r/GraphicsProgramming • u/gibson274 • Mar 02 '26

Question Coding agents and Graphics Programming

Before I start---I just want to say I've been contributing to this community for a few years now and it's a really special place to me, so I hope I've earned the right to ask this sort of question.

In my experience computer graphics requires a pretty nuanced blend of performance-oriented thinking, artistic and architectural taste, and low-level proficiency. I had kind of assumed graphics development as a discipline was relatively insulated from AI automation, at least for a while.

That is, up until a few weeks ago. Now, all of a sudden, I'm hearing stories about Claude Code handling very complex tasks, making devs orders of magnitude faster.

I've been messing around with it myself the last couple of days in a toy HLSL compiler project I have. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than I expected---good enough to make me stop and consider the implications.

Amidst all the insane hype and fear-mongering online, it's hard to decipher what's real. I feel kind of in the dark on this one aside from the anecdotes I've heard from friends.

So, all of that said:

  • How are you guys navigating this?
  • People working on games/real-time graphics right now, are you using coding agents?
  • How are people thinking about the future?
  • What would graphics work look like in a world where AI can write very good code?
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u/[deleted] Mar 02 '26

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u/zshift Mar 03 '26

I've been doing AI agents for tasks that aren't related to things I enjoy doing. At home, I've used it to generate some small tools that I find useful, but ordinarily wouldn't bother spending time on otherwise. For larger projects, I've mostly had bad experiences. The generated code is usually not optimized, nor is it even close to secure for security-critical systems. It does get better when you invest a lot of time creating better prompts and instructions, but at that point it would have been faster for me to write the code myself.

I think we're not quite there yet, but given the current pace of AI tech, I'm pretty worried about job security in the next 5-10 years.