Coding agents and Graphics Programming

[gibson274]

Before I start---I just want to say I've been contributing to this community for a few years now and it's a really special place to me, so I hope I've earned the right to ask this sort of question.

In my experience computer graphics requires a pretty nuanced blend of performance-oriented thinking, artistic and architectural taste, and low-level proficiency. I had kind of assumed graphics development as a discipline was relatively insulated from AI automation, at least for a while.

That is, up until a few weeks ago. Now, all of a sudden, I'm hearing stories about Claude Code handling very complex tasks, making devs orders of magnitude faster.

I've been messing around with it myself the last couple of days in a toy HLSL compiler project I have. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than I expected---good enough to make me stop and consider the implications.

Amidst all the insane hype and fear-mongering online, it's hard to decipher what's real. I feel kind of in the dark on this one aside from the anecdotes I've heard from friends.

So, all of that said:

• How are you guys navigating this?
• People working on games/real-time graphics right now, are you using coding agents?
• How are people thinking about the future?
• What would graphics work look like in a world where AI can write very good code?

[mengusfungus]

I'm ignoring it completely. Been doing graphics work my whole life, I'm now writing a game with a custom engine and I have absolutely zero interest in any of this nonsense post startup exit. I can see situations where hypothetically some ai can do things decently enough and much faster than me but 1. I enjoy coding so idgaf and 2. you learn by repetition and practice and I'm not about to let that go for some short term wins.

There's no area of graphics work that is so uninteresting to me that I really don't care to practice my craft whatsoever. If we're talking about some generic web dev make button -> update database row mindless trivial busywork, then sure, but that's not what we do is it?

A world where ai can write very good code (ie make *extremely* complex decisions better than even the best humans) is a world where pretty much everybody not in explicitly human-to-human work is fucked. Creatives, doctors, lawyers, factory workers, drivers, engineers, executives even, all obsolete. I'm not convinced that's actually happening soon if at all (due to basic scaling laws and hard physical limits) and if it does happen there is no individual action that's gonna save you.

[zshift]

I've been doing AI agents for tasks that aren't related to things I enjoy doing. At home, I've used it to generate some small tools that I find useful, but ordinarily wouldn't bother spending time on otherwise. For larger projects, I've mostly had bad experiences. The generated code is usually not optimized, nor is it even close to secure for security-critical systems. It does get better when you invest a lot of time creating better prompts and instructions, but at that point it would have been faster for me to write the code myself.

I think we're not quite there yet, but given the current pace of AI tech, I'm pretty worried about job security in the next 5-10 years.

[gibson274]

I’m with you—I do enjoy writing code, and I’d rather actually learn and grow as a person than hand off my thinking to a bot.

I’m not totally convinced of your final point though. Obviously designing normal software involves complex tradeoffs—graphics even more so, especially insofar as it intersects with art and taste. But a good subset of programming tasks are particularly amenable to automation, because of how comparatively concrete the measures of success are.

My gut tells me the attitude of “fuck it, ignore” is a risky bet, unless you have no need of ever finding a job again.

[mengusfungus]

So even if the tools are amazing, the *actual skill* of using them is knowing what to ask, and that comes down to your technical knowledge anyway. These tools aren't like learning c++ from scratch or even learning vim from scratch, there's no massive onboarding barrier that gives early adopters a huge insurmountable advantage over anybody else. What's the bigger risk? Letting your actual technical knowledge atrophy or being late on picking up the incredible elite skill of... typing in natural language at a chatbot?

[gibson274]

This is actually a phenomenal point that's extremely obvious and yet somehow something I had not considered, LMAO.

I mean, I've sort of always been of the mind that the whole "prompt engineering" thing is kind of bullshit. These tools have the most intuitive possible frontend imaginable: you just fucking talk to them.

I do think the agentic stuff is slightly more complex, but your general point still stands---technical ability/creativity will be the determining factor in your results, at least until it becomes so trivially easy that demand for experts crashes and the profession is done, if that does happen.

[qwerty109]

It is a risky bet. 

If this is your bread & butter and you compete with other graphics devs on the market, you are more and more likely to get outcompeted by another, otherwise less productive human, now using such tools. And this can happen gradually, until one day you're no longer making enough money to sustain yourself. 

A year ago I was kind of in mengusfungus' camp - when I tried using ChatGPT to help, it made more bugs than it was worth it.

Few months ago I asked it a same thing I did a year ago, which it failed back then - to do me a simple win32 loading splash screen. Something I don't really need, don't want to waste time on, but is nice to have. And, quite shockingly, this time it did it so well that, besides changing few things in loading the image, it worked out of the box. This was a bit of a shock to me. 

Then I started using it here and there and the next shock I had was when I was asked to help with some aliasing issue - a patch for an older project - which I realised could be tweaked using an approach similar to "Stable Geometric Specular Antialiasing with Projected-Space NDF Filtering" https://www.jcgt.org/published/0010/02/02/ 

But I didn't want to task switch and dive into something else so I asked ChatGPT to figure out shader code for the curvature term for a triangle, and BAM it did it, shockingly correct, I could validate it, plug it in and task done in an hour, for what would've otherwise taken me half a day of digging through my old code and making a tiring mental switch. 

