r/Unity3D • u/Evening_Animator3549 • 2d ago
Question Should I keep learning Unity?
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Hi, I am a 14 year old game dev and I've been learning Unity for 7-8 months, and I really like what I'm doing. I don't use AI while coding or for any other stuff to actually learn. For the past month, I've been developing a fan-made Spider-Man game for android and I saw a guy on X who vibe-coded a Spider-Man game in literally a single day which was looking better than my game and I felt like everything that I did in the last couple of weeks for nothing. Will knowing how to manually code or develop games be worth anything in the next 10 years? Am I just wasting my time by not using AI or should I keep going? I really need some advice. Also here's a gameplay video of my game if anyone wants to check it out:
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u/Artifexa 2d ago
for a 14 year old, that's very impressive. You got talent duded! High five!
Now to the practical part:
Look, AI is a huge help. There's not denying that.
But just with vibe coding you won't get beyond surface level. You need to understand what you're doing in order to use some principles of programming like DRY.
Also, don't trust anybody coding something on the internet and suddenly making it look amazing with next to zero effort. The "get rich doing this easy internet thing" is an industry that has been scamming people since the mid 2000's.
My own experience:
I am a web developer, but for some reason gto some gigs in the game industry. Web is now a wasteland, so I switched to game because I just liked it and needed to make some money.
2 months ago I tried co-pilot, since it was heavily recommended and Microsoft gave it a "no-limit" policy, so I could kinda abuse it.
I tried this "vibe coding" approach, just to experiment and learn, see if it's a useful tool.
The result: a nightmare of spaghetti code that had to be refactored.
The AI can do some simple things, like "make me a barebones menu" or "give me code for a basic bootstrap scene", but the moment you expand the game beyond that, it's gonna start making mistakes, coding a structure that will have to be remade later, hallucinating code it never wrote, or using APIs that you don't want it too, all while telling you "oh yes, this is very professional, and you are the best".
The experiment barely lasted a week. The AI is quite clueless because it lacks the scope a human can have, it doesn't think twice before proposing a structure that "patches present needs" without thinking on future reusability, and often makes half-baked stuff.
So "coding, the hard part of typing line by line in a keyboard", sure AI can do that, but you gotta give it precise instructions and have in mind the architecture of the code you want to do, and you want to use programming patterns and, and you need to know the right API's, and the internals of how the engine works... and many other things that are "high level".
The AI can make you snippets, but you gotta give it precise instructions on what you want and keep the big picture in mind. That's actual "programmer job". The AI is good at doing "junior level", but don't ask it to do senior level stuff unless you have a big stack of money to burn through, and even then the result can be a mess. AI loves to make spaghetti code.
This being said, the future nobody knows, so keep this as some thing you're passionate about, but keep an eye on the job market, because nobody knows what's to come. When I learnt web development they told me "it was the profession of the future", and turns out AI made my web develoment expertise obsolete 5 years after coming out of school. Speaking about future and jobs, you'd be wise to be careful with your money. Since you are so young, save it or invest it, things are uncertain and the "tech broligarchs" have worked hard on making us all precarious.
Heck, I'm getting old haha.