If you don’t work in tech or software development, it’ll be very hard for you to understand what this tech is doing within that space.
As a game developer who has worked in professional environments for about 15 years, I can say this is the most dramatic shift in working patterns in my own lifetime. A lot of it has to do with the mechanics, some of which are physical limitations. Humans can type around 300 wpm, and maybe you can stretch that with an integrated environment that has some intelligence around auto complete and so on. However, AI can write at 6000 wpm. This is a modern John Henry problem: even the best programmer could not out write the AI, and I think the best programmer partnered with an AI will always beat the best programmer without it. In all honesty, humans make tons of mistakes, and programming has many patterns that reappear. I’m not sure if the human+keyboard is the best interface to write code. Likewise, an agent without clear context is somewhat worthless & will generate poorly architected projects.
I don’t think AI’s assault on software development translates to all industries. Agriculture may use AI to inform how they do things, and eventually, machines could then take that knowledge and run the farm for you. The reality is that’s coming, but maybe 20 years or something. It’s not today, not tomorrow, and not for a while.
Other industries have greater risk profiles compared to game development. If a game is programmed poorly, so what? If a medical app is programmed poorly, someone could die. Legal & financial apps programmed by AI have meaningful risk profiles as well. Sure, AI will impact them, but it must be slower due to the considerations at hand.
In December of 2025, I would have said an AI bubble is going to pop. Now, I’m really not so sure. It’s upending how I’m used to working, and I struggle predicting the future. A few years ago, I would say I had a good sense of how to position myself & my career for a long term plan. Now, colleagues of mine with more tenure than me say, “I can’t predict what’s next.” This is pervasive once AI tools enter your workflow. It really is magic at times, talking to a machine & watching a game come into existence.
This is buttressed by people showing me memes of ChatGPT screwing up the count of R’s in strawberry & other silly memes. The reality is the consumer models are different than the business models, and integrated agents (ones with access to a scripting environment) can be very powerful compared to a chatbot. It’s like comparing an e-bike to a car: they each get you somewhere faster than walking, but the scale of capabilities changes quite a bit.
AI will need to find new patterns outside of LLMs in order to actually create something like AGI. LLMs are a mechanical process, a regression towards the mean at scale, but its still very powerful. You could write code on punch cards, or in a language with a compiler. AI feels like it is a big step, in that way.
For my own area, my hopeful self wants to believe that this will enable new voices & projects to exist that would have required significant funding or hard, multi-disciplinary skills prior, or a combination of them. You can hack an unbelievable amount of the game dev process for what’s basically $100/mn, compared to what would have been a burn rate of +$100k/mn for a small dev team. That is transformational.
At the same time, my pessimistic self sees things like arcade.gov, which is a fucking travesty & embarassment to the medium, clearly vibe coded by some nepo-baby with connections. The Skyrim IKEA shelf meme mod, while funny, is a marketing stunt. More of these sort of projects are coming, where the game is a vehicle for something else (a product, a brand, a person). We had Sneak King & Cool Spot, but I mean the scale. I think those sort of projects will be normalized, or at the least, many more will exist than today. If you look up AI disclosures on steam, it’s turning into a hockey stick.
It feels like Pandora’s box has been opened. I don’t think it’s all smoke & mirrors. It will not impact all industries equally. It won’t fix humans being poorly intended or malicious actors seeking power & wealth. In many ways, they benefit the most (giving capital more access to creativity). It’s built on the largest scale theft of public good for profit. To me, that’s wrong, and the people/masses should be getting financial returns, collectively & universally, in exchange for what was stolen.
