> “No more hand-written code” and that the game will be “generated with full AI workflows,” employees were reportedly “stunned,” which many hoped the news was some kind of sick joke.
The biggest surprise to me is that they're reporting that the employees themselves are surprised. I don't personally know a single dev who would or even should be "surprised" by this given the current industry state.
This doesn't even really seem headline news worthy. Practically every large company you've ever heard of is doing exactly the same thing right now. And I know very few devs who actually hand-write basically anything right now even if its just an unspoken truth.
At my job it's essentially the same. Everyone is actively encouraged to use AI to move faster and barely anybody writes code by hand.
Note this is not me making a value judgement saying this is good or bad, its just my observation. Having very little hand-written code is quickly becoming the norm.
I think you'd be also stunned about the custom scripting/tooling studios have built for themselves over the years. Like the Blueprint system of Unreal, and plenty of low-code scene editors and map editors.
Since games are fuzzy, it's also important that developers are in touch with the underlying systems of what makes the games games, and that requires understanding those systems -- easily done through writing and modifying them.
The statement did include that all art should also be AI-generated, which is a whole other thing. I'd also make a large difference between most code being AI-generated to start with, and actually not writing by hand at all anymore.
This is a critical piece missing from the original article. It would make a lot more sense that game devs and other employees would be "shocked" at being told there would be AI art generated with "full AI workflows"[0].
No hand written code is practically the industry norm now, yet game assets and visuals is still mostly done by hand. The backlash would seem to line up more with Epic encouraging AI generated art, which is incredibly unpopular in the art and game dev communities.
Man even a cursory look of this site which is very much in the Silicon Valley / Big Tech world and very AI forward will tell you that the usage of AI is still all over the place.
Or perhaps the fact that they were stunned should tell you that it's not quite as standard as you think, industry-wide...?
Like, why assume that your experience is necessarily the most authoritative, the most representative, when you encounter evidence that someone else's might be different?
I agree. I wouldn't think twice about hearing this about a small SF startup, or maybe even a large company during the height of tokenmaxxing, but its definitely a distruption, and a shocking one at that, for some C-suites to start mandating things like the disallowal of non-AI code.
There’s this tendency for a lot of tech folks to think their expertise in tech gives them special insights into other disciplines. Often when this happens, they’ll be doomed by missing many of the details that the old domain experts took for granted. I feel like AI is going to supercharge that. Lots of tech folks will see an AI make a CRUD app and think that means the AI will be equally capable of making art while missing why the overwhelming majority of the art community is against generative AI. The end result will be a lot of mass market art is going to become noticeable worse in the years to come in order to earn some shareholders a few extra cents in profit.
Isn't this the new norm for every modern tech company?
Claude Code can help me write and review code faster and better than a human possibly could. I spend my time drafting requirements, steering agents and reviewing diffs instead of writing code manually.
AI is changing knowledge work. Dressing that up with ragebait (game dev, Disney, layoffs) doesn't change that or the fact that the video game industry has always been brutally fickle and hit-driven. The Epic layoffs earlier this year had far more to do with the decline of Fortnite's popularity than AI.
How do you avoid the spaghetti code that (in my experience) most AI models spit out? Sure you can steer it, ask it to make it better, etc... but it's easier to me to be in the driver's seat. Doesn't mean AI isn't useful, but whenever AI designs a feature end-to-end, everything is tightly-coupled, the wrong abstractions are picked, and fundamentally the code is not optimized for human understanding. I don't really understand how people can tolerate this kind of code (assuming they read it, which I think they do not). Just take the Claude Code CLI as an example - is there anyone in the world that knows how that spaghetti machine works?
I agree that AI is very useful in reviewing PRs and searching for bugs. It's definitely a game-changer there. But a human still needs to understand the code and take responsibility for it.
>Claude Code CLI ... is there anyone in the world that knows how that spaghetti machine works
Having a very active, and happy user base.
Now this a simplistic view, and I think even heavily AI first dev teams still glance at the diff to make sure things aren't going too awry or ask questions. But the concept "spaghetti code" and "optimized for human understanding" are assumptions being revisited entirely in 2026.
This is why I haven’t been able to play split screen Fortnight with my son for the past several seasons.
You used to be able to do a trick where you login with one controller, then log back out with another, then back in with the first (thanks reddit for finding that), but now that doesn’t even work.
I think a lot of these devs are too proud. Personally, I'm glad to have AI coding now. After 15 years of professional experience, it was becoming repetitive.
Also, my goal since I graduated university, was to become a software architect but the position had become rare and mostly existed in bureaucratic organisations.
Now with AI, every developer is essentially a software architect.
My university major was 'software design'. When I came out of uni, I was shocked to learn that nobody cared about software design. Now software design is all any engineer has left to care about.
Contemporary AI is absolutely trash at things like scene graph management and lighting concerns. It also doesn't do physics, materials, SFX or "fun" very well.
