> “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.

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.

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.

I don't think that matches what I'm seeing. People use AI, but hand written code is still the norm at my company

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 mean, there's a jump between "use AI tooling" and "you're not allowed to handroll code".

Whether Epic leadership themselves can understand that difference is something I'm not sure of, this might be non technical bigwigs speaking and being ignored at the lower end, but these orders taken literally are a "you can't use the letter A" level of dumb.

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.

Gamers and the gaming industry seem pretty against AI.

AI is generally unpopular with people.

"Just let AI write all the code" is actually reasonable if (and probably only if) almost all code of the project was generated straight from the prompt and never get checked (but it's function still might).

It's like asking AI to generate HTML pages, then just eyeball it to see if the result fits the spec, all without reading the actual code underneath.

Is it ideal and good quality? Hell no, your HTML page maybe 50MB large and comes with some extra tags that's not even in the W3C spec. But... if you observe the behavior of regular consumers and what cheap shit they got lied to paying for, you'll know that most of them don't know (or maybe even care to know) about quality.

Also there's the fact that most top LLMs can now generate code that works mostly correctly, enough to keep most consumers from complaining, all of sudden it sounded reasonable for a for-profit company to try out this route.

Again, I really don't like where this is going, but I can't ignore what I see.

Agreed, you've got to have had your head in the ground to be "stunned" by what is largely "industry standard" now.

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.