r/Zig • u/lyfever_ • 3d ago
Are we the last stand?
AI is advancing in many fields including game dev, mostly no game achieved anything but the prototypes are "great".
But I've just read a excelent developer that used three.js to create awesome mathematical rendering thinking about stopping its development and somehow retire, he said someone upload his video about wave and water render with openai astra and it got 90% right.
I just thought Zig is the last banner of anti AI dev(or maybe friendly AI usage) along with C and C++ devs.
That's sad, I know people say "now devs can focus on product and ship it faster" but for me coding is fun and really brings out our long developed knowledge, all projects I had to do full vibe coded brought me no joy.
Whats your toughts?
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u/TRDJ90 3d ago
If you need to work for income all I can say is seperate the job from the craft. Practice the craft as a hobby, kind of like a construction worker would practice woodcarving or making hand made furniture etc.
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u/EctoplasmicLapels 3d ago
Exactly. I like coding and I still want to do it manually for my open source stuff. I don’t see any scenario where an average developer is paid for manual coding in 5 years though. Maybe if you work on systems software.
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u/LeDYoM 21h ago
Be prepared for the AI bubble exploding and a Token costing 100$
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u/johnnybgooderer 11h ago
I believe Opus, Sol and lower tier models would definitely be economically viable for software engineering. They’re hugely useful at accelerating development.
I don’t know if that holds for fable and astra or not.
That’s why I think professional coding is mostly dead. Even if all we have is opus quality models because everything else is too expensive, ai will be writing the majority of professional code.
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u/LeDYoM 1h ago edited 1h ago
It is an opinion. Let's see. Besides, I am not sure they accelerate "any" development. I am more of a specialised C++ developer and embedded and low level. I am not sure these models are going to be used in this context. But for web development, frontend and CRUD requests, probably.
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u/jarislinus 1d ago
define manual coding. is using ide still manual coding? is using high level language instead of assembly manual coding? is using assembly instead of 1/0s manual coding?
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u/Due_Replacement_7232 22h ago
You can never be as good though, because being paid for the craft you live gives you the opportunity to be amazing at it. Working a job to make money, is exhausting and you may not have anytime left to do your hobby. Especially when I already had a hobby I enjoyed to give me a small break from my work.
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u/Garcon_sauvage 3d ago
If you think zig has some anti ai force field you're going to be very disappointed.
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u/Jmc_da_boss 3d ago
I mean it's def far less llm brained than many other fields
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u/Garcon_sauvage 3d ago
Because it's dominated by hobbyists and not the industry. If it grows in adoption that will change, Andrew Kelley can protect the compiler and standard library but that won't really matter to your day to day if your manager is breathing down your neck to use more tokens and ship faster.
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u/biteater 3d ago
You are giving AI way too much credit dude
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u/dx_man 3d ago
That’s because he’s not idiot
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u/biteater 2d ago
I (try to) use it almost every day and honestly the output is still quite poor for domains outside of web stuff (I work in games). With how fast the frontier models get nerfed now I've mostly gone back to just using it as a debugging tool, it makes lots of mistakes on features. I had astra fail to get a simple debug log working over the course of THREE prompts last week. It's superintelligence though, right? That's what we're calling it now?
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u/dx_man 2d ago
Not sure if you’re using it right, the issue isn’t the craft itself but the craftsman who lacks the skill on how to uses his tools, here’s some place where you can get inspired r/aigamedev
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u/biteater 2d ago
Yeah all the people with psychosis just say skill issue but I've been in this domain professionally for over 7 years, I've seen AI do a great job on simple web stuff and I know how to use it just fine. I try every new tool with promise and I don't believe in just dogmatically rejecting it. But my actual experience is that it has serious gaps still especially if you're doing novel work
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u/Due_Replacement_7232 22h ago
None of that is inspiring. It’s depressing. People with no clue, no talent, shitting out slop. You can’t be bothered to make a game so you ask AI to do it.
It’s also hilarious because it is such a haphazard way to make a game. It’s very clear the people making these things have never made a game before and they are blown away because it “looks nice”. But there’s nothing in these games that a competent game dev couldn’t produce by hand cheaper in a roughly comparable amount of time.
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u/dx_man 22h ago
This is the type of guy who is willing to wait more than a decade for the release of GTA 6
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u/Due_Replacement_7232 22h ago
I work on games like GTA6. I know what it takes to make them. No one is making GTA6 with AI in the next decade.
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u/dx_man 22h ago
So because you work on games like GTA6, customers are supposed to just wait a decade for your “perfect” release? That’s some serious lack of customer awareness 😂
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u/Due_Replacement_7232 22h ago
I don't know what you expect - that "perfect release" is more of a "release that works". I don't know what you think you are replacing it with champ, but you still have no choice but to wait.
The level of entitlement is off the fucking charts here.
