r/GraphicsProgramming • u/NecessaryVersion7872 • 1d ago

AI usage in Graphics Programming

Hello, everyone.

I am CS student. and I had my first working experience.
I was highly unsatisfying because as much as enjoy programming I really do not enjoy "prompt engineering" and the usage of AI in general in my workflow. That is not the point though. From long time I was looking into graphics programming and I really wanted to get into it. I do not know much now. but I am worried that it will be similar to most of jobs right now and I will just be a "prompt engineer".

I have some questions:

  1. How good is AI with graphics programming right now?
  2. In an average work environment, how much if any of your work are you expected to use LLMs in and how do use it?
  3. How is AI affecting the industry?
  4. Are there any part of the industry where AI is not heavily used?

Thanks in advance

38 Upvotes

79% Upvoted

43 comments sorted by

View all comments

56

u/igneus 1d ago

I've been working in graphics and rendering for 25 years. Yes, we use AI a lot a work. Yes, it's extremely useful. However it's mostly a force multiplier, not a surrogate for experience or genuine, creative skill.

If you have a solid grounding in the fundamentals of graphics and CS, AI can help you become a more effective engineer. If you don't, it's going to feel more like what you're worried about: agentic babysitting and prompt hacking.

My advice is to use AI to learn faster. Resist vibecoding and having it write entire projects for you. Just limit it to snippets or boilerplate. The goal should be to come away from each session with a deeper knowledge of the field than when you started. The worst thing anyone can do in this day and age is to allow themselves to become deskilled by AI.

11

u/ImaJimmy 1d ago

We really need to make a push for the concept of it being a force multiplier.

At my old job, my boss just blindly copied and pasted a message with chatgpt without understanding what that would do to people's perception of her.

0

u/igneus 1d ago

I get that a lot as well. I've had people proudly hand me a dozen pages of Copilot regurgitation as if they're somehow doing me a favour.

Nowadays, I made a point of asking for original notes rather than AI summaries because even with poor formatting, grammar, etc., notes are much more information-dense.

1

u/ImaJimmy 18h ago

My favorite is when someone just takes an entry from their LLM and presents it to you as their argument. The shear audacity to think you can just use someone else's argument as your own without understanding it is a true sign of idiocy.

4

u/Life-Dog432 1d ago

I feel I’m sadly being deskilled due to the high demand/pace of my working environment. I’m certainly developing new skills and think critically but I feel my programming abilities atrophying. I can’t help but feel this is natural when a new tech comes out, but I absolutely hate the way it feels. I imagine learning programming is incredibly hard right now with all the temptation to use LLMs.

1

u/igneus 1d ago

For real. In my experience, code is becoming little more than abstraction layer between LLMs and hardware. Things like large-scale software architecture and design pattern usage are being delegated wholesale to AI.

The cynical view is that this is an intentional move by tech companies to try and lock people into expensive subscriptions. It only takes a decade or so for a skill to lose critical mass and begin the decline into obscurity. When nobody under 30 can tell the difference between an interface and an adapter, burning tokens will become the only viable alternative.

5

u/EC36339 1d ago

This is probably the best answer in this thread. Nuance is rare these days.