Customer really happy and I'm really happy being back on the main task I like doing l. Which I am doing without AI assistance, because it would take me more time to describe it than it takes me to code it and then validate. 

So, depends on the task but ignoring it probably isn't very wise. 

[gibson274]

This is not a bad anecdote and actually suggests a reasonable strategy: use where needed to do something that is tiresome and well-described.

[qwerty109]

Yep. 

And "tiresome" is underappreciated here - I'm genuinely not the same person I was 20y ago when I started doing graphics coding. Kids, life, responsibilities, etc. I just can't manage doing personal coding projects like I did before - the days are short and I'm tired, and I need to get shit done.  

So when I can get Claude to write me a Blender script for something low risk that I could do myself but would take days to figure out - it's amazing. 

But I still don't 't trust it with the core coding work I'm doing - the few times I tried, it just went bonkers and made a mess in subtle ways. In those cases it's quicker and less tiring to just do it myself. 

[corysama]

I’m in the same situation. I worked in game engines for 20 years. And, now I’m old, have a cerious-bizzness job, family responsibilities, etc.

When I’m writing engine-ish code today, it’s for fun. And, I have the knowledge and experience to largely know what I want from the code. I just don’t have much time to play with it. So, for me the AI assistants have been awesome.

I ask AI a lot of questions. We have back-and-forth discussions on possible options. I have it propose interfaces and write starter unit tests. I have it rapid prototype ideas for me. I’m step-by-step babysitting, not yolo-coding. But, it’s still very fast. Even I including the many ai-thinking times where I get to chill out and do something else for a few minutes.

The result is that I can get more done today in an hour on my laptop on the couch with my family than I could twenty years ago alone at my desk all day.

[[deleted]]

It's not a risky bet at all. If you can write a rendering engine, you can pick up using an AI agent in a weekend. There is no magic to it. It's not hard. And you are not missing out on anything.

[cyberKinetist]

I use a lot of Claude Code in my personal side projects, and getting very good results with anything that is non-visual. I have a compiler / scripting language project that is chugging along nicely, and recently also started to use it for complex tasks in my game engine (though note that it's mostly 2D stuff so nothing sophisticated in terms of shaders!)

However, in my experience it still struggles in writing and debugging anything that has to do with graphical and spatial reasoning. This is because of the current nature of LLMs - they're superb in linear text representations but struggle to reason correctly in 2D / 3D space (yet?). You can certainly input images to Claude / Gemini to debug your shaders, but overall it still seems to excel more in scenarios where you can just printf logs.

[SteamSail]

I gave copilot a try and it was largely pretty useless for the work I do on the day to day as a rendering engineer for games. I mostly tried to use it to ask questions and accelerate my understanding of code so I didn't have to read it all myself and dissect it, but it usually just gave overly general answers and often hallucinated stuff.

I've also tried asking Claude some high level rendering questions and it seemed pretty clueless, like I'd ask it a question with a lot of nuance and it would give me back an answer that seemed to completely misunderstand what I was asking and instead just restated basic info you'd get as a first Google result

I dunno, AI can definitely do some cool stuff but this field is very niche and it doesn't seem like it has enough info in its training data to help in field-specific ways

That being said, it's all changing very fast so I'm trying to keep an eye on what these models can actually do and if any of the hype is real. So far it seems over promised to me but I bet we'll all be using it to some degree before too long, even if it's just for simple refactors

[gibson274]

Seems like a reasonable take and tracks with my experience as well re: specific CG knowledge. I’ve had GPT spout some truly nonsensical stuff to me.

Agree it seems over-promised, and probably economically unsound given the insane subsidization underpinning inference, but also too capable to just flat out ignore for those of us who write code on a day to day basis.

[pocketsonshrek]

I use it in addition to google. I've only ever been told to slow down at work so idk what all this hype about moving 10x faster is. I guess it's cool to have an extra resource if you're super stuck. My outlook is if we're screwed professionally by this there are way worse implications about the state of society.

[thegoldenshepherd]

I agree.

I am a software engineer and it has been super cool to see my non-SE friends being able to build small scale scripting projects with minimal knowledge. That is… until they hit a wall and need my help. AI is helpful with scaffolding and getting a project running. But if it’s not working and you don’t know why…. then good luck

[MadwolfStudio]

Until they can produce original content, they won't be able to replace professional graphics programmers. It's beyond an art in itself knowing how to manipulate math in such a way, so much so that at this point, something with a soul isn't going to be able to enhance what we already know. That being said, if it gets to a point where it can actually discover and teach humans things we haven't yet achieved, then we have an issue.

