I had a similar experience. For complex maths in my 3d engine around IK, made more progress in those 3 days than I would’ve done in weeks.
I recently discovered though that ChatGPT 5.5 Pro is almost as smart but only available to me via the ChatGPT app. I’ve been having it read my code and having Opus 4.8 use the ChatGPT app to collaborate. It’s a step down but its a temporary stopgap for complex problems.
Agreed. I really don’t think this is worth arguing that AI can be a huge help. I was skeptical until April even after hearing many friends tell me how good Opus 4.5 was last year.
Not working on the “next big” thing but I only recently started finding that AI could solve complex problems for me starting around ChatGPT 5.5. Working on a game engine. Some of the quite isolated modules I’ve had it build are not good code by my own standards. The code has way too many indirections to say the least. But they work without bugs and perform well too (i have a very good CPU and memory management harness for my frame loop). My velocity on the project has doubled at least cause now stuff that I wanted to do down the line is already done. I’m definitely a bit careful with setting up isolated guardlines about which files I let a certain feature touch but with models like Fable even found that unnecessary.
Working code that performs exactly how I want on an outer level is valuable. It can be refactored and rearchitected or reimplemented better by just the virtue of having something to compare against and having the edge cases accounted for.
I’m in the same boat. Been learning 3d game dev past few years seriously after dabbling for half a decade. I even released my first few tiny 3d games in the last 6 months and they’ve made hundreds of dollars! That alone was a dream come true.
I picked game dev specifically because I wanted to build some things I had envisioned and found it challenging. And in the beginning each new concept within 3d modeling, optimisation, shaders, physics, lighting, shadows & rendering felt intractable and unmasterable.
Now, I have a basic working understanding of nearly everything that goes into traditional 3d game dev. Except the very cutting edge stuff. And have mastered things I was struggling with 2 years ago.
And recently I felt something that scared me. It was the feeling that within 2 years, I’ll have lost the excitement and challenges that learning game dev has brought me with these past few years. And I could see how to someone experienced this was as boring as full stack web dev was for me.
this mirrors my experience too. I’ll just add that some times taking a complete break from work is necessary to find the mental clarity to reach the state where learning, stability and happiness are possible.
This. As much as I love listening to JB, graphics wise he’s not doing anything ground breaking, it could even be done on the web. But I understand for him the architecture for his games being perfect is what makes it worth it for him.
This sort of thing keeps me skeptical of AI quite a bit. ChatGPT also has non sensical errors messages for random failures, Gemini too. These companies have infinite compute and yet they haven't been able to implement reliable/graceful error handling in 2+ years for a chat app? Why are they promising us they can replace all developers?
Can you tell me about how you use AI for baking and texture refinement?
I’m a beginner making small 3d webxr experiences, so tooling is a bit scarce outside of blender. Recently started making my own models and doing stuff like ao mapping and lightmapping. Editing texture maps using AI sounds helpful.
It’s a well known fact that some types of astigmatism (the kind I have too) causes light text on dark bg to look blurry i.e. the text to be somewhat doubled.
I got a pair of glasses made that only fix my astigmatism to use with computers.