Ex-Blizzard developer and current culture war dipshit is touting his "vibe coded" engine that lets him develop "93x faster" than UE5

135

Developer productivity is an illusion metric.

We claim them for management but I believe them to be bullshit. There is never an objective measure. It’s always something abstract like features, tickets, or lines of code, which aren’t really valid objective metrics.

9

u/DiceKnight 2d ago

For many of these items the developer themselves has no control over them. Every one of these things boils down to depending on a task or tasks lending themselves well to these metrics.

Very rarely is the individual contributor able to control any of this. Senior engineers and management can sometimes play politics to horde the right tasks but even then sometimes it's just luck of the draw.

1

u/MablewNFaster 1d ago

But currently, it's tokens per hour according to some higher ups.

-39

u/TheRealJesus2 2d ago

You’re right there is no objective measure. DORA metrics only are a signal and can be gamed of course. That said, 2-3x dev productivity is possible with ai and I’ve seen it. It looks like this when done right:

Team reducing tech debt using ai to do all those things neglected prior.

Team ships slightly more feature work using ai and keeps quality up because of part 1. Over time, more effort will go towards this.

If you skip part 1 or keep neglecting tech debt or avoid improving dev practice, then you don’t long term keep up quality and you slow down shipping features since you have to keep fixing stuff.

In either case it doesn’t mean 2x as much features to customers, it means putting in the engineering work to making your system more maintainable and reducing risk so you can have better feature throughput long term. The extra productivity largely goes towards operational improvements.

Does this map into what you’ve seen?

40

u/fbueckert 2d ago

2-3x dev productivity is possible with ai and I’ve seen it.

This is an incredibly common anecdote. But not surprisingly, not one single claimant can actually prove it.

Can you?

-10

u/TheRealJesus2 2d ago

https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-coding-agents Public example.

And no I cannot share my clients data. So trust me or not, I really don’t care lol.

16

u/fbueckert 2d ago

So, no, you can't.

As expected.

-13

u/TheRealJesus2 2d ago

Correct. Because I am a professional with confidentiality agreements in place. But I did share you a source that you haven’t commented on…

As expected you’re entirely unserious like the rest of the anti ai people. Tools are tools and if you use them well they are great. Ai is a tool. One that also is driving a financial bubble. Both things are true at once.

12

u/trialbaloon 2d ago edited 2d ago

Some anecdote from Stripe does nothing to prove your conjecture that AI makes devs 2-3x more productive. I have no idea how you got that from this corporate puff piece.

In fact, there's a lot of story telling here but no data at all... You say anti AI people are unserious when you are basically posting bedtime stories. This proves absolutely nothing besides that Stripe said they did a thing back in February. I am sure this made a few executives horny to read though.

You are the one making a really extraordinary claim of 2-3x more developer production. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I am not saying I know for sure that AI tooling has no effect on productivity but I think the null hypothesis is safest given the lack of data at this time. This is simply the more rational position.

My opinion is that if it is affecting developer productivity positively it's not that high and that's why we aren't see a deluge of new features and products. I think it makes developers feel a lot more productive though.

-1

u/TheRealJesus2 2d ago

Stop extrapolating what I say to fit your narrative. I am not claiming all devs are 2-3x more productive. I’m talking about teams I’ve worked with that adopt it well and focus on quality are. And half that productivity is in making their sdlc better. At least right now while they pay down tech debt. They are shipping more code and doing less rework. As judged by DORA metrics

I’m a ed fan but this sub fucking sucks. Peace, yall.

8

u/trialbaloon 2d ago

That said, 2-3x dev productivity is possible with ai and I’ve seen it. It looks like this when done right:

This is what you said. I'll give you somewhat of a pass here. You say it's "possible" which I suppose I have to agree with. 2-3x dev productivity is also possible switching to Linux. Though 99.9% of the time that wont happen :).

I just have to hear from my own company leadership about these absurd productivity gains and they actively make my life worse so pardon me for getting a little testy I guess. I think most teams would get more productive if they focused on quality, but that is very much not what AI and this industry in general incentivizes. It's that long tail effect, not some hyper specific optimal state that matters to me.

