> “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.
This is a critical piece missing from the original article. It would make a lot more sense that game devs and other employees would be "shocked" at being told there would be AI art generated with "full AI workflows"[0].
No hand written code is practically the industry norm now, yet game assets and visuals is still mostly done by hand. The backlash would seem to line up more with Epic encouraging AI generated art, which is incredibly unpopular in the art and game dev communities.
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 agree. I wouldn't think twice about hearing this about a small SF startup, or maybe even a large company during the height of tokenmaxxing, but its definitely a distruption, and a shocking one at that, for some C-suites to start mandating things like the disallowal of non-AI code.
> 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.
There’s this tendency for a lot of tech folks to think their expertise in tech gives them special insights into other disciplines. Often when this happens, they’ll be doomed by missing many of the details that the old domain experts took for granted. I feel like AI is going to supercharge that. Lots of tech folks will see an AI make a CRUD app and think that means the AI will be equally capable of making art while missing why the overwhelming majority of the art community is against generative AI. The end result will be a lot of mass market art is going to become noticeable worse in the years to come in order to earn some shareholders a few extra cents in profit.
The "art community" is highly fractured to the point where claiming "overwhelming majority" doesn't have the rhetoric impact you want it to have. I have seen a good number of longtime visual artists and musicians express recently interest in generative AI.
Any artist mentioning that they are using gen AI in their art will instantly generate a massive amount of backlash so I doubt this is a very large number.
The folks making these decisions are only "tech folk" in that they work in tech. Really these are professional businessmen who are focused on maximizing profit. If you left it to tech folk to make these decisions, then most of these companies would quickly fail as the tech folk fail to even try to make any money (let alone be able to understand consumers well enough to be able to make money from them).
>Lots of tech folks will see an AI make a CRUD app and think that means the AI will be equally capable of making art while missing why the overwhelming majority of the art community is against generative AI.
It's less about thinking that the technology that can quickly spin up an app could be used to quickly spin up some art and more about the ROI. Actual tech workers could probably leverage AI very effectively in "unoffending" ways, but they're really not the ones calling the shots. It's the MBAs who recognize that the quality of the product really doesn't matter if they can make the product cheap enough.
>The end result will be a lot of mass market art is going to become noticeable worse in the years to come in order to earn some shareholders a few extra cents in profit.
Brother, we're already living in this reality.
The article this thread is about provides the perfect example: Epic Games is working on a Disney game. These are two companies which are the epitome of generating "art" so efficiently that they're almost just generating the profit directly. Switching out some engineers for AI isn't going to make much of a difference in the end product.
For a specific example, "Star Wars" has been closer to AI generated "art" than it has been to actual "art" for nearly half a century at this point. It was just that back in the day you needed a bunch of nerds to produce the specific kinds of characters, settings, scenes, etc., needed to sell the underlying products. Now you can just use AI. But don't mistake the fact that it was humans working on it with it being "art." It's all driven by algorithms at the end of the day.
For what it's worth, those who actually appreciate "art" aren't the target audience. They never were. It's currently hip to hate AI, but the consumer base these companies target really do not care. They want slop. They wanted it before and they got it before, and they still want it now and they're going to get a lot more of it now.
Isn't this the new norm for every modern tech company?
Claude Code can help me write and review code faster and better than a human possibly could. I spend my time drafting requirements, steering agents and reviewing diffs instead of writing code manually.
AI is changing knowledge work. Dressing that up with ragebait (game dev, Disney, layoffs) doesn't change that or the fact that the video game industry has always been brutally fickle and hit-driven. The Epic layoffs earlier this year had far more to do with the decline of Fortnite's popularity than AI.
How do you avoid the spaghetti code that (in my experience) most AI models spit out? Sure you can steer it, ask it to make it better, etc... but it's easier to me to be in the driver's seat. Doesn't mean AI isn't useful, but whenever AI designs a feature end-to-end, everything is tightly-coupled, the wrong abstractions are picked, and fundamentally the code is not optimized for human understanding. I don't really understand how people can tolerate this kind of code (assuming they read it, which I think they do not). Just take the Claude Code CLI as an example - is there anyone in the world that knows how that spaghetti machine works?