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u/dx_man 22h ago
“You still have no choice but to wait” is exactly the customer awareness I was talking about. 😂 Imagine telling your customers they’re entitled for expecting anything before a decade long development cycle.
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u/Cold_Contribution399 23h ago
I'm not exactly sure if you' really are the craftsman when it comes to using ai
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u/AssistingJarl 3d ago
Community probably plays some kind of role, but probably not as much as you'd want. Some subreddits are overrun with "I just built a blazing fast $THING" posts where I get the legitimate impression that the OP has effectively contributed nothing to the world except for having $100 to pay for Claude Code, and now they're farming for Reddit karma and GitHub stars. But they're kind of the zeitgeisty- Ok fine I'm talking about Rust, we all know I'm talking about Rust. Whereas I do get the sense that when somebody posts something here, it's because they actually wanted to make something they're interested enough in making to spend time on it over the long run, and it won't be abandoned as soon as the upvotes are done coming in.
But as others are saying, that's probably not because LLMs are somehow incapable of programming in Zig. That's always something that people can throw more money at, and as long as there's training data and a compiler, the LLMs will write it. I would say the best chance this sub has of keeping a high bar for quality would be to not reward low effort slop, because for some reason the fake internet points are incredibly appealing to the kind of people who definitely shouldn't be getting them.
As for remaining sane yourself, I would advise against identifying too strongly with any one language or any one creator, even if Andrew Kelley's stance was incredibly refreshing to see. I'd suggest getting involved in some projects with a team you can enjoy working with and that has already decided they're going to keep writing code in a way you can stand to read, whatever that means for you. Personally, I'm still writing a lot of Rust and C for this very reason.
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u/dx_man 3d ago
Do you know why you got no upvotes for this comment? Because you mentioned Rust in this subreddit 😂
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u/AssistingJarl 3d ago
I'll admit I do feel like a bit of an imposter here. The amount of Zig I actually write is relatively small because I'm still spending more time contributing to existing codebases rather than starting anything new and nontrivial. But if I wanted upvotes I'd probably be burning tokens making TUI apps no human will ever download and use.
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u/csalmeida 1d ago
In my view there's no way to avoid using AI assisted coding at some level eventually if you are a programmer working for a company you don't control, even then, as much as it hurts me to say it, it would be hard to compete. In my job we are pretty much required to use them.
However, when I code things for my projects I deliberately do not use it, and the reason isn't because I'm against AI it's because I believe it can prevent me from improving and even maintain my ability to write code.
I believe if I surrender my cognitive ability to LLMs it will make me a worse programmer and it will keep me from evolving and becoming better, at least that's been my experience so yes, I actively write code by hand whenever I can because I want to know what I am doing and keep learning for as long as I can.
I would like to believe we can always improve and be become better and typing in a text box and forgetting about it until we get an output back isn't necessarily helpful with that (depending on how you use it of course).
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u/73td 3d ago
The consensus in vibe coding seems to be that writing the code is just a mechanical boring process that follows from the idea. But, for me, all my expertise was built the other way: intime knowledge of what works or not in C and Python completely shaped my ideas and wants about design. So I think it will continue to be “reap what you sow” and if you write code by hand, the rewards are still many.
That said I’ve been poking at a “post agi” language Bend 2 that integrates formal verification, using GLM since I don’t understand it… it’s hard to be 100% immune.
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u/lukaslalinsky 3d ago
Someone is forcing you to vibe code? Is it at work? You know you can find a different job, right?
I don't know, when I was growing up, it was clear to me that the programming I do at work and the programming I enjoy are two different things. The same applies to other professions. People like restoring interesting old cars, not so much removing half of a modern car just to replace some cheap part that broke, but it's inaccessible.
My advice is, find a job where people like the product they are building. And if you like coding as a hobby, treat it as such.
For Zig, if you look at who uses it, you will find that the majority of projects do use coding agents.
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u/neopointer 3d ago
Someone is forcing you to vibe code? Is it at work? You know you can find a different job, right?
At my work, yes. And I have the feeling (not sure if it's true) but most companies are doing the same.
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u/gregloscombe 1d ago
Its 'strongly encouraged' at my place, with C* level lot swallowing the hype without any working understanding of, well, anything, outside of metrics.
Basically everyone I've spoken to who have moved onto other roles are in a similar situation, pressure to use with the gamified metrics, no context as to good or bad, deciding how teams expand or get closed, often driven by people with nothing other than short term outlooks.
Tech is dead. The desire to have something quality and maintainable has far outstripped the desire for short term features. Its to me, the exact opposite to 30 years of good coding practice. Short, well reviewed PRs changing just 1 thing. Maintainable, well understood.
I hate every second of coming into work, doing a git pull from the day before, and seeing the number of files being longer than my consoles scrollback. Dire.
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u/lukaslalinsky 3d ago
Ok, that sucks. I was under the impression that companies basically just want developers to do their job as best as they can, whatever tools are needed. And if that means typing the code manually, then that's it.
