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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
AI is generally unpopular with people.
Practically every large company? Is Epic not large? At the least, this team wasn't doing it. Reconsider your perspective.