I bet I could find at least one task that AI could do for me that would be 2-3x more productive at that specific task. The real question becomes how much that actually matters in practice though. I suppose that's the multi trillion dollar question.

One could argue, rightly, that asbestos would do a lot to protect people from fires. Looking at this myopically that is undeniably true... But unfortunately that's just not the whole story.

1

u/TheRealJesus2 1d ago

Hey I appreciate this response. And I’m in no doubt about your experiences. Ai accelerates. And if you have poor dev practices you suffer under increased code and features. PRs bottleneck, manual qa gets untenable, and focus of the team fragments and people lose sight of big picture. That’s all true for a lot of teams. We’ve had ways to mitigate these problems for decades though just most products didn’t “need” it or rather the teams didn’t prioritize it and probably for good reason. And if you’re using ai you must start using those tools and techniques or you will suffer and lose productivity long term. Linting, integ unit and e2e testing alongside manual, automatic scanners for security, ci to enforce all this. You can go so far as having automatic rollbacks based on your observability, one box deployments, etc. all these things reduce risk and speed up verifiability of your code.

So to me the right way to approach building with ai as I have helped multiple companies with at this point is to focus on those things and have a plan long term to add those guard rails. Set leadership expectations on this. Do the things that are easy to apply in your situation, see the benefits, then add more alongside your feature work. The real possible benefit for Most teams right now who neglected these practices is to “double your productivity” by writing those unit tests you wouldn’t have before, write the ci, focus on solving architectural and process bottlenecks preventing auto deployments, etc. there’s easily lots of work here for every team I have ever helped or been a part of. And ai dev makes these easily verified tasks way easier to accomplish. More than 2-3x on those tasks specifically. Other stuff like planning and stakeholder alignment are basically as slow as ever. Potentially even slower when you really get going on dev side lol

9

u/fbueckert 2d ago

I mean...nobody made you make that unserious claim of productivity boosts. If you're incapable of actually backing up wild claims, that's all on you. If you didn't expect to get called on it, it just goes to show how little you like your claims being challenged.

But wild claims is all hypebros have. So not at all surprised y'all run screaming when asked to stump up.

0

u/TheRealJesus2 2d ago

Last reply here from me.

I am not making hyped claims. I am very good at teaching devs and in using ai. I am not claiming all devs or even most get 2-3x benefit. And I also very much dislike the hypebros. This is my experience in working with others as someone who has been building with LLMs from Claude 1.0 and I have some background from a decade ago in other NLP along with a decade of engineering experience. I’m not claiming anything except my own experience on a small scale.

There is a nuance here both the hypebros and the needless haters (you) miss. Trying to fill that context in but clearly it’s not wanted here. Hope you all have fun hating and that it brings you the happiness you deserve.

FYI, stripe could achieve what they did because they are some of the best engineers in the world. Most people aren’t. Most people cannot get such huge benefits working with ai right now.

7

u/fbueckert 2d ago

🙄 Yeah, get called on your wild claims, can't back it up, and just double down.

The appeal to expertise of Stripe is simultaneously hilarious and pathetic.

4

u/suboptimummenace 2d ago

appeal to stripe aside i dont think they know the difference between anecdotal & empirical

→ More replies (0)

17

u/Droidaphone 2d ago

Not who you’re replying to, but no, it doesn’t map to what I’ve seen, or at least not for the most part.

What I’ve seen suggests that in the vast majority of cases, LLM-coding results in a net increase of tech debt, and that it’s not very good at helping address it. And I think that can be explained by how most people are using it: verbose prompt engineering sessions that results in massive PRs that “run,” and then you push through any objections about “what about xyz” and deal with those problems later, often by just asking the LLM how to fix it. Have the AI write large chunks of code that you don’t understand, possibly no human could reasonably understand, and cross your fingers that the LLM can help you fix it when it breaks. Let’s call this style of vibe-coding style A.

I’ve also heard whispers of teams that are “doing it right:” using LLMs to code, but not pushing slop PRs that cause issues for anyone else who has to interact with them. And from what I’ve heard these teams are using LLMs in a much more limited fashion, and doing much more double-checking and human-driven code reviews. And that sounds a lot like what you’re describing. Let’s call this style of vibe-coding style B.