I agree that AI is very useful in reviewing PRs and searching for bugs. It's definitely a game-changer there. But a human still needs to understand the code and take responsibility for it.
>Claude Code CLI ... is there anyone in the world that knows how that spaghetti machine works
Having a very active, and happy user base.
Now this a simplistic view, and I think even heavily AI first dev teams still glance at the diff to make sure things aren't going too awry or ask questions. But the concept "spaghetti code" and "optimized for human understanding" are assumptions being revisited entirely in 2026.
I am not trying to get into a flame war, but I have seen a lot of complaints about Claude Code, not to mention their huge backlog of bug reports (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues) on GitHub. Just because they have lowered the bar for software quality and people have accepted it, does not mean that they are delivering quality software. I know at the very least we agree that these ideas are being re-explored in 2026, but I don't see evidence that it's a positive improvement for software development/quality. How many sites or services does one use on a daily basis that are just broken? Is that really the best our industry can aspire to?
EDIT: also, from the software engineer perspective, it is an order of magnitude more tedious to maintain software projects that lack quality, consistency, or standards. If I could measure the effect of AI vibe-coding in terms of personal pain, I would say it makes software development more painful when code is not well thought-out. There is a way to use AI responsibly, but I see more often people taking shortcuts and throwing "engineering" out the window. It's possible to ship quality with AI, but that's not the path of least resistance.
Contemporary AI is absolutely trash at things like scene graph management and lighting concerns. It also doesn't do physics, materials, SFX or "fun" very well.
Do not let the apparent visual progress of diffusion models conflate things. Unless we intend to run the entire game via diffusion models (which is certainly possible), I don't think this represents a reasonable baseline against which any amount of AAA art capacity can be compared. The number of units is here is effectively zero. A single AAA artist is infinitely more productive than GPT6 because they can produce and iterate content that the model simply cannot.
This is why I haven’t been able to play split screen Fortnight with my son for the past several seasons.
You used to be able to do a trick where you login with one controller, then log back out with another, then back in with the first (thanks reddit for finding that), but now that doesn’t even work.
I think a lot of these devs are too proud. Personally, I'm glad to have AI coding now. After 15 years of professional experience, it was becoming repetitive.
Also, my goal since I graduated university, was to become a software architect but the position had become rare and mostly existed in bureaucratic organisations.
Now with AI, every developer is essentially a software architect.
My university major was 'software design'. When I came out of uni, I was shocked to learn that nobody cared about software design. Now software design is all any engineer has left to care about.
I do understand the feeling, though I genuinely can't help but feel jealous! I've spent most of my teenage years learning everything I could about software, with a particular focus on low-level systems programming, small finicky cache line optimizations, SIMD, DOD, and the year I enter the workforce ChatGPT comes out and suddenly all that stuff is "solved".
I genuinely don't hate AI, I have to use it every single day, but... I really wish I got some more years like you until I got sick of the normal workflow... :') I was simply born late for that. Maybe this comes off whiny, and it is to some extent, but I do hear this from other people in my cohort a lot and it genuinely pains me.
Game dev seems like one of the worst places for LLM code
Maybe some of the generic scaffolding and tooling you could use it for, but any game mechanics and effects you want to make artistically represent your game will just turn into sloppa when generated by an LLM unless you just have it make the generic functions that you fully specify then manually tweak yourself
but how much faster will that be to someone that actually knows what they're doing?
I've always wanted to get into game dev but never did for lack of time or sustained interest. I tried to slop together some ideas and mechanics that I've been toying around with in my head for years now. And llms have no concept for the nuance that goes into actual enjoyable mechanics. Maybe it's just me, because I never put the time in myself so I can't get the results out that I want.
