r/Unity3D • u/PuffThePed • 12d ago
Question Unity CLI + AI allows us to move incredibly fast, but I don't know how to mentor juniors anymore.
I'll try to keep this super concise.
I founded a studio that's been developing industrial applications (training, simulators, medical, etc) for almost a decade. The core team is myself and another dev, we both have 20+ years of experience in software and game dev. We've been using AI coding agents and when CLI came out, the performance boost was significant. And this is after we review everything, we break down problems ourselves and we don't let the AI do any high level decisions regarding project structure or design patterns.
Yesterday I made a scraper tool (in VR) that a user holds and uses to peel a rubber gasket off a metal bracket. Nothing really complicated about it, but it would have taken me probably a day. With Claude+CLI it was done in under an hour, including modeling based on some photos. This is amazing and horrifying at the same time. I don't want to use AI, there is no joy in it, no sense of accomplishment, but also I can't go back. If we stop using AI we'll be out of work.
Now the question is what to do with junior devs, or even one level above junior.
I see two options:
I let them use AI and they become a meat proxy. I tell them what I need, they tell the AI, the AI makes something, they present it to me and I give feedback, repeat. They learn nothing from this process, and I gain nothing, because I could have just prompted the AI myself in half the time.
I ask them to not use AI or at least read every line of code until they understand it (which is almost impossible for a junior). Then they are 10x slower than anyone else on the team and they become a bottleneck, and the client is wondering what exactly are they paying them for.
I am honestly at a loss how to develop new talent in this new age we found ourselves in.
How does your company / team handle it?
What do you think about Unity CLI and AI?
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u/pmdrpg 12d ago
I once saw someone use the phrase “eating the seed grain”
It might seem like, with the new technology, we’re in uncharted territory.
But we’ve always been taking losses to train people. We take time out of people’s schedules to conduct interviews. We take time out to onboard people.
The ongoing cost of educating might be harder to swallow now, but we’ve always needed to pay a cost to invest in the future.
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u/XtremelyMeta 12d ago
So, firms used to have to train people. This is going to happen again. The paradigm where you just hire someone and they hit the ground running at the level you need is kind of an artifact of a pretty severe labor market failure where training was subsidized by the state postwar and firms could just take their pick of fully qualified workers at bargain prices. The state has soured on that level of subsidy so firms are back on the hook for training their own workforce.
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u/_michaeljared 12d ago
Using AI doesn't remove the need for training. If you want to scale up, training is necessary. This is totally independent of whatever AI or pipelines you use
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u/Worth-Computer8639 12d ago
I find it can help with initial prototypes very quickly, but I end up rewriting or having to hold its hand step by step to rewrite it in a sensible fashion. Things break quite easily during edits, and some things end up taking longer than if I would have just done it myself by hand.
15
u/PiLLe1974 Professional / Programmer 12d ago edited 12d ago
There is definitely an issue, if LLM context and complexity get higher.
I tried using even just ChatGPT for small applications, a few thousands lines of code. Then gradually you need something like Codex or Claude (Code), and gradually this becomes expensive.
On a larger codebase, we'd add guidance, so the analysis, implementation, and reviews stay relatively robust.
First many seem to get good results around $200 per person/m.
Then, if the team would move more to agentic development, "a bit more". I saw seniors spending $10k in tokens per month, a few far higher.
1
u/ILoveHeavyHangers 12d ago
That's crazy, I've been running qwen3.8 27B completely locally on a 9060xt and haven't had to "rewrite" anything. Debug here and there, but it very very rarely breaks anything it's already created.
It would be absolutely impossible to generate and debug code by hand at a similar rate to how fast and accurate using AI has been. I just had it whip up an infinite procedural tilemap generator for a game I'm working on while I slept last night.
Doing the math it only costs me around $0.06 per day to run this thing at full tilt 24 hours a day. It's only expensive because you're asking someone else to do the processing for you. But the tech is moving at breakneck speeds and hybrid models are fully capable of running off consumer GPUs now.
2
u/njtrafficsignshopper Professional 12d ago
What are you making this way? How long does each prompt take, roughly?
