Yep. All AI has done for me is give me the power of how good search engines were 10+ years ago, where I could search for something and find actually relevant and helpful info quickly.
I've seen lots of people say AI can basically code a project for them. Maybe it can, but that seems to heavily depend on the field. Other than boilerplate code or very generic projects, it's a step above useless imo when it comes to gamedev. It's about as useful as a guy who read some documentation for an engine a couple years ago and kind of remembers it but not quite and makes lots of mistakes. The best it can do is point me in the general direction I need to go, but it'll hallucinate basic functions and mess up any sort of logic.
My experience is the same. There are modest gains compensating for lack of good documentation and the like, but the human bottlenecks in the process aren't useless bureaucracy. Whether or not a feature or a particular UX implementation of it makes sense, these things can't be skipped, sped up or handed off to any AI.
What are these bottlenecks specifically that you feel are essential?
Am trying to compare this to reports that people are not reviewing code any more.
When features and their exact UI implementations are being developed, feedback and discussions around those things.
Thinking of it, I haven’t seen as many “copy paste from StackOverflow” memes lately. Maybe LLMs have given people the ability to
1) Do that inside their IDEs, which is less funny
2) Generate blog post about it instead of memes
Python one-upped that a long time ago:
https://github.com/drathier/stack-overflow-import30 years ago (well, 28 years ago) we had the Perl Cookbook which was basically Stack Overflow but printed and without annoying moderators closing your questions. That and the camel book never even made it back to my bookshelf because they just always sat open on my desk.
> All AI has done for me is give me the power of how good search engines were 10+ years ago
So the good old days before search engines were drowning with ads and dark patterns. My assumption is big LLMs will go in the same direction after market capture is complete and they need to start turning a profit. If we are lucky the open source models can keep up.
> how good search engines were 10+ years ago
For me this is a huge boost in productivity. If I remember how I was working in the past (example of Google integration):
Before:
Now:This is what you'd use a search engine for 10 years ago.
The docs used to be good enough that there would be an example which did exactly what you needed more often than the llm gets it right today.
What language/engine did you try it with for gamedev? Just curious if it was weak in a popular engine.
It makes me wonder if the majority of all-in on AI folks are quite young and never experienced pre-enshittification search.
Also I see so much talk about "boilerplate" I can't help but wonder if people just never had decent text editors, or never bothered to customize them at all?
Aye, I know. Don't get me wrong, I knew that the majority of devs have always been worse than useless, but it's been disconcerting to see quite how much value folk are getting out of agents for problems that have been solved for decades.
Arguably this solution is "better" because you don't even really need to understand that you have specific problems to have the agent solve them for you, but I fail to see the point of keeping these people employed in that case. If you haven't been able to solve your own workflow issues up until now I have zero trust in you being able to solve business problems.
> the majority of devs have always been worse than useless
I disagree with "always".
This is only the recent wave of brogrammers who care nothing about the quality of the tech and are only in this industry for the gold rush.
They aren't inherently technically minded, they just know how to schmooze their way around and convince decision makers to follow capricious trends over solid practices.
Are you using Claude Opus 4.5/6?
If not, then you’re not close to the cutting edge.
Until two weeks from now, at which point you'll be hopelessly obsolete. I've seen this treadmill before and am happy to let it settle down first.