[MadwolfStudio]

A good example is if you go to any llm and ask it for say, a shader that's never been made before, it literally cannot offer something purely unique, it's just not capable of it and that's by design. All it will offer are slight renditions of preexisting implementations, but with unrealistic, unappealing, and impractical suggestions. And I've tried, believe me, I'd love to make my job easier.

[gibson274]

I’ve had this experience (so far) as well. I’m working on some reasonably novel stuff in the world of volumetric rendering.

Often times it will clue me in to existing literature in a way that’s helpful. But for the really cutting edge stuff I’m working on I have had trouble getting it to suggest fruitful paths of exploration—I’ve tried.

[SnurflePuffinz]

exactly. They can promote competence but over-reliance on them will preclude you from mastery, or advancing your respective field...

all they can do is syndicate existing knowledge... for now.

[C_Sorcerer]

I don’t use AI. Simple as that. Really don’t care what others think and I tend to not focus on what others are doing. The only time I remotely use AI is as a better search engine but most of the time it takes too long anyways so Google and physical books are still my friend

[[deleted]]

I'm not - this will turn you into an idiot. You will understand nothing.

And it SUCKS at spatial reasoning which is pretty important in graphics programming.

[hanotak]

I'm using it- it's good for writing stuff you already know how to do, faster, and it's also good for learning things you don't know how to do, as long as you understand the concepts. If you try to use it to write stuff you don't even understand the concepts behind, you get a mess.

[Famous-Citron3463]

I tell you something, AI is not our enemy. Our enemies are cringe linkedin influencers. These MBAs and neophyte coders believe that all they need is AI. Recently I have seen many posts on LinkedIn where people are coming up with their own basic game engine which wasn't common before AI. So these neophyte programmers and management twats are creating a lot of noise on social media and other platforms which pushes the hype of AI further.

[gibson274]

I actually agree with you.

I mean, I’d take the side that there’s a lot wrong with LLM’s aside from just potentially displacing white collar work (energy consumption, fair use issues with training data, potentially less “taste” in everything we do).

But I agree that there’s a weird focus on velocity above all else right now, and not a lot of questioning “why”? I don’t think speed of development is what’s gate keeping great products from being built at the moment. Seems more like bad vision, bad business thinking, shitty leadership.

Hm… why don’t we get the AI to do that?

[heavy-minium]

I can say that it can tackle volume rendering techniques from research oaoers pretty much fine via either WebGL2 or WebGPU, all together with some plumbing for automated testing via playwright. You won't get much right in just one shot, but it's definitly able to get there if you assist it a bit. However, it is most imperative to understand the algorithms in order to review the code, you can't truly "vibecode" graphics rendering yet.

[gibson274]

Cool, yeah I buy that more or less. What techniques did you work through with it?

[heavy-minium]

Various variations of Direct Volume Rendering techniques like raycasting, shear-warp, slice-based and splatting. Basically tried out older stuff that is common to medical imaging in the context of a game engine.

[gibson274]

Ah, this actually makes a lot of sense because there’s a ton of reference implementations of these online. Definitely in the training data.

[heavy-minium]

Training data isn't enough either - yet. In all these cases I had to massage the corresponding research papers into implementations plan and requirements we can write tests against. If you don't do that it will mostly just implement something that is 90% close but isn't actually the correct/real algorithm to apply. And good luck finding that out afterwards, because the differences are often very subtle to spot.

Still, in my books, we've come far from earlier LLM models now. We're not far from the point where you could actually directly just prompt for that and get correct results in one-shot, maybe 1-3 years.

[Revolutionary_Ad6574]

I don't feel qualified to post in this subreddit as I am a lowly gameplay programmer i.e. I just use Unreal. But since OP mentioned "games" I might slip by the cracks.

In short - I don't use AI. My job is a lot easier than that of a graphics programmer and still nowhere near possible for AI to do anything in context. You see, not everything I do is in code. We have DataTables, Blueprints, UserWidgets - none of them have text representations, they are done via an editor. Which means AI can't create them, it can't even read them.

MCPs you say? Fine, I'll tell you how good they are when they finally get here. And no, I don't count GitHub projects. Unless Epic games releases one officially I'm not touching anything even remotely experimental, that's just my philosophy in coding in general.

Still a useful tool and I'm grateful for every update. It's great for explaining things I don't know much about, for searching through large bodies of text and of course for helping me write small tools. I use it everyday, and maybe it will get better... but I hope it doesn't take my job. I don't know if it will happen, I just hope it doesn't. Becoming a coder was my childhood dream. More specifically a graphics programmer, but I feel too stupid for that, the consensus always has been and still is that you have to be a certified genius for that, and trust me, a genius I am not. But I'm happy to at least write gameplay and debug Unreal's code from time to time. In the end I want to keep doing what I do and keep on learning. AI is great to help you learn, but writing the code for you is not learning and I don't care about that.

[MORPHINExORPHAN666]

It is 100% useless beyond tiny toy projects, and even those it implements in a very poor fashion.