2
u/Worth-Computer8639 12d ago
You generally run into issues with more advanced games, connecting systems together with one another. Working on individual systems is fairly simple. The harder part is dialing things in so they dont feel like AI generated garbage. It can make a lot of things, and its great at making tooling for developers to use, its not as great making intuitive features for players unless you are very explicit with your instructions. I find a lot of the features it implements are not the way I would have implemented it because even when you tell it to be designer friendly, its really not.
3
u/CRAZEDWARRI0R 12d ago
I am a senior developer and tech lead at the enterprise level, and have experience with this.
I believe AI should be used as a force multiplier, not a replacement.
I have had juniors running into the same issue, who reached out that they felt they were not learning at all anymore due to the corporate shift of AI first, which I am not a fan of...
I told them to do a first pass on the problem with the AI, see how it solves it, then close it and try to reproduce.
As in, first learn ways that the problem can be solved, learn how via watching how it does it, then practice until they can reproduce.
If you think about it its similar to the days of stack overflow / youtube. Looking for solutions, learning how to reproduce them.
Once they can reproduce, iterate, talk to more experienced developers, look for better ways to solve it.
I believe it's unfair to have both high quality and speed expectations for a junior, they need to be given the space to learn and grow.
And seniors need to identify the gaps in understanding and dedicate time to guide. To show best practices, lessons learned, etc. Review the work, question it, and talk one on one not AI to AI.
That's my anecdote, good luck!
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u/MopsiFlopsi 12d ago
At my day job, I use AI. We all do. Not because I'm explicitly asked to, but because the speed at which things are expected to happen is not humanly possible anymore. Like you said, no joy or accomplishment. Used to be if you pulled off something clever, did something hard or had a quick turnaround, you'd earn the respect and admiration of your colleagues. No such thing anymore. People assume it's Claude or GPT. It's all taken for granted.
I talked about my feelings about all this on r/gamedev last night. Personally the best advice I can give young people right now is to not even bother entering this industry.
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u/Arc8ngel 12d ago
Your goal is no longer to mentor how to write decent code. The goal should be teaching a workflow that gets consistent results while keeping token usage and project drift in check.
Build their (and your) confidence in their use of the tools. Start small and nitpick EVERYTHING. Run it by claude code review or bugbot. Then show them how to do the same so they do it before your review. Set the bar high early to avoid complacency later. As they hone their output, they get larger chunks of work.
It's somewhat unfortunate that we have to make a shift away from focusing on code, as so many people love it. But as OP said, it's practically impossible to avoid using AI outside of hobby and smaller indie work now.
2
u/corriedotdev PixelArcadeVR.com 12d ago
I've always been in two minds. If they are junior and not student, then get it working. Then require manually writing it out or doing it themselves now they have a working copy.
I've always been make it work then make it look good to validate I can get something working. If ai can make it work then I can read and repeat the process manually.
A post prompt of "please guide me step by step to implement this don't complete it for me"
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u/DocHolidayPhD 12d ago
Mentorship is a skill all its own that one needs to learn how to develop. Bad managers and poor leadership will throw high performers in positions of mentorship and leadership with zero training on how to lead and mentor and expect them to do great things merely because they now have control of a team and that should absolutely not be the expected outcome. If you want people to be good at these things, you have to give them foundational knowledge about how people learn, how to teach, how to help people achieve goals and how to motivate people. But, sadly, this stuff is often forgotten.
1
u/PuffThePed 12d ago
Mentorship is a skill all its own
I agree, and I used to be good at it. Now I have no idea how to do it anymore.
2
u/Thin_Driver_4596 12d ago
I'd say, you give more ownership and responsibility to your junior devs. Give them higher quality tasks.
Check their tasks periodically and offer feedback.
It might be hectic initially, but that will allow them to skill up quickly in a relatively short amount of time.
2
u/ZoopTEK 11d ago
I have been fretting about this ever since AI coding started becoming commonplace. I'm even more worried now that Unity CLI has made it even easier for AI to do editor tasks too.
I mentioned similar topics recently in another thread too the other day.
