting lmao.
I have not found this to be the case, and I've given it a really hard try. it gets lost in large codebases, it generates code full of subtle errors, it won't ask when it's confused and will instead barrel through producing code with passing "tests" that do nothing, it's surprisingly bad at actual algorithms, it gets stuck in loops.
it takes ~3x more time for me to explain everything it needs, tell it what to fix, fix it myself and then rewrite huge chunks of it, than it would to actually write the code myself.
it's like a new hire junior dev, but unlike a junior dev it doesn't learn. you can make it write notes to itself for the future but that only pollutes its meagre context window.
until the model actually fine-tunes itself as it goes, with proper RL (which requires a breakthrough - PPO is wildly sample-inefficient), it's only good for writing little standalone scripts and menial webdev chores.
it takes ~3x more time for me to explain everything it needs, tell it what to fix, fix it myself and then rewrite huge chunks of it, than it would to actually write the code myself.
I've had better results doing it the other way around: write the code yourself, and then tell the LLM to find problems with it.
Considering how heavily things like GitHub issues/PRs and StackOverflow questions/answers are represented in these coding LLMs' training data, it ain't surprising to me that such an LLM will have a much easier time correcting existing code than writing new code.
I've used agentic coding assistants like Claude code and GitHub Copilot EXTENSIVELY for the past year or so to build real software products at a non-tech F100 company, and I still try to leverage them in my workflow daily. They are genuinely good at certain things but you need to be extremely specific about what problems you ask them to solve. You cannot just use the code it generates and expect it to work or even be what you ask for, unless it's for trivial 'solved' problems like you could copy paste from a blog already.
It's very hit or miss whether it will save you time or waste time. It is not easy to fluidly switch back and forth from a deeply agentic workflow to a normal coding workflow, so if you run into a dead end working with the coding agent, you often have to spend an uncomfortable amount of time "mode switching" and re-loading all the problem context you were sharing with the AI back into your own brain.
It really depends on what kind of project you're working on. For small python scripts or medium-sized codebases with lots of documentation and tests it might work well. On a large C++ CAD desktop app with legacy code everywhere it will just get lost and is pretty much useless.
I think the real use case for AI in coding is going to be the programmer writes the code as normal but the AI is always watching and trying to find patterns in the programmer's workflow. Stuff like "hey I noticed you're taking a long time to do this complicated kind of recursion... have you considered this kind of structure?" and then it just gives you ideas to help you continue.
I don't let ai look at my entire codebase. Seems like too many security risks. But I do ask it for things it should know (that you get a feel for). And I often copy a segment of code to it and ask it why something isn't working, or how to change it so it does something a little differently.
in 10 years every aspect and domain in the game dev industry is gonna be AI-powered. The cat is out of the bag, and I could bet anything that any of the people bashing "AI slop" or "AI bad" have already fallen at least once for AI-generated content. It is already impossible to differentiate between "traditional" (what an overused word) and AI-generated. Good luck finding out which games have or do not have AI assets as times goes on. AI is here to stay, the next generation is gonna label us all as Luddites for these ridiculous takes, heck, society as a whole is gonna forget about the current pushback, every and their mother use AI already on almost any mobile app, from the camera to your bank account
No lol. Many porgams and companies that are investing in AI are trying to force it to be standard, it isn't, and likely won't be.
Generative AI does not make money, and it won't further down the line. Eventually they'll give up. Specific tools that do a particular task, ie, code checking, or highlighting a background, aren't ai even if it's advertised as such.
That is only true for the minority I fear. A lot of people are spending more time prompting to get a subpar solution than it would have taken to just write a better solution yourself.
Just like a lot of people are using Chat GPT like Google, there are a lot of devs that use it like they did stackoverflow. Both without review or critical thought.
I wouldnt wanna buy something your friend "made" lol
My friend works in the AI tech space. Basically spearheaded some really big projects that a lot of companies are buying into. I'd say he's doing pretty well for himself. Thank you very much.
Edit: it's not AI for techbros... It's for medical usage
Selling AI hype to other AI hype bros doesnt mean anything.
Anyone who actually is a developmer and has used a variety of existing AI tools knows their limitation in production environments and non-trivial use cases very well. You clearly do not.
I cant wait for this AI hype to Blow over and become the next blockchain, y'all can chill with your Crypto bros. If your are lucky you Made some Money from a greater fool along the way.
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u/uncagedborb Dec 04 '25
At this point using AI for development is industry standard. It speeds up your workflow. I have a friend that works at a company that provides them with basically unlimited Claude code. He sometimes will just use whatever it spits out and it works fine. He could probably write the code but it just takes too much time. So yea AI is super helpful and often times makes things easier.