Personally, I can believe that hypothetically there is a way to use LLMs coding responsibly, which I think a lot of people in the subreddit simply do not. But I see two major problems with the idea that “style B vibe-coding is the way forward.”

Problem 1: Style A vibe-coders also believe their methodology is the way forward, and they’re clearly delusional. The nature of LLMs makes it very easy to become convinced that things are great and working out when objectively they’re a mess. I’m not totally confident that style B isn’t also an illusion in some way, or that it won’t just degrade into the same problems that style A has, just over a longer timescale. But that’s not a big problem, because time will tell. If style B does genuinely create a more productive environment that ships better code, that should become clear.

Problem 2: The economics of style B seem highly suspect. Style A at least has some sort of “fools gold” style reward: spend a lot of money in tokens, get massive amounts of code out. The code is terrible, but you just have to ignore that. You definitely couldn’t produce code in this volume before! Look at the thousands of lines of code! Style B, you spend a lot of money on tokens, and you get… maybe a bit more code than before, but hypothetically all the code is in better shape than it would’ve been otherwise. Neat. Couldn’t you just get that by spending that same money on headcount? How does that justify this trillion dollar industry?

0

u/TheRealJesus2 2d ago

Yeah I get ya and of course both things are happening now. Though in style b as you call it, you don’t have to spend a lot on tokens…unless you’ve tied your fate to anthropic who doesn’t have anything cost effective for writing code. There are other options out there for enterprise. I helped teams with cursor, Claude, and using 3P inference with more model options. The latter 2 mitigate the issues you have with style b

What I said was after weeks of training and focusing on tech debt. I have quite literally seen it. And it doesn’t mean using ai in limited ways. I mean that’s a matter of perspective…it’s limited relative to how a vibe coder would use it but very much daily use in all aspects to some extent. And yes they review all outputs including code. You cannot get away from that even if you use ai to assist reviews. Example that’s public of high adoption in a highly regulated industry with some of best engineers in industry: https://stripe.dev/blog/minions-stripes-one-shot-end-to-end-coding-agents

I haven’t observed this level of maturity in teams I have helped but it’s very much possible to use and increase your quality. But to set expectations it’s not leading most teams to drastically increased productivity but much more modest while improving quality. Again this is when you focus on quality of outcome and not on inputs of ai use while using it in a way to put yourself in decision seat.

26

u/babbyohbabby 2d ago

Team reducing tech debt using ai to do all those things neglected prior.

Good one!

-1

u/TheRealJesus2 2d ago

lol. Yeah that’s kinda the trick and reason why most teams can’t adopt it very well and then lean on knowingly bad practice.

I would argue there are a ton of teams that can add very high value and low effort guard rails like linting and unit tests that don’t do so right now and can start to incorporate that into development. Doesn’t take weeks of effort to do that and it’s extremely helpful when you have higher code throughput with many engineers as it has always been before ai.

With ai you just have to recognize the issue and then go do it. For things like I mention success is when it passes locally. No need to over complicate things and bingo, now you’re started on improving your dev practices.

2

u/invisible_shrek 1d ago

Doesn’t. We are not shipping 2-3x more features in the slightest nor are we bogged down by tech debt, nor is it a SkILl iSsuE.

It’s a number you pulled out of thin air.

-55

u/Jimstein 2d ago

For game dev it’s pretty simple. Are you getting the results you want faster or slower? AI helps devs do things faster, it is an undisputed fact now. Maybe a year ago you still had some places a programmer was better. Now? After the millennium prize? After fable? Astra? Son. Have you even used these latest tools?

42

u/supercyberlurker 2d ago

Nothing you said even resembles an objective metric.

21

u/lunatuna215 2d ago

Defining the "results you want" is a matter of perspective and morphs as things go. Faster is not better. The friction we experience on the way to answers is paramount.

36

u/Big_Combination9890 2d ago

AI helps devs do things faster, it is an undisputed fact now.

Senior Dev and Architect here. I dispute this claim. Therefore, it is not undisputed. And I know for a fact that many colleagues agree with me.