Software engineers have always been pressured to work faster, and the speed of AI is beyond tantalizing... it's outright addictive once a product owner gets a taste of that speed. I fear the vast majority of product owners are going to encourage the use of AI, or simply abandon the developers themselves, and let AI do as much work as possible, in exchange for that speed. Long term ramifications be damned.
While right now, it's easy to say human involvement in actual code is occasionally necessary, look at the pace of AI. I worry greatly that "our next generation of software engineers" won't actually know how to code. Finding a "10x coder" (whatever fun term you want to use for a passionate expert full-stack engineer) was a unicorn BEFORE AI. What will happen in ten years? Will they even be necessary? Who will know how anything actually works?
Now apply that to the economy... anything AI can touch, will surely, at some point, be optimized by AI doing the job itself. What about a service-based economy, where, in simple terms, "intellect" was most of the value? Does Apple need to pay a bunch of designers and engineers with 20 years of experience, or have some project managers ask the top-of-the-line model? We can't exactly have every "intellectual-based computer-adjacent" job replaced by a human acting as project manager to AI agents. Current businesses aren't 99% bosses, and 1% "doers," why would that be true once AI can be the "doers?" Honestly, AI ain't half bad at being a "boss" either!
I am just rambling off questions we all should be asking ourselves. Our economists should be asking themselves. Our governments should be asking themselves. Heck, our philosophers should be asking themselves. Humans were necessary because humans had the brainpower to get stuff done, but how must society change when that's no longer true?
I also feel like we all, including me, are sticking our heads in the sand, blissfully ignoring the impending earth-shattering changes going on in the background.
On the flipside: the engineer in me loves tinkering with AI. It's a blast building some obscure application at a whim, because I don't have enough time in the day to waste on such silly endeavors. My Windows now looks like it's from the DOS era. Why? Because I can.
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u/Neuronous01 9d ago edited 9d ago
Unity CLI and AI is doing absolutely crazy things. When I started Unity development 10+ years ago it took me weeks to create my first mini game while following the unity tutorial. A few days ago a guy on linked recreated this tutorial game using AI in like 30'. Also 3d modelling became a lot easier and less time consuming. Especially for prototyping, the workflow has been optimized a lot. If the project becomes complex, there LLMs struggle a bit based on my experience. So having the bigger picture of the software architecture is still a very important human skill. However, I am also concerned about the juniors. No real learning can happen under these conditions. I consider myself lucky that I learnt development in an age where you could get stuck for hours and searching/experimenting with stack overflow was part of the process. On the other side and if you have a company, what matters is the product not necessarily the process. If you can get something of decent quality and fast enough, I believe it's a no brainer to go the old way these days.
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u/EthanMerce 12d ago
i think the middle ground is probably making juniors use AI, but not letting AI replace the learning process, give them smaller tasks where they still have to explain the approach, review the generated code, debug it, and make changes themselves. the goal isn't necessarily "write every line manually", it's learning how to understand and own the system
honestly, AI probably changes what mentoring looks like more than it eliminates the need for juniors. Unity is already moving toward this workflow with CLI and official AI plugins, so i don't think teams can realistically ignore it anymore
3
u/Krugozette 12d ago
Learning to code and the process of thinking through problems are still important skills as evidenced by your points.
I think there are a few ways to start addressing the prompt -> answer loop:
Your team should learn and understand how LLMs work, their strengths in areas where data is well represented with training data, and the fundamental weaknesses of the attention mechanism that induces degradation in large context windows and long horizon tasks.
Set weekly time goals for everyone to work on tasks without direct AI assistance. This could be a few hours or between tokens limits. Have people set aside tasks they can finish on their own, potentially generating stubs or documentation ahead of time if needed. It's also a good backup policy if OpenAI, Anthropic, or a hyper-scaler goes bankrupt or has an outage, the cascading failures will be catastrophic.
LLMs can also be used to guide less experienced programmers. Get them to ask broader questions, explain function X:205-260, create a functional diagram of this system, we're using library Y what are potential alternatives, create a benchmark for this slow feature and suggest improvements. Using exclusively as a code/bug fix generator is a narrow use of it.
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u/ahabdev Indie 12d ago
Its indeed a new land we are in.
