Caltrops - Rants





	[quote name="Freaking Meatbags"]Here is what thedereksmart .. DEREK SMART has to say about it. [quote]Right. So, the past few months, I have been using @ClaudeDevs to refactor and modernize one of my soon-to-be-released games (UCCE30 aka The Lyrius Conflict), alongside a complete port (from an engine that Microsoft deprecated some years ago) of another [unreleased] game, Line of Defense, which, at about 90% complete, I had put on indefinite hold after deciding that porting to UE was more trouble than it was worth - not to mention the time and costs involved. It's been an eye-opening experience - to say the least. As a tier 1 legacy dev who has been around since the curtains went up on game dev, written engines, tools, backends, frontends - even an entire AI language (AILOG) from back in the day when AI wasn't even a buzz word etc, I have come to believe - with uncompromising certainty - that we're all fcked. I am over 60 yrs old now, not as dev sharp as I used to be, and now on the cusp of retirement that seems to come up just after I wake up at night in a cold sweat muttering "One last ride..." much to the chagrin of my wife. AI isn't new to me, neither is tech, so I don't take it lightly when I say this: All the noise and apprehension around AI "killing us", "taking our jobs" etc. aren't to be ignored. It's a real and present danger - for the most part. AI isn't going to kill you. People with access to AI are going to be the ones to do that; in much the same way that some would opine that "Guns don't kill people, and that people with guns kill people". I am pretty sure that when cars were invented most people weren't running around clamoring about how many people were going to get killed. Or something like that. In the past few months since I started using agentic tools for dev work, I haven't written a single line of code that I could call my own. And I didn't even notice. In fact, most of my dev time is spent in code review, reading and approving discovery and plan files, designs etc. - all created by a team (I built my own - more on that later) of agents working 24-7. I end my day, go to sleep, wake up in the morning - and have a slew of agentic code work to review, approve etc. Even as I write this, an analysis of my legacy code this agentic team has worked on and which I had written over the years, indicates that over 75% of it is gone. Just gone. As in, I can't even diff against them any more without pulling out hairs. When, after writing up your procedures, constraints, tools use etc. you say "Go modernize and refactor this repo. Work autonomously, don't delegate to subagents and don't ping me unless you've blown something up", that's precisely what's going to happen. And with each new update, bar the occasional snafu (Opus 5, I'm looking at you!), they've gotten quite good at it. One important thing that I did notice is that the same flaws that some of us devs have whereby we tend to overcomplicate simple code - well, AI agents do that too. But in the worse way possible because they have access to a wealth of knowledge that normal humans don't readily have access to. For example, I would never think of porting my DX9 basic graphics engine to DX11 when I have better things to do and DX9 "just works"; let alone DX12. So, I tasked 2 agents to do it. Those nutters decided that it was better to go from DX9 to DX12 - bypassing DX 11.1 entirely. Then the lead posted a nice, snarky message as it was ploughing through. It went something like : "Removed DX9 and D3DX helpers. FFP removed, all legacy shaders converted and working. Now to run DXVK via RenderDoc to check the DX12 terrain rendering with DX11.1 as fallback." I didn't even blink. I just chuckled - and kept on scrolling through the output (I work exclusively in VS Code), safe in the thought that 40 years ago, I would have broken out in a cold sweat with the full knowledge that I was about to become obsolete. They ported a legacy game that I last worked on back in 2010. They did it in 3.8 days. That would normally have taken a single dev at least 9-12 months at 1000x what it cost me in about 4 months of session tokens. Yes - if you're a game dev (coding, art etc) and turning up your nose at the prospects of what agentic dev work brings to the table, while caving to the whims of a finicky install base who, at any given day have no clue how you pay your bills, you're fcked. Get on board or quit now and go find another career. You - quite literally - have no choice now. Go forth and embrace the suck, my dev friends.[/quote] <a href="https://x.com/dsmart/status/2103290258892738854">https://x.com/dsmart/status/2103290258892738854</a> He's a good hang. His games have had a reputation for bugs, this is probably great for him. [/quote]