A month ago I was still talking like you. Then I said to an insisting colleague, “watch I’ll try to vibe code a game engine and show you the crap it produces.”
Granted, this wasn’t my first game engine so I knew exactly what to say, but I was completely floored. GPT Sol & Astra at max effort was flawless at nearly everything I threw at it. I’m talking fully ground up, zero dependencies, just the primitives and SIMD. Fully featured engine done in two weeks with deferred 2-stage render pipeline, shadow maps, mesh shaders, MSAA, post processing, collision, physics, the works.
I even intentionally skipped a few important optimizations and went back to refactor them in, thinking there’s no way it can do a wholesale rewrite of major systems, but it did it. I got dry mouth from all the jaw dropping. My prompts got shorter and more ambiguous, so it would ask me clarify. I audited every line of code, and it was good (after adding two skills.md). I gave up. I’m a reluctant believer.
It sucks, but sadly these things are really good. Don’t be last contrarian, there’s nothing to gain. You’re just lying to yourself
But I dropped it and will probably never touch it again.
Are you going to do anything with that game engine? I'm sure there are thousands of others who've written a game engine with the tools. What are they being used for? Is it just to "try it out"? I see people producing a LOT of software. Sure, the code is good, but was it needed? Are people using it?
And maybe that's OK - we're just writing software for ourselves now, because it's so cheap + fast to produce.
You can ask the same about hand written code too.
I have no pressure to use this stuff. I’m still getting paid. I’m still shipping higher quality software at the same speed as the rest of my peers. Why should I sacrifice quality for speed?