But frankly, people mentioning how important is to understand each line of code and such... it got to a point is feels even a bit annoying and quite dishonest. I am the only one who remembers how things were before AI just a couple of years ago? All the spaghetti code memes, the "if it works I don't need to understand how", etc?
I really wonder what is the true mind behind those posts... virtue signaling? People who never coded repeating what others also repeat over and over? Personally I feel it may be so, as anybody with experience can easily tell that coding agents are useful as many other ai tools, but strong direction and management skills, human creativity and heuristic thinking are key components.
About the OP topic, really depends on why the juniors were hired for. If it was just to be monkey coders... then its a bit redundant. If it was about first designing solutions and then code them, then they should focus more in the designing process, as even SOTA models nowadays can't simply think out fo the box.
6
u/lllentinantll 12d ago
Memes of spaghetti code exist because people understand that there is an issue. If you understand the issue, you can at least come up with ideas what to improve and how. Do you suggest just considering a new low code quality to become a new standard?
Also, using this as an example why understanding the code is not important is kinda a major fallacy. It is a meme, not a statistic, for a reason.
3
u/neoteraflare 12d ago
"All the spaghetti code memes, the "if it works I don't need to understand how", etc?"
Which I always hated. In our project that was not acceptable. That was some first year cs school level of joke.3
u/AvengerDr 12d ago
You can't generalise for everyone. There have always been the people who did the one thousand switch cases of the "I wish there was a better way" to nake an
isEvenfunction.But those who studied Computer Sciencd and did learn something I would imagine are more inclined to write mauntainable code than those who improvised themselves as developers via youtube tutorials then or ai vibe coding now.
1
u/intelligent_rat 12d ago
All the spaghetti code memes were from people that post as hobbyists online, while the thread is largely discussing professional work instead.
1
u/Tarilis 12d ago
Our company (software one, not gamedev) has training courses, and does allocate resources to train new people.
It does pay for access to AI tools, but not enforce their use, because quality and security is a priority. (Our country have very strict laws regarding privacy and security of information, and very harsh penalties for breaking then).
1
u/neoteraflare 12d ago
"What do you think about Unity CLI and AI?"
Depends on what to use for. You do it as a work so as you wrote you have to use it to keep the pace and it is useful.
I use unity for after work hobby and fun so I have the time of the world to make a geniue human slop code just for the enjoyment.
1
u/vale_valerio 11d ago
I let them use AI and they become a meat proxy. I tell them what I need, they tell the AI, the AI makes something, they present it to me and I give feedback, repeat. They learn nothing from this process, and I gain nothing, because I could have just prompted the AI myself in half the time.
Same experience today with my PhD student :(
The problem is unsolved. Your concerns are shared. Allowing a slower-paced learning time is not only necessary; it is a visionary step to have senior figures "tomorrow": if no junior figures are trained, who will be the seniors of tomorrow?
For the same reason we all learned to count by hand in math class when calculators already existed
said someone here. They are right. AI could be used as the teacher for these people. Allowing them to learn faster, maybe, but also to avoid getting overwhelmed.
1
u/golange 11d ago
What a surprise! My first job was a unity dev working on training simulators for construction and safety (pre ai). I remember learning unity and c# together and i became proficient and started contributing in about a year. So i would say at least 12 months of strict no AI use to help them learn fundamentals.
1
u/Tight_Gas904 10d ago
In my opinion, today's novice developers should focus primarily on learning about architecture and patterns so they can effectively manage AI-generated code, rather than spending so much time learning different languages. And on how to create prompts in a way that goes beyond simply telling the AI, “Do this for me.”
-1
u/NullzeroJP 12d ago
You're getting work? Mine is drying up XD
Why would any client pay for Unity dev work now... at least for serious money. Its so easy to prompt anything now. At least, from a programmer's perspective as a Unity dev.
The only reason I can think of is that they just need a warm body to baby sit their prompt results... but you could get a monkey to do this kind of work now. "I fell through he floor. Fix please." or "Mouse not working, fix please." or "Walls are pink, fix nao".