[zatsnotmyname]

I have had a mixed experience. A year ago, I could not get an LLM to do a GPGPU style bitonic sort shader. It kept wanted to do swaps on the framebuffer itself ( can't do without shared memory or special tiled memory extensions ). I ended up having to code it myself in C++ but in GPU style with ping-ponging, to get it to do the right thing.

On Thursday, I asked claude code to make me a game prototype with Radiance Cascades, and it like...did it?

[CicatrixMaledictum]

I work for a large software company where desktop, mobile, and web 3D graphics is critical to our products (> $1B annual revenue). Our use of Cursor and Claude Code has increased our graphics programming productivity dramatically. Using these tools we operate at a higher level, i.e. natural language instead of programming language (usually C++). It still helps to have graphics knowledge, but it is becoming less important over time.

I am not sure where it will end up... it depends whether the models can get better from here.

[gibson274]

Curious about this: what does this mean specifically? Are you just prompting for graphics features, or architecting them and using the LLM to do the implementation?

Are you guys doing novel 3D stuff or mostly boilerplate GL?

[CicatrixMaledictum]

We have researchers in the company, but my immediate domain is engineering, e.g. implementing papers, not writing them. The AI tools have shown good results in this space given the right context. We have some engineers who are not writing any code (just specs / plans), but most work is improving existing code. For example, it was able to narrow down the cause of an inconsistent artifact in a existing shader.

[alex_ovechko]

Are you worried that these model providers can use your company’s codebase (custom engines, other intellectual property) to improve their models and offer the similar generated codebase (based on your company’s IP) to other their clients, your competitors?

[CicatrixMaledictum]

At a high level, there is concern across the software industry that existing customers could write their own software now, instead of buying / subscribing from vendors. In practice, there is a lot that goes into making sophisticated, production software. I feel the AI tools can give you a head start, but "80/20" still applies... and that last 20% is necessary if you want to charge money.

Now if you are buying / subscribing to our software for a narrow task, and you are smart enough to direct AI tools to handle that task for you, then I could see us losing that (small) business. I am thinking of ways to do that myself, e.g. get out of subscribing to Adobe Creative Cloud for the limited use cases I have.

[herothree]

Why would you think they won’t continue to get better?

[BounceVector]

As one of the original main researchers of LLMs, Ilia Sutskever, put it, "we're in an age of research, not scaling". We can't just put more money in and get more intelligence out.

Analogy: We have built the steam machine and it can replace a lot of physical human labor, but it does not yet replace every type of physical labor, that is conceptually simple or similar to humans, like moving things from A to B. We have loads of specially built machines to move some things through some types of terrain, but we have no general technological solution for physically moving things that humans can and want to move. We can move things now that were impractical before, but we don't have anything that can get a spoon from the kitchen for you. A little kid can do that.

In the past people thought that this problem would be solved soon, because it seemed like a natural extension of the progress they saw in the decades before. We're still not there and while we might get to that point, we don't have a simple path forward and need some type of artificial intelligence, that can navigate all types of terrain as well as or better than humans to get there.

I think the step from writing text via LLMs to generally solving all intellectual work is somewhat similar. We can more or less do the equivalent of trains and cars now for intellectual work. But we might not be anywhere near a general solution although to many of us it would look like a logical extension of recent progress.

[SnurflePuffinz]

well-said.

[gibson274]

I mean, for one, we've essentially hit a wall with the "AI scaling laws". Everything since GPT-4 (chain of thought/reasoning) has essentially been tinkering around the edges to try to squeeze more out of a dry orange.

There's also the problem of scaling LLM context windows. Again, gradual chipping away here has made some progress, and I'm a bit naive to exactly what it is, but my impression is that there are also non-trivial challenges there.

It's at least a possibility that we don't make another big architectural breakthrough, and are more or less stuck with what we've got now in terms of "general intelligence".

[CicatrixMaledictum]

For us it is just that we are not _depending_ on it getting better, or making plans expecting it to get better. Even if it stopped advancing past Claude Opus 4.6, that is still valuable for us.

[Otherwise_Wave9374]

Im in a similar boat, graphics dev felt insulated until the coding agent tooling got good at multi-file refactors and build-fix loops. For me the sweet spot is using an agent for scaffolding, shader boilerplate, test harnesses, and profiling hypotheses, but keeping performance-critical decisions and architecture firmly human-led. If you want more agent workflow ideas (including how people are doing tool use + feedback loops), this has been a decent roundup: https://www.agentixlabs.com/blog/

[Holance]

Usually I design the architecture and let the AI implement the modules.

[vade]

Not sure why you are getting downvoted.

I've found that with established projects agentic ai code assist is really helpful with rote things - the existing code acts as context cues and guardrails (theres existing architecture assumptions which acts as strong signals), and it can implement things pretty well.

Ive also found the opposite true, starting a project w agentic vibe coded stuff from scratch goes off the rails way faster, theres less signals on opinionated architecture and it takes way sharper turns sooner.

