Epic Games tells employees to use AI to get Disney game done
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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.
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?
Because it's easier.
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...
Practically every large company? Is Epic not large? At the least, this team wasn't doing it. Reconsider your perspective.
Whether Epic leadership themselves can understand that difference is something I'm not sure of, this might be non technical bigwigs speaking and being ignored at the lower end, but these orders taken literally are a "you can't use the letter A" level of dumb.
For what it’s worth a lot of the code in my company is similar in scope and style. Our design documents are very very thorough and catch edge cases .
I’m not in an ic role anymore but I do feel sad about the loss of handwritten code. It hits at my identity.
As for the article it feels like this is an abuse of ai and is being used for executive cover.
I say this as a person who uses AI for my job, but if someone isn't doing what you are doing and it's working for them, why bother?
I've been a software developer for 25 years, and coding software by hand is not a wise career choice right now.
It's like asking AI to generate HTML pages, then just eyeball it to see if the result fits the spec, all without reading the actual code underneath.
Is it ideal and good quality? Hell no, your HTML page maybe 50MB large and comes with some extra tags that's not even in the W3C spec. But... if you observe the behavior of regular consumers and what cheap shit they got lied to paying for, you'll know that most of them don't know (or maybe even care to know) about quality.
Also there's the fact that most top LLMs can now generate code that works mostly correctly, enough to keep most consumers from complaining, all of sudden it sounded reasonable for a for-profit company to try out this route.
Again, I really don't like where this is going, but I can't ignore what I see.
Actually, if AIs in the future is truly realized as promoted, then you can just prompt the AI to get the problem fixed. The idea is, the dev in the future will never look the code ever, they give instructions and the AI implement the functions. It's like operate Jarvis from The Iron Man.
BTW, let's get off-topic a little since we're off the home page.
You know back in the day people called Elon Musk the "real-life Iron Man" and it's so cool and all? Now if you watch those movies again, it is just hard to ignore the detail such as how few people shown working inside the Iron Man tower and residence.
Maybe the true story of the movies was in a society of high productivity, mans who's powerful and dominating fight war with each other while regular people just trying to survive between the waves of destruction and reconstruction like ants in fire works.
AI is generally unpopular with people.
https://metro.co.uk/2026/05/13/very-sad-eastenders-jake-wood...
I work in IT at a place where the vast majority of activity is not IT related but we have a huge number of systems. I regularly interact with a wide range of disciplines. It is in education sector so it may be somewhat skewed, but I see very little positivity about AI from anyone but us developers. It gets used loads, but even those using it to speed up documents, reports, comms etc are generally negative about it.
The folks making these decisions are only "tech folk" in that they work in tech. Really these are professional businessmen who are focused on maximizing profit. If you left it to tech folk to make these decisions, then most of these companies would quickly fail as the tech folk fail to even try to make any money (let alone be able to understand consumers well enough to be able to make money from them).
>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.
It's less about thinking that the technology that can quickly spin up an app could be used to quickly spin up some art and more about the ROI. Actual tech workers could probably leverage AI very effectively in "unoffending" ways, but they're really not the ones calling the shots. It's the MBAs who recognize that the quality of the product really doesn't matter if they can make the product cheap enough.
>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.
Brother, we're already living in this reality.
The article this thread is about provides the perfect example: Epic Games is working on a Disney game. These are two companies which are the epitome of generating "art" so efficiently that they're almost just generating the profit directly. Switching out some engineers for AI isn't going to make much of a difference in the end product.
For a specific example, "Star Wars" has been closer to AI generated "art" than it has been to actual "art" for nearly half a century at this point. It was just that back in the day you needed a bunch of nerds to produce the specific kinds of characters, settings, scenes, etc., needed to sell the underlying products. Now you can just use AI. But don't mistake the fact that it was humans working on it with it being "art." It's all driven by algorithms at the end of the day.
For what it's worth, those who actually appreciate "art" aren't the target audience. They never were. It's currently hip to hate AI, but the consumer base these companies target really do not care. They want slop. They wanted it before and they got it before, and they still want it now and they're going to get a lot more of it now.