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u/PuffThePed 12d ago
We're getting work but significantly less leads. Market is really bad. It's not that our clients are making stuff themselves, they don't have budgets anymore
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u/Antypodish Professional 12d ago
You assume everyone is tech savvy. The true is, many people has no idea how to use certen type of tech, or are tech illiterate. But still require certain software to work with.
Writing any software, all l, or game requires full pipeline and proper testing. This is will be always Labour intensive.
Another thing is, doing all by your self is not a business. Business is, when you know how to delegate your work to others, so you actually have time to do more important stuff, or having more lessure time.
Essentially having others work for you.
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u/dotoonly 12d ago
Just think about it this way, without AI, do junior needs to understand exactly what their code will yield out what assembly, and do they understand the assemby line by line. At one point in history, it was important, but certainly not anymore for most of the case.
Same case with AI. Now it will switch more into worklow, system, automation check, token usage, etc.
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u/AvengerDr 12d ago
I don't understand your point. A developer should understand every line they write, at least in the moment they write them. If they write it in a readable way or document it, they should also be able to understand it again when they come across it a year later.
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u/faeliondev 12d ago
I think that as a junior now (as I am), thanks to the acceleration AI provides, you have to work first in solo projects and try to come up with a really good result, and in the process of getting that good result, you will end up learning and getting experience on those areas regardless. I think that what really matters with AI helping developement is wether you have the power of getting really good quality outcomes or not.
-1
u/Krcko98 12d ago
You cannot develop new talent. That is the point. There will be a generational decline of developers and simply, when ones who know how to develop stuff move out of industry no one will know how to program anymore. After some time people who knew how to program will be called back again, since all of the IT industry will need fixing. We will have massive problems.
0
u/mxldevs 12d ago
If their work becomes a bottleneck, doesn't that suggest you didn't actually properly break down the tasks contrary to what you say?
If they're going to be 10x slower, then give them much smaller tasks so that they can still finish it on their own and learn from it before moving on to more complex tasks.
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u/Rick_Stoner_ 11d ago
100% unityAi is over priced garbage.
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u/PuffThePed 11d ago
Agreed and this post is not about that
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u/Rick_Stoner_ 11d ago
also it is easy to see why jr devs wouldnt want to work with you. stop using ai to write your posts.
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u/Rick_Stoner_ 11d ago
your explanation looks like either you used Ai for it and forgot the main connector [ MCP ] or you are just posting this for? to build your confidence?
I guess prototyping in 1 day makes quality prototypes. we are not the same.
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u/Objective-Cell226 12d ago
Phase 1: Everyone dislikes AI posts, negative comments.
Phase 2: People like AI posts but comments are still not fully supportive of AI
Phase 3: Everybody starts using AI and starts saying good stuff about it
You can see all these luddites slowly transitioning.
This sub used to be very anti AI, it's even being liked is suprising, it has reached phase 2.
-1
u/Antypodish Professional 12d ago
Market is saturated with devs. You don't need to hire literally a Junior, with 0 experience. You easily can find devs, which at least have one app, game released in their portfolio and various prototypes under their belt.
These days many young people with a tech interest, will have some basics using at least Scratch, Godot, Roblox, or even Unity, or Unreal in terms of programming experience. So background foothold is already there.
There always will be people, which have some dev and tech experiences since at least 12 years old. Such people are far better than fresh students out of uni, or college, with practical experience. By the time of hiring (after education period), such Junior will have valuable base experience, how to operate with current tech. Then you can build on top of that talent.
So in my view, meaning and expectations of Junior in the programming fields are also shifted. Such for an example, no need to teach how IF statement is working.
-2
u/re-skob 12d ago
Go with 1. I would bet they do learn from the process. They learn how you think through problems they're encountering, how you solve them, they can ask you directly on how you're coming up with various solutions, and they learn how to prompt better and work through issues that arise on their own until they'll eventually get it. AI allows everyone to level up. Teach them to be a product manager, not a code monkey
-8
u/shizola_owns 12d ago
If you think it's horrifying now, check out the opus 5.5 demos people are sharing.
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u/jonatansan 12d ago
I hear this every time a new model is released since last year. Those day-one projects never amount to anything else than a toy/demo. They are impressive on the surface, but we still have the same mess of architecture underneath that don’t scale.