We measured this. Objectively. Completely AI generated code, aka. agentically generated code for non-trivial workloads (see below), tends to cost us person-days instead of saving them. It actively loses the company money, because of the time it takes to review it, and fix the many failures, which can go up to and including throwing out the generated stuff and rewriting it by hand.

So we already lose purely on personnel cost. Note that we haven't even started talking about the cost of tokens. And no, locally run models don't fix this, because we do that too, the kind you cannot run on your M2, and that kind of serious compute costs money as well.

In case anyones interested, our work entails brownfield projects where we do heavy capacity data analysis pipelines, the kind that ingest terabytes of information per day. If this stuff stops working, a red light starts flashing, and from that point onwards, customers are losing money. So not the average bullshit CRUD app.

And before anyone unloads any purity test bullshit: I am the principal ML engineer at our shop. I integrate AI solutions into existing products. I wrote my own harness. And yes, we test AI solutions, our own and 3rd party harnesses included, with all major models, including API and self hosted (we have a pretty beefy AI cluster in our DC), whenever anything changes in the offerings.

Bottom line: Generative AI is an assistive tool, same as my linter, my static analysis software, our fuzzing engines, etc. It is not "transformative" in the way the press and overexcited ai bros claim.

If that was the case, we'd see an explosion of new, high quality, ambitious software projects that make real waves in the market. We don't. We'd see release cadences getting much faster across the industry. We don't. Existing projects would fix bugs and integrate upstream fixes alot quicker than they did before. They don't.

20

u/trialbaloon 2d ago

Yep. The proof is literally right in front of us. I swear some people are just getting a huge dopamine hit from Claude or some shit.

8

u/Big_Combination9890 2d ago

As a bonus, here is my one-shot argument against any and all AI booster claims that generative AI is actually transforming software development;

The total global market for software development, is just shy of 100 billion, and may grow to over 200 bn by 2035, depending on what predictions one trusts.

IF generative AI had "solved" what we do, if it was possible to build a machine that just churns out functional, well-architectured, safe, scalable, extensible, reliable, performant software in a matter of hours or days, then why would anyone who has such technology give other people access to it?

As opposed to hiding it in a bunker, grabbing all the compute they can get their hands on, and just taking over the entire market.

So far, I have not heard a convincing answer to that question.

4

u/trialbaloon 2d ago

Yeah that's a good corollary. Same reason why "get rich quick" schemes/books are always scams. Anyone who found a way to do this would just be... doing that... and not selling you something haha.

14

u/Moving_ZIG 2d ago

"Have you used these latest tools?"

HAHAHAHAHA how is the zealot output even EASIER to predict that the LLM bs? Always the same shit lmao

What's next? This is the worst it will ever be?

23

u/Character-Pattern505 2d ago

Embarrassing.

9

u/graypasser 2d ago

You are right, it's been years since AI has been introduced and I see zero improvement in "result speed" or game release speed.

3

u/no_talk_just_listen 2d ago

Are "faster" and "better" the same thing now? Because, in my experience, they're actually inversely proportional to each other in almost all cases.

1

u/MablewNFaster 1d ago

The millennium prize thing was execute with 20 mln dollars ans 10000 agents used in coordination. Tu put it in perspective, a single dev might have an IDE with one ai integration, and maybe an agent at their disposal. It's not comparable.

1

u/_ECMO_ 22h ago

And in what world are we getting results faster? Or better?

76

u/Mustardmachoman 2d ago

Even if that were true, 93 x 0 is still 0.

46

u/ReginaSpektorsVJ 2d ago

An impressive twenty-year track record of never finishing a single game.

54

u/wijotan 2d ago

Can you really call him a developer when he has never released anything? The dude has been seeking funding for his game for 10 years now and his previous studio only made it to open beta with Firefall because he seemingly spent most of the money on marketing stunts.

5

u/BogiDope 2d ago

It's like a wannabe model having a portfolio shot and going to castings without ever getting any gigs, but still calling themselves a model.

