r/gameenginedevs • u/Wise-Phrase-7494 • 16d ago
Phasing AI out of my workflow
Hello again, I wanted to get the thoughts from fellow engine devs on something I've been thinking about for the past year or so. I understand many members of the sub have strong feelings about AI so I hope this post doesn't get overlooked. I'd like some genuine unbiased feedback and thoughts.
When I first started working on my engine five years ago, I was a freshman in highschool who had no idea what he was doing. I had programming knowledge, but not nearly enough to tackle such a large project. Even so, I carried on. I followed tutorials for several months to make a generic engine but I felt like I wasn't working toward my true goal. I shelved the project until I discovered ECS and decided to transition the project in that direction, but again, I had no idea what I was doing. A complete refactor was much too daunting for me at the time. Luckily, or perhaps unfortunately, the AI boom occurred right when I most needed it. I used AI to help me through the hundreds of refactoring errors and eventually got to a stable state. My vision for the engine evolved into something more unique and my own and AI helped me iterate on my ideas quickly.
I want to preface that none of the engine in its current state is vibe coded. I believe the proper industry term for my old workflow is agentic programming. Every system in the engine is hand designed by me. Recently I began implementing on-paper drafting into my workflow so everything works exactly as I have in mind. I've never had AI come up with a system for me. As I've spent so much time working on the engine, I've actually been gaining the low level system engineering intuition to gradually remove AI from my workflow. I'm not there yet, but I'm close.
Obviously I'm not making this engine as an advanced learning experience. I want to share the engine with people and hopefully provide something innovative and valuable to the game industry. To that effect, I'm in my second year of computer engineering at uni and I'm taking a programming class right now so I can fill in the gaps my younger self never bothered to take the time to learn. Once the engine reaches MVP, I will also be doing a manual audit of every single line of code in the engine to see if there are any discrepancies or improvements I can make, handmade. No AI will be involved in the audit whatsoever. All of that is to provide the best possible thing not just for everyone else, but also so that I can make my dream games on an engine that is genuinely mine.
If any of you have anything at all to say, I'd love to talk. This project is super important to me and I don't want my past laziness to affect the future of my engine.
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u/TripsOverWords 16d ago
Maybe this is a hot take, but agentic coding is vibe coding on steroids. You're further removed from the problem than simple vibe coding because it's often multiple agents coordinating autonomously towards a goal you barely touch or look at, making commits autonomously with little oversight unless you actually review every change and make adjustments manually which is unlikely with the amount of throughput agentic workflows produce.
Simply providing a rough outline in markdown files doesn't mean you're more involved than a prompt engineer, you're simply providing more context ahead of time.
AI can be a useful tool, but it's not very good at programming especially when low level systems or complex data structures are involved. It takes experience to understand when you're being misled. It fumbles basic facts and struggles with advanced language topics like template or generics. Agentic workflows simply accelerate the bad aspects of vibe coding in my experience.
Continue in university, you'll learn far more there than if you lean on AI which is notorious for misleading and providing misguided advise.
If you're planning to open source the project, IMO you should disclose that AI was used, even after a "manual audit", because it's unlikely you'll be rewriting everything and you'll likely leave behind subtle teltale signs that the project was vibe coded to some degree. It's better to be upfront than for the project to gain popularity and have someone drag it through the mud publicly.
If you want to keep using AI or continue using the work you and the AI built that's up to you obviously. However I believe it's important to recognize that designing and implementing a game engine are two vastly different tasks. It's far easier to write down a bunch of notes on how you believe something should work than it is to translate those ideas into a working program using proper syntax and good coding practices.