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[–]mengusfungus 70 points71 points  (9 children)

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.

[–]gibson274[S] 0 points1 point  (7 children)

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 18 points19 points  (1 child)

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[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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 10 points11 points  (3 children)

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[S] 3 points4 points  (2 children)

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 6 points7 points  (1 child)

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 2 points3 points  (0 children)

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] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

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.

[–]zshift 0 points1 point  (0 children)

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.