alt Hacker News> “No more hand-written code” and that the game will be “generated with full AI workflows,” employees were reportedly “stunned,” which many hoped the news was some kind of sick joke.
The biggest surprise to me is that they're reporting that the employees themselves are surprised. I don't personally know a single dev who would or even should be "surprised" by this given the current industry state.
This doesn't even really seem headline news worthy. Practically every large company you've ever heard of is doing exactly the same thing right now. And I know very few devs who actually hand-write basically anything right now even if its just an unspoken truth.
At my job it's essentially the same. Everyone is actively encouraged to use AI to move faster and barely anybody writes code by hand.
Note this is not me making a value judgement saying this is good or bad, its just my observation. Having very little hand-written code is quickly becoming the norm.
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The statement did include that all art should also be AI-generated, which is a whole other thing. I'd also make a large difference between most code being AI-generated to start with, and actually not writing by hand at all anymore.
Agreed, you've got to have had your head in the ground to be "stunned" by what is largely "industry standard" now.
Or perhaps the fact that they were stunned should tell you that it's not quite as standard as you think, industry-wide...?
Like, why assume that your experience is necessarily the most authoritative, the most representative, when you encounter evidence that someone else's might be different?
I think you're the one in the bubble if you think no one is writing code.
Practically every large company? Is Epic not large? At the least, this team wasn't doing it. Reconsider your perspective.
Man even a cursory look of this site which is very much in the Silicon Valley / Big Tech world and very AI forward will tell you that the usage of AI is still all over the place.
I think you'd be also stunned about the custom scripting/tooling studios have built for themselves over the years. Like the Blueprint system of Unreal, and plenty of low-code scene editors and map editors.
Since games are fuzzy, it's also important that developers are in touch with the underlying systems of what makes the games games, and that requires understanding those systems -- easily done through writing and modifying them.