Do not let the apparent visual progress of diffusion models conflate things. Unless we intend to run the entire game via diffusion models (which is certainly possible), I don't think this represents a reasonable baseline against which any amount of AAA art capacity can be compared. The number of units is here is effectively zero. A single AAA artist is infinitely more productive than GPT6 because they can produce and iterate content that the model simply cannot.
Game dev seems like one of the worst places for LLM code
Maybe some of the generic scaffolding and tooling you could use it for, but any game mechanics and effects you want to make artistically represent your game will just turn into sloppa when generated by an LLM unless you just have it make the generic functions that you fully specify then manually tweak yourself
but how much faster will that be to someone that actually knows what they're doing?
I've always wanted to get into game dev but never did for lack of time or sustained interest. I tried to slop together some ideas and mechanics that I've been toying around with in my head for years now. And llms have no concept for the nuance that goes into actual enjoyable mechanics. Maybe it's just me, because I never put the time in myself so I can't get the results out that I want.
AI is perfectly capable of doing all of the coding for games now, especially if you have your own engine (which Epic does), build around harnesses (which Epic does), and treat the job of making games like a job not a side-slop (which Epic does).
Maybe this will bring quality down, but I don't think so, at least not more than the usual crunch + Disneyification.
Either way, the more interesting effect of this is not Epic making another IP licensed shooter, but more people making/modding into existence the games they want. This is already happening. And that's probably what was the genesis of this policy from Epic.
The biggest surprise to me is that they're reporting that the employees themselves are surprised. I don't personally know a single dev who would or even should be "surprised" by this given the current industry state.
This doesn't even really seem headline news worthy. Practically every large company you've ever heard of is doing exactly the same thing right now. And I know very few devs who actually hand-write basically anything right now even if its just an unspoken truth.
At my job it's essentially the same. Everyone is actively encouraged to use AI to move faster and barely anybody writes code by hand.
Note this is not me making a value judgement saying this is good or bad, its just my observation. Having very little hand-written code is quickly becoming the norm.
Since games are fuzzy, it's also important that developers are in touch with the underlying systems of what makes the games games, and that requires understanding those systems -- easily done through writing and modifying them.
No hand written code is practically the industry norm now, yet game assets and visuals is still mostly done by hand. The backlash would seem to line up more with Epic encouraging AI generated art, which is incredibly unpopular in the art and game dev communities.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/10/report-epic-games-goe...
Like, why assume that your experience is necessarily the most authoritative, the most representative, when you encounter evidence that someone else's might be different?
Isn't this the new norm for every modern tech company?
Claude Code can help me write and review code faster and better than a human possibly could. I spend my time drafting requirements, steering agents and reviewing diffs instead of writing code manually.
AI is changing knowledge work. Dressing that up with ragebait (game dev, Disney, layoffs) doesn't change that or the fact that the video game industry has always been brutally fickle and hit-driven. The Epic layoffs earlier this year had far more to do with the decline of Fortnite's popularity than AI.
I agree that AI is very useful in reviewing PRs and searching for bugs. It's definitely a game-changer there. But a human still needs to understand the code and take responsibility for it.
You don't. This is demonstrated by
>Claude Code CLI ... is there anyone in the world that knows how that spaghetti machine works
Having a very active, and happy user base.
Now this a simplistic view, and I think even heavily AI first dev teams still glance at the diff to make sure things aren't going too awry or ask questions. But the concept "spaghetti code" and "optimized for human understanding" are assumptions being revisited entirely in 2026.
You used to be able to do a trick where you login with one controller, then log back out with another, then back in with the first (thanks reddit for finding that), but now that doesn’t even work.
Also, my goal since I graduated university, was to become a software architect but the position had become rare and mostly existed in bureaucratic organisations.
Now with AI, every developer is essentially a software architect.
My university major was 'software design'. When I came out of uni, I was shocked to learn that nobody cared about software design. Now software design is all any engineer has left to care about.
Contemporary AI is absolutely trash at things like scene graph management and lighting concerns. It also doesn't do physics, materials, SFX or "fun" very well.
Do not let the apparent visual progress of diffusion models conflate things. Unless we intend to run the entire game via diffusion models (which is certainly possible), I don't think this represents a reasonable baseline against which any amount of AAA art capacity can be compared. The number of units is here is effectively zero. A single AAA artist is infinitely more productive than GPT6 because they can produce and iterate content that the model simply cannot.
Game dev seems like one of the worst places for LLM code
Maybe some of the generic scaffolding and tooling you could use it for, but any game mechanics and effects you want to make artistically represent your game will just turn into sloppa when generated by an LLM unless you just have it make the generic functions that you fully specify then manually tweak yourself
but how much faster will that be to someone that actually knows what they're doing?
AI is perfectly capable of doing all of the coding for games now, especially if you have your own engine (which Epic does), build around harnesses (which Epic does), and treat the job of making games like a job not a side-slop (which Epic does).
Maybe this will bring quality down, but I don't think so, at least not more than the usual crunch + Disneyification.
Either way, the more interesting effect of this is not Epic making another IP licensed shooter, but more people making/modding into existence the games they want. This is already happening. And that's probably what was the genesis of this policy from Epic.
Ashes to ashes. Slop to slop.