I agree, but I think pretty much everything will get noticeably worse in the years to come. It has happened to a lot of civilizations: they had some high level of skill in beautiful pottery, and then over the generations that skill disappeared. Probably because they were cheaper.
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.
EDIT: also, from the software engineer perspective, it is an order of magnitude more tedious to maintain software projects that lack quality, consistency, or standards. If I could measure the effect of AI vibe-coding in terms of personal pain, I would say it makes software development more painful when code is not well thought-out. There is a way to use AI responsibly, but I see more often people taking shortcuts and throwing "engineering" out the window. It's possible to ship quality with AI, but that's not the path of least resistance.
This may be a case of "you'll see more posts from people who are complaining than from the people who are busy using it." As a semi-relevant comparison: go on Reddit/Twitter any time there's a Fortnite update and you'll see and endless sea of complaints, yet the game is still being played by ridiculous numbers of people.
The kind of outfit that's going to go all in on Claude is also likely to punish "negativity about AI".
That's the neat thing—you don't.
Frontier models, especially Opus 5.5, have vastly stepped up their game in terms of code quality. Furthermore, the sheer volume and speed of code they produce has meant that humans just don't have time to read and review the code even if it were the most well-written code in the world. The frontier is now structuring your loops, graphs, and evals in such a way that agents with a fresh context review the agent-produced code looking for bugs and errors. If humans review anything, it's an agent-produced summary of the code changes.
Business people now expect speed of delivery that humans can't match. Humans are now the bottleneck; agents will step up to replace them.
It all starts making sense once you realize the most important thing in software development: MONEY. Oh, and the fact that management hates programmers.
You can be in the driver seat while delegating implementation to agents. You can use agents to generate documentation and refactor architectures. You can ask an agent to explain a feature and then work with it to plan how to extend it.
You don’t have to type the code to be the architect.
I'm a big fan of the advice "See what everyone else is doing, and do the opposite"
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 know Jonathan Blow has recently said in the last couple weeks that he just doesn't even really bother
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.
I genuinely don't hate AI, I have to use it every single day, but... I really wish I got some more years like you until I got sick of the normal workflow... :') I was simply born late for that. Maybe this comes off whiny, and it is to some extent, but I do hear this from other people in my cohort a lot and it genuinely pains me.
To summarize 15 years of experience for you: You keep learning non-stop the entire time and after 15 years, you've got a really good high level view and you've built up an intuition for how to separate code in a way to minimize complexity whilst maximizing maintainability, reliability and performance... But you still miss stuff, miss some security vulnerabilities; because complex projects give you so many things to think about, it's a struggle to attend to everything. The one real advantage is that what you miss is generally easy to fix (thanks to your design intuition).
Even after 15 years, though, my feeling is that I'm still not skeptical enough. Solving problems with software is really hard. The more experience I have, the harder it appears to be. I'm a much better coder now than I ever was by an order of magnitude but I trust my own code less than I ever did. AI is can help a junior a lot; you just have to be humble about your output and be very critical of it.
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.
This sounds nigh-indistinguishable from the catastrophic waste of capital that Concord turned into.
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.
Edit… oh wait you said a bug, yea agree
Names changed/hidden to protect the guilty. Early this year, the CEO of a company I'm familiar with in a highly regulated industry announced a companywide initiative, let's call it "Operation Rapidash". Total AI transformation. AI all the things by 2027. Recently I learned that both major frontier labs are starting to roll out their own technologies for this highly regulated industry. Any guesses where the training data for this specialized knowledge might have come from? Anyone? Anyone?
Of course, it's not just them, it's anyone with an Operation Rapidash. Committing to AI development is allowing the labs to distill your business out from under you. We're looking at a future where not only people formerly hired for their expertise become peripherals to the machine, but the entire industry becomes a peripheral to the frontier labs.
But you'll have a couple amazing quarters before jumping out and deploying your golden parachute.
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.
The future is now old man
In a similar way to how it can generate music, but its still the most mediocre trash you have ever heard.