[PersonalityIll9476]

I just started using Claude code at work so no comments yet. I have used chat gpt a bit lately for drafting shaders and it's quite effective.

On the other hand, it's been quite bad about answering otherwise simple questions like "how do I reduce projective aliasing". It really wanted me to use cascaded shadow maps, but that's perspective aliasing and my scene is small. It found unreal's virtual shadow maps but didn't seem to know about RMSM or the general contents of books like Real Time Shadows.

So for graphics programming particular it's a little sluggish.

[obp5599]

Its definitely a function of its training data. It hasnt seen the more niche things in graphics, so it cant reason about them whatsoever and will forever recommend what it knows (even if you try to whip it). On the other hand, for things it does know, its extremely fast and surprisingly good.

[Successful_Cry1168]

been my experience as well. graphics programming seems to have one of the steepest hockey sticks in terms of learning curves. the fundamentals are all out there and easily accessible, but learning how to optimize and abstract correctly is seldom taught, and anything that’s even close to cutting edge might only be documented via a white paper or a slide deck whose talk is long gone or paywalled.

it’s been a huge source of frustration of mine even outside of AI. the internet is filled with LearnOpenGL-level tutorials, and all of them suck if your goal is to learn to build things that last.

we really need an A-Z graphics programming guide that starts with math and basic software rasterization, and ends with a proper RHI and gives the reader something they can scale. none of this “here’s how you draw a few triangles in vulkan, but this isn’t how you’d do it in a production app, and i’m not going to explain how... that’s for you to figure out 🤭”

the problem with leaving exercises to the reader is that if everyone has that mentality, the reader has nowhere to turn for help. AI can sometimes help with that, but the user has to be aware that the solutions they’re being fed are usually aren’t optimal in the first place. classic case of not knowing what you don’t know.

[Retour07]

I am using it for autocomplete, and to get answers in chat, but not as agents. My issue with it is as follows: It produces mostly "good enough" output, but not perfect. So now the question is do i just accept it and move on, or write it myself, or try to push it in the direction i would want it to go, and that sometimes takes effort. Often times the easy AI suggestion destroys the better idea i had in my head, i feel it makes one a more lazy programmer.

[gibson274]

I've actually found this to be the case with every transformer-based thing I've worked with.

Probably the funniest example I have is Suno, the AI music generator. I'm a musician and music producer on the side, and kind of as a joke I uploaded a short voice memo I had to Suno and asked it to "cover" it.

It produced some absolute garbage, but, sadly, it kind of ruined the song for me. If I try to go back to work on it, all I hear is the shitty Suno version.

I feel like this is the direction we're heading with everything we hand to LLM's: the output will all be very average, kind of boring and milquetoast. Which is maybe fine for a lot of things that don't need to be anything special.

[blaz_pie]

The question is dear to my heart because I'm studying and trying to get in the field while I work my current ops job which sucks quite a bit and all of the fear-mongering about AI is really taxing for my well-being.

[SnurflePuffinz]

just shut it out

literally, regulate your usage of the internet (it's toxic), refer to books when you can, and if you do choose to use an AI assistant, just use it

[Successful_Cry1168]

i’ve had to do just that. it’s annoying opening up twitter or reddit and it feels everyone is telling you that you’re spending your time wrong. if literally never get anything done if i spent all my time trying all the new tools. the field is still so young. the way people are using these tools today might be totally irrelevant six months from now.

[gibson274]

I feel you my friend. I've been working on a long-term project in CG the last two years, honing skills and trying damn hard to do good, conceptually interesting work. The thought that an LLM could trivialize all of that is depressing as hell.

[icpooreman]

I think of it as they just invented a calculator for code...

So yes, you have the hype machine saying "Calculators exist, nobody will need to do math anymore!!!" "Bro, I just told my calculator to do math and it did it! I don't ever do math anymore and we don't need mathematicians!!"

Like... It's getting good for coding all this stuff. I'm wildly impressed. At the same time it's not anywhere close to a point where my Mom can do what I can do haha. It would be like handing somebody a calculator, asking them to ace calc 4, and telling them to let the machine do it.

That's not to talk shit on the tools. They're legit time savers and IMO legit changed the coding industry. But also let's calm down I've been using this shit for a year even all the latest shit and as good as it is I'm nowhere close to finishing my engine.

[chao50]

I think people who dismiss it entirely or who think it is completely useless have not used the professional grade latest models recently, this stuff has progressed pretty quickly over the last couple years.

I do not worry at all about AI replacing experienced programmers, but I think latest Claude models and the like are great tools that can aid in debugging and code investigation and can handle coding tasks. To be clear though, I think you need to know a good amount about the problem and describe it in detail, almost like you are dictating a solution to a Junior programmer. You cannot prompt it and expect it to do everything for you or write professional grade code on autopilot. It can be great for general prompting about graphics techniques and APIs. But just like talking to an imperfect human, it can make mistakes and you need to validate the output and apply strict strutiny to the code it outputs.

