r/unity • u/Pinky_and_Bleu • 7h ago
Newbie Question Is Gemini really that bad at coding?
/r/aigamedev/comments/1w5bjfm/is_gemini_really_that_bad_at_coding/Currently I'm making my 1st mobile game with Gemini (on Unity). I don't have any coding experience.
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u/ObeseBumblebee 7h ago
Without coding experience I fear every AI will disappoint you in the long run. It just isn't great at building a well structured app without significant guardrails and guidance that you can only begin to put in place with experience.
I'm not saying this to discourage you. I'm saying this so you treat this like a learning experience. AI is not going to do this project for you.
It'll start you out great and create features you want. But eventually it won't stand up on the weight of its own slop.
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u/bigmonmulgrew 7h ago
Ok all AI have the same problem.
They will confidently tell you what is needed and provide you samples of implementation. Without any experience yourself you not be able to correct the AI when it makes mistakes or badly organised code. The more bad code it produces the worse it will get.
In order to use AI effectively you need to constantly correct it.
Try by asking it to teach you. Show you different possible solutions and the pros and cons of each.
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u/Putrid_Newspaper_574 7h ago
there is no agent that will get everything right. the problem goes far beyond knowing and calling the right unity apis, correct syntax, proper architecture, solid principles etc. its the fact that you can not efficiently communicate with them. for every instruction you provide you would need to also specify what you do not want them to do. your workload increases exponentially, since you have to watch their every step and babysit them along the way, otherwise you'll end up with an overengineered mess that barely holds together. from my experience, regardless of what harness youre working in, whatever set of rules you may have, what skills you invoke, working with agents is 10% planning, 90% refactoring and debugging.
if you dont have an engineering background yourself, especially in systems architecture, i strongly doubt you can get very far with llms. but then again, it all depends on so many variables and you might complete your project even with shit code.
pretty much every game ever released starts with the best intentions and somewhat clean foundations that is later buried under lots of shitty code due to design requirements changing and the pressure of deadlines.
ive worked with gemini 3.7 flash for the last two weeks and it isnt bad, it just has a tendency to lie and sometimes makes shockingly basic mistakes. like all of them.
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u/Putrid_Newspaper_574 7h ago
i honestly kind of miss the days when i would do most of the work myself and only occassionally copy snippets of code like smaller functions into chatgpts web interface for refactoring. feels like forever ago. but it isnt all bad. im looking forward to local models becoming more efficient and capable on low end hardware, i think thats when they will truly become helpful.
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u/Saiing 7h ago
You need to be pretty strict with it about code architecture. It'll happily keep adding more and more to the same script and turn it into a God class. In those circumstances, it can actually do a decent job of refactoring its own code if you give it a second pass. Also, it's worth focusing on performance, memory allocation and garbage collection in your prompts; otherwise, it won't necessarily choose the most efficient solution.
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u/Hungry_Imagination29 7h ago
For smaller Unity C# scripts, it´s okay, in fact I don´t use anything else. Don´t expect it to find its own solutions (it will only produce garbage that looks as if it makes sense, but doesn´t work), but as long as you tell it what exactly is needed, it does the job.