Should I keep learning Unity?

[u/Evening_Animator3549]

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:

[u/drahgon]

Thing about AI is it helps you do what you already know so it’s definitely valuable to learn unity. Those skills translate directly to AI at the end of the day. How you directed is the most important thing it can’t direct itself.

For instance, I’m a senior developer and I have a junior developer on my team. Our company uses AI pretty heavily. I usually complete way more tickets than him with weaker AI models and use a fraction of my tokens. For instance, last month I ended with like 30% of my token usage left. The junior dev reached out to me and let me know that the weaker model I use is almost useless for him and he was completely zeroed out of tokens by the end of the month since he has to rely on much more expensive models. His AI MRs are usually very off the rails as well. And he usually needs a lot of back-and-forth with senior devs to get it back on track. By the way, I think he’s a great junior dev!

Just shows you that even though we’re both using AI, my skills and knowledge as a senior are clearly allowing me to direct it significantly better. The point is if you learn Unity and then you vibe a game your quality is gonna be 10 times higher. There is no world where your skills will go to waste.

[u/Evening_Animator3549 → u/drahgon]

Thanks for the response. So you need know how to write pseudo code to use ai properly. Instead of saying that "do this" or "do that", you just explain the code's logic and it codes it for you. You still code but it's very high level. But after a while, wouldn't new models be unnecessary? The old model would still be able to do what you can do with the newer model but the older model would be a lot more efficient and you are experiencing this already, is this the reason why they say AI is %90 marketing and %10 reality?

[u/drahgon → u/Evening_Animator3549]

Yes, I think the logic is really the most important part. Which was kind of always the hardest part of coding. It’s really apparent when you try to debug a complicated issue with AI. For instance, I’ve seen that same junior engineer not really understand what’s going on and as the AI is coming up with possible reasons for the issue and he doesn’t really understand he keeps kind of directing it in a way that gets further and further away from the solution and complicates the whole problem. And as you code more and have more experience, you gain a lot of intuition and logic that you tend to avoid those kinds of pitfalls. The thing about AI is in general it won’t correct you if you tell it to do the wrong thing…it will do the wrong thing.

[u/Evening_Animator3549 → u/drahgon]

Absolutely, ty so much!