> Developers on the game, a shooter featuring characters from the Marvel and Star Wars franchises, were instructed to implement an “AI first” production model using tools such as Anthropic’s Claude. Humans will then manage and guide that work. “No more hand-written code,” one of the game’s directors told staff in an internal message reviewed by Bloomberg. The director added that all art for the game would be “generated with full AI workflows.”
This sounds nigh-indistinguishable from the catastrophic waste of capital that Concord turned into.
AI is perfectly capable of doing all of the coding for games now, especially if you have your own engine (which Epic does), build around harnesses (which Epic does), and treat the job of making games like a job not a side-slop (which Epic does).
Maybe this will bring quality down, but I don't think so, at least not more than the usual crunch + Disneyification.
Either way, the more interesting effect of this is not Epic making another IP licensed shooter, but more people making/modding into existence the games they want. This is already happening. And that's probably what was the genesis of this policy from Epic.
> “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.
I don't think that matches what I'm seeing. People use AI, but hand written code is still the norm at my company
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.
This is a critical piece missing from the original article. It would make a lot more sense that game devs and other employees would be "shocked" at being told there would be AI art generated with "full AI workflows"[0].
No hand written code is practically the industry norm now, yet game assets and visuals is still mostly done by hand. The backlash would seem to line up more with Epic encouraging AI generated art, which is incredibly unpopular in the art and game dev communities.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/10/report-epic-games-goe...
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 agree. I wouldn't think twice about hearing this about a small SF startup, or maybe even a large company during the height of tokenmaxxing, but its definitely a distruption, and a shocking one at that, for some C-suites to start mandating things like the disallowal of non-AI code.
> 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?
Because it's easier.
Agreed, you've got to have had your head in the ground to be "stunned" by what is largely "industry standard" now.
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.
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.
There’s this tendency for a lot of tech folks to think their expertise in tech gives them special insights into other disciplines. Often when this happens, they’ll be doomed by missing many of the details that the old domain experts took for granted. I feel like AI is going to supercharge that. Lots of tech folks will see an AI make a CRUD app and think that means the AI will be equally capable of making art while missing why the overwhelming majority of the art community is against generative AI. The end result will be a lot of mass market art is going to become noticeable worse in the years to come in order to earn some shareholders a few extra cents in profit.
The "art community" is highly fractured to the point where claiming "overwhelming majority" doesn't have the rhetoric impact you want it to have. I have seen a good number of longtime visual artists and musicians express recently interest in generative AI.
Any artist mentioning that they are using gen AI in their art will instantly generate a massive amount of backlash so I doubt this is a very large number.
This is a bit "misguided" in my opinion.
The folks making these decisions are only "tech folk" in that they work in tech. Really these are professional businessmen who are focused on maximizing profit. If you left it to tech folk to make these decisions, then most of these companies would quickly fail as the tech folk fail to even try to make any money (let alone be able to understand consumers well enough to be able to make money from them).
>Lots of tech folks will see an AI make a CRUD app and think that means the AI will be equally capable of making art while missing why the overwhelming majority of the art community is against generative AI.
It's less about thinking that the technology that can quickly spin up an app could be used to quickly spin up some art and more about the ROI. Actual tech workers could probably leverage AI very effectively in "unoffending" ways, but they're really not the ones calling the shots. It's the MBAs who recognize that the quality of the product really doesn't matter if they can make the product cheap enough.
>The end result will be a lot of mass market art is going to become noticeable worse in the years to come in order to earn some shareholders a few extra cents in profit.
Brother, we're already living in this reality.
The article this thread is about provides the perfect example: Epic Games is working on a Disney game. These are two companies which are the epitome of generating "art" so efficiently that they're almost just generating the profit directly. Switching out some engineers for AI isn't going to make much of a difference in the end product.