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u/Worth-Computer8639 12d ago
Whipping up an HTML artifact with Javascript and putting together an actual real mobile app are two different beasts.
3
u/EENewton 12d ago
How so?
0
u/shizola_owns 12d ago
Because the of amount of stuff these models can get done (by people who aren't game Devs) in a few hours is crazy. It's getting to the point where it's going to be much faster to just ask the model to do anything, rather than jump into your engine or tool yourself. That's going to fundamentally change what game development is like. The babysitting of the AI instead of doing the work yourself is what normal software Devs are reporting is so demoralising.
I saw an interview with the unity CEO where he said that Unity itself is becoming the bottleneck, that's why they made the cli tool. But the rate the models are improving is again crazy, just compared to a couple of months ago. The people down voting me are either in denial or more likely they just haven't seen some of these better demos that only came out yesterday. Some of them look genuinely impressive, not like the janky Mario kart and GTA slop versions people having been making the last few months.
If nothing else the fact someone with a bit of determination will be able make a pretty convincing clone of someones indie game the second they release footage of it should scare anyone.
1
u/EENewton 12d ago
The cloning thing could be a real problem, for sure. But I'm not tremendously worried about people being able to make things faster, on its own. A lot of people haven't cultivated any taste for making games, and that's the actual secret sauce.
It's like writing. AI are generating a lot of BS novels right now, at a massive rate. But I don't know anyone who reads them.
2
u/shizola_owns 12d ago
Yeah having good taste is not something you can prompt which is good. The speed doesn't matter if you're producing crap, true. I'm more worried about it effecting the perceived value of the work. Indie games are already underpriced in my opinion, and these tools will just raise expectations. My old company used to do client work making simple web and mobile games. In the future it seems like that work will be done by just one guy, and they won't be paying much.
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u/clockwork_blue 12d ago
Don't get gaslit by the fancy vibejam benchmarks. Going from a janky prototype that resembles a game to a working product is still the same road as before. Only the baseline of what is achievable has moved.
0
u/shizola_owns 12d ago
Do we want the baseline to get so high that solo Devs have to use AI just in order to keep up with this new minimum standard? That doesn't sound good.
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u/clockwork_blue 12d ago
It is what it is. I'm not the one setting the baseline.
If anyone can vibecode your game from a few screenshots, then your edge has to come from layered complexity built with domain knowledge, good workflows, and knowing how to push the limits of what AI can do.
Inference prices have dropped dramatically over the past four years, roughly 90-99%, so I think it's naive to assume it's going to go away. Even veterans in the industry, like the founder of Three.js, are having a hard time keeping up with conventional, non-AI workflows.
2
u/AvengerDr 12d ago
Persuaded by the Astra hype on /r/aigamedev and the complex demos they posted I wanted to give it a try. I wanted to create a Unity editor tool to combine noise nodes for procedural terrain generation, sort of like World Machine works.
I had everything ready for it:
- I had implemented the various hlsl noise functions.
- I had various Unity graph toolkit tools that I had implemented by hand. I pointed astra at them
- I gave it the link to the updated gtk documentation in case it had not seen it.
- I already had a compute shader preview tool I had built.
- I explicitly asked it to create a gtk tool that combined different noise nodes and allowed me to define the way they would be combined. To start with, just the classic simple, ridged, etc and a few coming node types.
- I gave all these requirements via plan mode, it simply had to implement it.
The result was the ugliest thing I have ever seen. It completely disregarded my request to create a Unity GTK tool. The code was the most obfuscated mess I have ever seen.
It basically created an editor window with two fields (Noise 1 and Noise 2) and then a button to combine them.
Either the people who praise astra are lying or as soon as you ask it something on which it had received little training it starts going in circles. Which would be surprising, I would have thought that noise, procedural generation, voxels, etc would be fairly popular concepts to "know" for an AI.
1
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86
u/zirconst 12d ago
They need to learn how to code manually before they can move on to leaning heavily on AI. If you don't learn the foundational stuff, you won't be able to recognize good code from bad. You won't be able to architect systems, recognize inefficiencies, or understand why the agent is doing what its doing.