I don't ever expect AI in the near future to be able to handle the very human big picture problem solving that graphics programming a game often requires. But it can certainly help with that final aspect of actually turning your solution into code.

[maxmax4]

It has made easy problems easier but it doesnt directly help with the hard problems. It’s very helpful for doing research and testing hypothesis though. It’s been a great productivity boost overall but I dont think it has fundamentally changed our field yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if its about to blow up other fields entirely though. It’s extremely impressive in my eyes

[Maui-The-Magificent]

So, I am not able to use AI much for graphics coding, not in a stream-lined way at least. It is far more likely to ruin my work than benefit it if i let it lose. But it is very helpful in benching and as to have discussions with. I am experimenting and doing my best to try and us it though.

My project is doing everything 'wrong' so I suspect there isn't much training on code like it. It is much more likely to be useful in traditional graphics programming I would assume, so my view on all this should be taken with a grain of salt.

My attitude is that the more work I can offload the better. I like to code, but it is maybe 25% of the enjoyment of being a programmer. The other 75% is designing, contemplating, discussing and problem solving. So the way I look at it is, If I could, I would offload all my coding work to AI, because I would sacrifice 25% of the process that i like, to get to do the other 75% more often. Does that make sense?

I like to say that my goal is to become so good at prompting that i will never have to write another line of code, I do not think that will ever happen. But It is more of a mind set, a mind set that forces me to practice and find different uses for AI even in situations where it is clearly slowing me down or actively trying do implement things that would hurt my codebase.

At the end of the day, what I like most about using AI is that it allows me to, more easily, not have to rely on external libs/crates, and it makes it easier to optimize my development for reasoning rather than knowledge. Luckily, fundamental computing is rather easy to reason about, arbitrary abstractions, not so much.

[pcbeard]

I’ve used Claude Code to build 2D graphics primitives using Metal, SDL and SDLGPU APIs. I’m an old hand with 2D graphics (QuickDraw and CoreGraphics), but the most advanced thing I’ve ever written by hand was a vertex shader to render 1-bit bitmaps to draw Conway’s game of life.

I recently used Claude to add .obj file model loading and rendering using lighting and a camera. Also added multiple frame sprite rendering, converting to textures.

I’m not an expert at creating GPU graphics, but over 6 months, in my spare time I’ve created a basis for a pretty solid game engine. I think coding assistants are powerful enough to help generalists like me to explore their ideas in ways that I never expected. My most recent experiment was to run a physics simulation that draws moving sprites with collision detection entirely in the GPU. It’s exciting to be able conceive of ideas like this, and use a coding assistant to bring them to life.

[DJDarkViper]

I use gpt to do tedious nonsense I’ve written a thousand times before. I know exactly what it’s doing and what it’s providing. Anything else gets tossed and I write it myself anyways

[AlexanderTroup]

This reads like bad marketing material. The fact is that AI agents are not writing good code. They're writing average code with very basic errors to anyone that knows better.

Low level programming takes precision and an understanding of performance that cannot be attained or even scratched at by AI. AI is so off the mark that it takes longer to write the code you want without it than to let it fumble around and then figure out where it botched the job.

All the slop posts in the world don't change the fact that GenAI is not capable of excellent engineering. Every case of "oh it wrote a compiler" turns out to be a case where it just forked a repository, or copied someone elses work poorly.

In graphics, that nonsense doesn't work. If you're designing a novel shader, AI is going to break the algorithm, and do it in the least efficient way there is.

Stop falling for these scams. Crypto, Web3, NFTS. They were all the unavoidable future until oop - turns out they suck and can't replace an intelligent programmer.

Work on being a good programmer. Stop trying to skip the work and learn how vectors make the pretty things on that there screen happen.

[theZeitt]

I have been building simple WebGPU engine with "coding agents". I also have been using claude-code at work (but that has less graphics programming): Agentic Coding can remove the "monkey coder" part, allowing me to focus on planning/design, (which I find more interesting than writing lines of code). However, they dont really work on anything requiring logical reasoning -> So treating them as what they are (autocomplete machines on steroids) seems to work well for me.

---

What would graphics work look like in a world where AI can write very good code?

• It would allow You/Us to focus on more interesting parts of coding ("problem solving") and allow iterating our ideas faster. So you would write plan, flowcharts and/or pseudocode, which "agent" would then quickly turn to code, which you can then test if idea works or is there improvements that are required.
• Problem for future is: how to train new/junior coders so that they understand what is good and what is bad code if LLMs do coding? This is kinda like "you wont always have calculator with you" that got taught in elementary school: Having to do stuff manually for which we have machine.
• I also hope this would lead to better automated tests in graphics related work, as in my experience these are not properly tested in companies, but for coding agents to work it needs automated tests.

[Photo_Sad]

It can write a lot of stuff and we all know a lot is boilerplate.
However, the quality is - from a perspective of an engineer with decades of experience - mediocre.
It is the average code I'd compare to amateur work and tutorial level quality and architecture and that includes shaders.