For a specific example, "Star Wars" has been closer to AI generated "art" than it has been to actual "art" for nearly half a century at this point. It was just that back in the day you needed a bunch of nerds to produce the specific kinds of characters, settings, scenes, etc., needed to sell the underlying products. Now you can just use AI. But don't mistake the fact that it was humans working on it with it being "art." It's all driven by algorithms at the end of the day.
For what it's worth, those who actually appreciate "art" aren't the target audience. They never were. It's currently hip to hate AI, but the consumer base these companies target really do not care. They want slop. They wanted it before and they got it before, and they still want it now and they're going to get a lot more of it now.
"No more hand-written code"
Isn't this the new norm for every modern tech company?
Claude Code can help me write and review code faster and better than a human possibly could. I spend my time drafting requirements, steering agents and reviewing diffs instead of writing code manually.
AI is changing knowledge work. Dressing that up with ragebait (game dev, Disney, layoffs) doesn't change that or the fact that the video game industry has always been brutally fickle and hit-driven. The Epic layoffs earlier this year had far more to do with the decline of Fortnite's popularity than AI.
How do you avoid the spaghetti code that (in my experience) most AI models spit out? Sure you can steer it, ask it to make it better, etc... but it's easier to me to be in the driver's seat. Doesn't mean AI isn't useful, but whenever AI designs a feature end-to-end, everything is tightly-coupled, the wrong abstractions are picked, and fundamentally the code is not optimized for human understanding. I don't really understand how people can tolerate this kind of code (assuming they read it, which I think they do not). Just take the Claude Code CLI as an example - is there anyone in the world that knows how that spaghetti machine works?
I agree that AI is very useful in reviewing PRs and searching for bugs. It's definitely a game-changer there. But a human still needs to understand the code and take responsibility for it.
>How do you avoid the spaghetti code
You don't. This is demonstrated by
>Claude Code CLI ... is there anyone in the world that knows how that spaghetti machine works
Having a very active, and happy user base.
Now this a simplistic view, and I think even heavily AI first dev teams still glance at the diff to make sure things aren't going too awry or ask questions. But the concept "spaghetti code" and "optimized for human understanding" are assumptions being revisited entirely in 2026.
I am not trying to get into a flame war, but I have seen a lot of complaints about Claude Code, not to mention their huge backlog of bug reports (https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues) on GitHub. Just because they have lowered the bar for software quality and people have accepted it, does not mean that they are delivering quality software. I know at the very least we agree that these ideas are being re-explored in 2026, but I don't see evidence that it's a positive improvement for software development/quality. How many sites or services does one use on a daily basis that are just broken? Is that really the best our industry can aspire to?
EDIT: also, from the software engineer perspective, it is an order of magnitude more tedious to maintain software projects that lack quality, consistency, or standards. If I could measure the effect of AI vibe-coding in terms of personal pain, I would say it makes software development more painful when code is not well thought-out. There is a way to use AI responsibly, but I see more often people taking shortcuts and throwing "engineering" out the window. It's possible to ship quality with AI, but that's not the path of least resistance.
If it is, then I see a wide opening for a modern tech company that produces high quality artisanal hand crafted software.
I'm a big fan of the advice "See what everyone else is doing, and do the opposite"
Make a fantastic game, 95+ on metacritic, no mistakes
i miss the days when my text editor was a blackbox to those above me in the org chart.
Omg I've been thinking about this... You have to use company provided tooling and they're sure to log every single thought of yours.
Epic fail incoming?
Does Disney really need a bunch of random dudes to prompt Claude for them?
Code is not the hard part of game development.
Contemporary AI is absolutely trash at things like scene graph management and lighting concerns. It also doesn't do physics, materials, SFX or "fun" very well.
Do not let the apparent visual progress of diffusion models conflate things. Unless we intend to run the entire game via diffusion models (which is certainly possible), I don't think this represents a reasonable baseline against which any amount of AAA art capacity can be compared. The number of units is here is effectively zero. A single AAA artist is infinitely more productive than GPT6 because they can produce and iterate content that the model simply cannot.