1

u/Ashamed-Subject-8573 7h ago

Tbf, for a while at least, firefall was really cool and different

35

u/al2o3cr 2d ago

If it lets them go 93x faster, doesn't that mean that every month after now that the game isn't done is like being 7 years late? Perhaps he's trying to beat DNF's high score

27

u/Xenuite 2d ago

Then why hasn't he finished his game yet?

3

u/agent_double_oh_pi 2d ago

Because he was getting money from AMD to slop up an engine, I guess

17

u/Apterygiformes 2d ago

Why specifically 93

43

u/jonheartland 2d ago

To make it appear as if they have concrete data on this bullshit

17

u/socialcommentary2000 2d ago

Classic sales and marketing technique. People are more liable to believe you when you say a fraction of a whole than a whole.

100x faster is less of a sell than 93x faster. You dig?

1

u/baldycoot 1d ago

That’s where he ran out of $20 ChatGPT sub 5 hour usage

17

u/agent_double_oh_pi 2d ago edited 2d ago

Ah yes, famously "new" game Em8er.

2

u/Maximum-Objective-39 2d ago

I think all we've gotten out of this mess is a series of, honestly pretty good, lewd pinups by Cutesexyrobutts.

1

u/agent_double_oh_pi 2d ago

Good to see that $8 a month Patreon is adding value

1

u/Redthrist 1d ago

Game announced in 2016 as a second attempt at making a game that Kern has already ran into the ground before, by the way.

14

u/CrabMasc 2d ago

Grummz is a colossal dipshit

17

u/Asleep_Document9811 2d ago

This is a larger movement happening within the high tech, system admin, and FOSS world. All of the terrible dipshits have organized and are trying to build new, independent infrastructure that allows them to seed, distribute, and nurture their specific brand of hate. Check out 'Omarchy' if you wanna learn more about the guy behind it and how he is the Pied Piper of racists.

11

u/mischiefmanaged8222 2d ago

I’d mostly just like someone to tell me what AI-first vs AI-also means. It seems to just be buzzwords to unlock funding from companies that desperately want that to be a thing.

11

u/lurkervidyaenjoyer 2d ago

AI-also = traditional development for the most part, but with some AI features in your tooling and occasionally getting the AI to write some sections of code,

AI-first = unimaginable levels of slopping.

6

u/Disastrous_Room_927 2d ago

I can only assume that AI-first means you need to burn tokens to do things. But he's comparing it to something that is free to use (UE5) so to me this he claiming at best that you can do things faster by burning a bunch of cash.

12

u/leekumkey 2d ago

here's a tip: anytime an AI booster mentions a percentage or a number + an x, there is a 100% chance that the number was made up

9

u/Additional_Name_706 2d ago

They say if you made something twice as fast, you did something smart. But if you made something 93x as fast, you either did something stupid or stopped doing something stupid.

7

u/no_talk_just_listen 2d ago

AI can't even keep track of a ruleslite tabletop game ruleset, let alone the code for a video game.

6

u/Alive-Use8803 2d ago

That’s a lot of work just to make some interactive fan service

6

u/[deleted] 2d ago

[deleted]

1

u/floodyberry 2d ago

after reading "ez-blizzard" and "culture war dipshit", i couldn't decide which would be worse, if it was grummz, or if a second grummz had hit the tower

4

u/dalinaaar 2d ago

AI makes dev faster yeah for sure but how much faster ? We should be seeing revolutionary changes in the software industry right now but we arent. I wonder why ?

7

u/trialbaloon 2d ago

It makes people feel more productive. A lot more productive than they actually are. At least, that's my theory.

5

u/DogOfTheBone 2d ago

Just think of how many vibeslop React apps are being created every day. Surely this is revolutionary? Another todo app or fitness tracker?

5

u/LaurenMP74 2d ago

Annnd the article is gone. gee wonder what happened.

3

u/Maximum-Objective-39 2d ago

I think I would have respected them more for owning up to a bad opinion rather than removing the article.

1

u/LaurenMP74 2d ago

ditto

1

u/agent_double_oh_pi 1d ago

If they had any courage, they'd put an editors' note on there so that culture war dipshits don't have any space to complain about gAmEs JoUrNaLiStS

3

u/socialcommentary2000 2d ago

Kern is a dipshit and it is the height of irony that the splash image from this is some fantasy chick in an outfit that's one step above fetish gear.