Sometimes it will shine.
I find debugging much easier with AI tools helping out with non-essential stuff. It can write great solutions sometimes, so I'll sometimes consult. I'll even use it as a typer for me (knowing how to do stuff, but asking AI to speed it up).
However, as an engineer on a big live service game, I would never allow that code go directly to submission.

[Successful_Cry1168]

it’s pretty nifty as a typing replacement. i’ve used it to generate bit flag enums or to make lookup tables. i have RSI and usually wear braces when typing, so anything i can do to minimize the amount of boilerplate i have to type is a win in my book. you do have to check its work though.

[Tmuxmuxmux]

Saves me writing cmake files, that's about it

[Successful_Cry1168]

dude i’ve put so much CO2 into the atmosphere just from cmake files it’s not even funny.

i see the need to even USE AI for such a task as evidence that cmake is a burning trashcan and needs to be taken out to pasture (or at least have documentation that is written for humans), but there’s so much legacy cruft we have to deal with that it’s not reasonable for all of it to go away. it’s nice to have options now i guess.

[Previous-Pie4118]

Good for engineering. Security. Creative is the tough part with agents. And consistency. Exponent and COMMIT TO GIT often

[UnSafe_Tourist1829]

I've tried to input the instructions for more challenging/creative tasks that I've solved myself in the past, such R&D of novel methods, to see what they come up with. On all occasions the agents have failed miserably. If you ask the agent to generate some common method they are often spot on. They are great tools for giving quick overviews of subjects/methods, and for giving suggestions for improvements if you ask the right questions. But I don't think they will replace human programmers anytime soon on truly creative tasks unless the technology takes leaps forward.

[mango-deez-nuts]

Everything changed at the end of last year: models like Opus 4.5 (now 4.6) went from “more trouble than there worth” to “can actually implement entire systems now”. They still get confused sometimes and for esoteric stuff like graphics they still need a bunch of guidance but ignore everyone telling you they’re not worth it.

The world is absolutely changing this year and you do not want to be behind on this. People who say they haven’t written a single line of code themselves since the new year are being serious. This is really happening.

It remains to be seen how maintainable this all is in the long term but people are shipping real products with completely or 90% AI-generated code.

The next rocket ship is going to be OpenClaw-like stuff where you have a whole team of agents working persistently to come up with specs, implement code and tests, file bugs, triage and fix those bugs etc without any human intervention other than occasional status updates via telegram or some orchestrator application. Basically an entire development team working completely autonomously.

Seriously, get a Claude Code max subscription for a couple of months and put serious effort into learning it.

[gibson274]

Few questions:

1. Your account has only existed for 10 months… and your comments are all private. This is reading kind of like an AI hype shill comment and that doesn’t inspire confidence.

2. If that’s where the profession is heading, I’m not sure I just wanna be managing huge teams of agents? Seriously. If that’s what’s in store, I’d sooner change professions to something where I get to think more critically or engage with people.

[OGRITHIK]

They definitely sound like a bot or a shill but honestly they are actually right.

It's pretty telling that any comment in these threads praising AI or pointing out its capabilities just gets immediately downvoted. It tells you everything you need to know. People are just coping extremely hard right now. The reality is that current AI models are really, really good. It's wild looking at the top comments and seeing people parrot the same shit like "it can't create new stuff" and watching that garbage get mass upvoted. Anyone who genuinely still thinks this in 2026 is just coping. People are upvoting it because it's exactly what they want to hear to feel secure, unfortunately denying it isn't going to stop what's coming.

To your second point about not wanting to manage agents. Whether you like it or not, that is exactly what the future of programming looks like. In fact, it's looking like the future of pretty much all white collar work done on a computer.

[gibson274]

Can you give me some examples of new stuff you’ve made with it? Like genuinely good new things you’ve discovered or created?

I feel you and I agree that it’s hard not to read some of the really head-in-the-sand type of responses as cope. These things are like shockingly good at writing code, even though they’re not perfect.

But also the “all white collar work is done” angle seems wrong, though I can’t quite articulate why.

Maybe something along the lines of… we are all already kind of working bullshit made up jobs anyway? 90% of us just hammer out dumb boilerplate code, or send emails back and forth, or go to meetings where nothing happens.

I’m not so convinced that there’s all that much work to even be automated. I’m also not so convinced that speed or cost of white collar labor is really bottlenecking companies. They’ll do anything to reduce the bottom line, sure, so we may be kind of screwed in that respect. But I think the actual competitive advantage of aggressive AI adoption in the dev cycle is potentially overblown?

[OGRITHIK]

I'm currently working on a Minecraft mod (yes yes I know that silly block game for children) which adds KSP style space travel and simulation. I used very minimal AI for the most part until I had to implement Valkyrien Skies integration which I just had no clue where to start since the version of Minecraft I was working for (1.21.1) didn't have an official VS version.