This is why I haven’t been able to play split screen Fortnight with my son for the past several seasons.
You used to be able to do a trick where you login with one controller, then log back out with another, then back in with the first (thanks reddit for finding that), but now that doesn’t even work.
That sounds like a bug and not a feature.
I mean my son is the type of person that will “do anything” to get some stupid skin, seems like they would want him able to play
Edit… oh wait you said a bug, yea agree
Search YouTube: opus 5.5 game
The future is now old man
The gap between generating a game, and generating a game that anyone wants to play is still colossal.
In a similar way to how it can generate music, but its still the most mediocre trash you have ever heard.
Any worth playing?
Normally I'd say this is a weird way for a company to announce bankruptcy, but no, this is pretty on-brand for Epic.
I think a lot of these devs are too proud. Personally, I'm glad to have AI coding now. After 15 years of professional experience, it was becoming repetitive.
Also, my goal since I graduated university, was to become a software architect but the position had become rare and mostly existed in bureaucratic organisations.
Now with AI, every developer is essentially a software architect.
My university major was 'software design'. When I came out of uni, I was shocked to learn that nobody cared about software design. Now software design is all any engineer has left to care about.
I do understand the feeling, though I genuinely can't help but feel jealous! I've spent most of my teenage years learning everything I could about software, with a particular focus on low-level systems programming, small finicky cache line optimizations, SIMD, DOD, and the year I enter the workforce ChatGPT comes out and suddenly all that stuff is "solved".
I genuinely don't hate AI, I have to use it every single day, but... I really wish I got some more years like you until I got sick of the normal workflow... :') I was simply born late for that. Maybe this comes off whiny, and it is to some extent, but I do hear this from other people in my cohort a lot and it genuinely pains me.
For now.
How many software architect roles are there in a typical company? How many are needed per product?
Skull Emoji
Game dev seems like one of the worst places for LLM code
Maybe some of the generic scaffolding and tooling you could use it for, but any game mechanics and effects you want to make artistically represent your game will just turn into sloppa when generated by an LLM unless you just have it make the generic functions that you fully specify then manually tweak yourself
but how much faster will that be to someone that actually knows what they're doing?
From direct experience it's just fine to carefully, thoughtfully do gamedev coding with AI.
I've always wanted to get into game dev but never did for lack of time or sustained interest. I tried to slop together some ideas and mechanics that I've been toying around with in my head for years now. And llms have no concept for the nuance that goes into actual enjoyable mechanics. Maybe it's just me, because I never put the time in myself so I can't get the results out that I want.
Gonna be interesting flop
Epic will blame the workers and say they sabotaged it, I predict.
> Developers on the game, a shooter featuring characters from the Marvel and Star Wars franchises, were instructed to implement an “AI first” production model using tools such as Anthropic’s Claude. Humans will then manage and guide that work. “No more hand-written code,” one of the game’s directors told staff in an internal message reviewed by Bloomberg. The director added that all art for the game would be “generated with full AI workflows.”
This sounds nigh-indistinguishable from the catastrophic waste of capital that Concord turned into.
Gonna coin a new term here, AAAI Slop
Arguably, that game is the right testing ground for this kind of development pattern.
Ashes to ashes. Slop to slop.
Are they trying to get bought by MBS like Electronic Arts? They know that AI figures from Slop Wars will be hated by gamers. But MBS buys any crap.
I don't think this strategy will flop.
AI is perfectly capable of doing all of the coding for games now, especially if you have your own engine (which Epic does), build around harnesses (which Epic does), and treat the job of making games like a job not a side-slop (which Epic does).
Maybe this will bring quality down, but I don't think so, at least not more than the usual crunch + Disneyification.
Either way, the more interesting effect of this is not Epic making another IP licensed shooter, but more people making/modding into existence the games they want. This is already happening. And that's probably what was the genesis of this policy from Epic.
It won't bring quality down, it'll just be the end of human understanding.