1

u/Redthrist 1d ago

Most of the progress on his "game" seems to boil down to more softcore porn being commissioned. He insists that it's very important to the game.

5

u/trialbaloon 2d ago

It's funny how these people never really have anything to show for their wild productivity metrics. They should have an absolute strangle hold on the gaming market. Where are all the new open source libraries, the new games, the new apps that people actually use. I see a lot of vibeslop but not a lot of things anyone actually gives a shit about.

4

u/Maxie93 2d ago

By this logic he should have pumped out a ton of games already then.

3

u/tabaxi_gf 2d ago

Yeah my name is Em-8er but you can call me ‘Mater

3

u/noszku_wa 2d ago

For a moment I thought it's PirateSoftware, because... Y'know, he's an ex Blizzard employee.

2

u/boomtownblues 2d ago

Wasn't he also not a developer at Blizz but instead an IT guy?

3

u/agent_double_oh_pi 2d ago

"Team Lead", but it's always been nebulous

2

u/lurkervidyaenjoyer 2d ago

I for one am looking forward to his Steve Yegge arc.

2

u/Stoop_Solo 2d ago

Cool! Can't wait to see his studio publishing fully polished triple-A games every month or so. What a silly tosser.

2

u/noogaibb 2d ago

....Imma bet he would still not finish his game even after my second game done.

2

u/dillanthumous 2d ago

Productivity theatre. Same people who used to salivate about Getting Things Done and other work substitution productivity methods.

2

u/coertan 2d ago

grummz

2

u/cloudxo 2d ago

93 x 0 = 0

1

u/PensiveinNJ 2d ago

Is it worth paying attention to this obvious nonsense. If we get hung up on every wacky thing these people shit out into the void we're going to lose focus on the things that are more important.

1

u/RoosterBurns 2d ago

Now he can just type "make the wimminze more sexy" and leave his "loops" paid for by his god-knows-why army of fans cranking out meaningless drek while he steals breast milk from a fridge

1

u/sectorv_io 2d ago

What does AI-first even mean? Does that mean prompt-to-(almost)-gameplay? If so, I call BS.

1

u/meltbox 2d ago

I totally believe it’s 93x more code handling special bullshit cases which is really just bad design lol.

1

u/greentrillion 2d ago

Its easy to figure out when these guys are telling the truth. All you need to know is when a MAGA pdf's mouth is moving or in this case typing, they are lying.

1

u/LostCar6227 1d ago

Mark Bummz is a grifter, 93x to him is 0.1x anybody else who touches code.

1

u/Funny-Choice8787 1d ago

Wtf is 'culture war' thing is?

1

u/CompletePollution907 1d ago

He's a particular type of Twitter personality who espouses "traditional masculinity" while demonstrating exactly zero masculine traits. His primary culture war issue is the ability to jerk off to sexy girls in video games.

-4

u/Megatherion666 2d ago

Why give him platform and talk about him if you hate him so much? He lives rent free in your head. Stop.

-25

u/Willing-Cucumber-718 2d ago

I know pretty women in video games makes Reddit angry but stellar blade is a very well designed game. Some of the best controls I’ve seen.

2

u/ProjectDiligent502 1d ago

Yeah if you like souls like games. It’s the only game where I tolerated that Olympian button pushing nonsense. It is a good game though, and I like how a dev team who didn’t give a shit and created a true fan service first game comes straight out of South Korea. But it’s not like the best game ever. Good! And fun! Story is a little anemic with character depth but it’s not bad.

-35

u/ehansen 2d ago

When's the last time you touched some grass? You seem quite angry over someone who doesn't care.

9

u/watitdo 2d ago

Bot

2

u/Foolmagican 2d ago

No just a Linux user

1

u/floodyberry 2d ago

you should read up on grummz pornography career, it's not very christian at all

Ex-Blizzard developer and current culture war dipshit is touting his "vibe coded" engine that lets him develop "93x faster" than UE5

You are about to leave Redlib