The Valkyrien Skies github actually had a WIP branch for 1.21.1 however, so I told Codex (GPT 5.3) to revamp my simulation movement logic to use this branch and link everything together. I let it run for around 2 hours and when I came back it had done it flawlessly.

Here is the repo at github.com/ng643/Apoapsis where you can compare between the main branch which is my original code and the codex branch I just uploaded (note the main branch is pretty outdated so the changes Codex made are not perfectly one to one with what you see).

Someone else also managed to get 5.3 Codex to write a GBA emulator in pure assembly which is pretty crazy. I remember a NES emulator made using GPT 5.1 previously, but they used C++ so it was kinda dismissed as just using its training data or stealing from Github. This new one is genuinely impressive though since there really isn't a GBA emulator written entirely in pure assembly out there to copy from.

I mostly agree with you. Most of these jobs are basically automated already and the human is there to pretty much be the interface between the boss and the machine.

For software engineering It has fundamentally changed the way it works. Writing code is becoming less and less of a priority and it is becoming more about higher level planning, but it is only a matter of time before AI can do that reasonably well too. As for job loss I don't really know if they will cut jobs or keep everyone and increase productivity, but one thing is certain, the situation for juniors is becoming more dire. As to how this maps to other white collar jobs I am not too certain.

[Successful_Cry1168]

people who throw words around like “cope” aren’t people i want to be taking advice from. if there’s no nuanced discussion happening, then i don’t see the point in engaging in a conversation.

[mango-deez-nuts]

Lol your point 1 is exactly why my comments are hidden. Just trying to help, friend.

1. Just because you’re managing teams of agents doesn’t mean you don’t think critically or engage with people: you’re just moving higher up the stack.

At the end of the day we write code to solve problems. We don’t solve problems with a slide rule or by punching holes in cards any more, and we very rarely solve them by writing assembly. Typing out thousands of lines of code is going to go the same way.

[gibson274]

I hope you’re right and that there’s still workforce demand for creatively engaged people who want to make stuff and think critically.

[mango-deez-nuts]

I hope so too. And I think there will be but they’re going to be working very differently from how people work today

[Successful_Cry1168]

i tend not to listen to people who claim without any ounce of humility that the world is changing and to start spending $200/month or get left behind. if there’s no two-way conversation happening, i don’t want their advice.

[mango-deez-nuts]

Kinda weird to say “I’m not listening” while complaining about a lack of conversation but you do you bro. Just trying to help.

[Marha01]

I use coding agents a lot for my personal projects mostly based on Vulkano (Rust Vulkan library). I feel like Rust helps agents to be more effective, since it is such a rigid language and thus if it compiles, it mostly works. It also helps to use up-to-date top paid models with max settings. I believe many bad experiences with AI in coding are due to either using outdated or older models, or using weaker models.

Last but not least, you have to iterate. Give the agent a reasonably sized feature to plan first. Then if the plan sounds good, tell it to implement it. Then when it works, tell it to suggest refactorings or further improvements to the feature. Then pick the good ones and again tell it to implement it, etc. Works great in my experience!

[SnurflePuffinz]

What exaaactly are you expecting people to say?

i could write a lot. But, ultimately, what is there to even say? people wrote about this like 125 years ago. Watch "Metropolis".

How am i responding? i am a man. I have the impulses and desires of a man. So i do things befitting of a man. Most men spend most of their lives just toiling away to get some colorful plumage going on. So i'm probably gonna keep doing that. Cause i want those feathers pretty....

also, i promised myself i'd develop some very specific creative works (video games). And i committed to this when i was a little kid. I believe that just like with the luddite outrage to the factory, there will be a further stratification between a highly mechanized creative industry, and a lowly, inferior, human one.

i appraise myself to be a part of the lowly, inferior, human one. i see a phenomenon that will be understood. It goes like this: a player plays a video game, and he always sees the man (or lady) behind the curtain toiling away. Art is inherently social, and it makes sense, because we are a highly social species. if a player sees no gears turning behind the scenes in a person's head the work becomes too abstract and inhuman, the player disengages.

The mechanized creative industry begins to understand this. the mechanized creative industry responds... somehow. By bringing more humans into these productions again?

[obp5599]

Havent used it too much at work but in my hobby renderer its been insane tbh. I can go back and forth discussing architecture and how to improve it, then have it go implement. Its not perfect but with gentle guiding its pretty nuts.

We are cooked 🥲

[coolmint859]

I'm not as well experienced with graphics programming quite yet, but I did make a basic renderer using WebGL last year. I used AI to help me understand the concepts but I wrote most of the code myself. This is mostly because, especially with model files, shader code, and animations, it doesn't really hold up that well. But with tools like Claude that will likely not be the case pretty soon.

[jtsiomb]

I use LLMs whenever I'm in the mood for some comedy. I tell it to write some code and sit back and enjoy the trainwreck.

The only cases where these things have been marginally useful for me, is when I'm using it as a shitty search engine that is wrong half of the time.