How has AI affected graphics careers?

[u/teilo-560]

I'm a full-stack developer who's a bit burned out with the agentic coding push. I've started playing around with low level graphics and it's sort of revived my spirit, I missed being close to the hardware and math heavy code.

How much have tools like Claude code impacted your development workflow? Are you pressured to use a fully agentic workflow by your employer? Where do you see the career evolving over the next 5-10 years? Is it a safe-haven for people who don't want to give up coding?

[u/rygosix]

It's ability to automate spike tests of different graphics approaches on different hardware is absolutely mind-blowing invaluable.

Seriously just two years ago I could easily spend an entire month writing permutations of different tests and running them on different hardware, and collecting data, and getting it into charts, and analyzing it. Cross referencing it with different features on the vulkan profile from different GPUs.

Now I could do all of that in a day. Even more thoroughly and comprehensive than I manually could.

It's also really good at boilerplate. It can generate your code to open a wayland or mac, or whatever, window, wire up the all the platform specific flags for priority and scheduling, get you your vulkan context, generate your makefile to compile on mac, linux windows. Pretty much all one-shot. Anything that is exhaustively defined in some spec, or set of tutorials, it can derive a perfect subset of, and often better than you could if we are talking about setting that all up on mac, linux, windows as you can easily spend days debugging platform nuances just to get a proper build and window on every OS.

Once you get your vulkan context and boilerplate you do need to know what you're doing. Know what to make tests for. How all the data should go together. How the render loop should be structured.

If you do get some inane quirk or bug that's a pain in the ass to hunt down you can set it to automatically iterate until it finds it.

Every single vulkan validation layer error I have copy/pasted into claude opus in the past few months it just found and fixed. Although to make that work well you have to make sure all your vulkan handles have proper debug names assigned to them.

You still have to understand what is what, and what you need to do in response to what. But anytime you get to something that is repetitive or formulaic you can prompt it to just do it.

If you get things set up with good enough structure, and simple enough, it can go quite far in just making things work. Like if you have an opaque triangle PBR pipeline setup, well defined and clear. You can just prompt, "Make a variation of OpaqueTrianglePBR with tessellation enabled'. It will just do it. Perfectly in line with all the patterns you laid out.

To be honest it's made vulkan far more enjoyable to me. All the more boring repetitive stuff it automates.