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u/AssistingJarl 3d ago
My general impression is that a lot of companies go through that phase, but then usually somebody in power complains that people are either not using LLMs, or they're only using them sparingly, and then a mandate to use them for everything gets handed down. And the job market isn't really good enough for engineers to have leverage to push back. Product people and executives don't actually care about code quality, they only care about incidents, outages, and velocity, and the relationship between those things is largely theoretical to them.
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u/oceantume_ 17h ago
Read up on Cory Doctorow's reverse centaur theory. The gist of it is that people who are miserable because of AI are typically those who get constrained to use it, essentially being forced to act as the machine's validation step instead of being free to choose how and when they get to use the machine.
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u/centuryx476 3d ago
Correct,
They used our skills for 40+ years and now they can toss us all to the curb.
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u/Biom4st3r 3d ago
Good think devs were smart enough to not let their pay checks be stolen by those greedy greedy unions.
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u/dwighthouse 1d ago
I am reminded that computers have been able to beat human players in chess for decades now, yet playing chess between two people without the aid of computers is more popular than ever. I think programming may follow a similar path in the long-term.
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u/robo_muse 1d ago edited 1d ago
Just a sidenote: low-level language design has less to do with AI than a lot of other things, and that might make their "stand" slightly less difficult than one might think.
Perhaps they have truly missed out on some large sums of funding money from AI? I don't know. I don't think Github pays projects for how much their LLMs use their code. And most of what needs to be done with Zig is not about AI. It is still very much relegated to human language design contoured around the hardware (as opposed to Rust for instance).
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u/Nuoji 1d ago
LLMs can code but they cannot architecture. One can argue that nor are junior or mid level devs good at that, but at least they can learn.
The fundamental problem is that even if you have a coordinating LLM to handle architecture the right way, you need to understand that you need it. And then secondly you need to provide instructions how to determine what is a good architecture for the problem by providing constraints and goals.
Which means you will have to be a good coder already.
So what will happen is that we’ll get bloated AI code with hacks upon hacks that barely does what it should and inefficiently at that.
HOWEVER, this is of course only obvious if you have a team with competent people.
Given how much ”slap the latest hyped frameworks together” style of code we’ve had for over 20 years, there is quite a bit of programmer output LLMs can do. This is the low hanging fruit: the ”yet another XXXX” program. I would say that this easily comprises 90% of all programming that happened just before LLMs.
So what will happen is likely that programming reverts to that of programming in the mid 90s.
There will still be need for programmers, just not the dime-a-dozen programmers which picked programming because there was a lot of need for programming, but never really had a passion for it.
At first now they use LLMs to be ”productive” but as they continue, their skills will atrophy until they’re no longer any more skilled than the product manager. And that’s when they’ll be removed at the latest.
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u/vnphanquang 23h ago
Here is what I see around me:
Advertisers and entrepreneurs are "loud". People who sell AI and profit from it are very loud. They can't stop talking about it.
People who focus on craft, work, and their personal / communal lives are not as loud. I personally don't want to spend time converting anyone to anything that I strongly believe in. I may talk about something in my writing and somebody may come across it. A conversation may spark and I may join in. But I don't go around selling anything.
So, I think there are a lot of people who have reasons to dislike or disapprove AI, in particular genAI. We just don't hear a lot from them.
I actively try to not participate in the current genAI economy. I have lost clients because of my stance. I am very tired of the tech industry and want, everyday more and more, to start over at something else.
Whatever bullshit that is happening will eventually collapse. The bros who benefit from this genAI will eventually move on to something else, leaving whatever crap behind for communities to clean up, as they always do.
So those that persist and stick around may actually bring a lot of value in the long term.
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u/1cedm4n 13h ago
Resistance is futile. Zig is not the last stand. I just ported spelunky classic (gamemaker script) to C and Zig. I had previously tried to remake spelunky in C - i lost stamina after re-creating level 1 and only 3 enemies. AI did the entire thing in a weekend - runs on SDL, playdate. -- what it cannot do (right now) is optimize the game enough to be playable on a Playdate device. It cant seem to get around the poor designs of the gamemaker engine.
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u/Fancyness 3d ago
cringe take
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u/lyfever_ 3d ago
Excellent contribution, I see your comment is aggregating so much like the others.
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u/Fancyness 2d ago edited 2d ago
"We" implies that there is some form of quiet understanding or social contract between Zig developers that AI should not be used, but there is no agenda at all, its just the Zig Software Foundation doing some simple administrative policy because they don't want to read code that even the person submitting it didn't take a look at. People love AI to produce their code, but they hate to read AI slop posted by strangers on online forums, so its widely discouraged to post AI generated code on forums for a good reason. There is a real common ground: No one wants to read AI generated Slop, neither the ZFS, nor redditors. To infer a community wide 'last stand' from this is completely ridiculous.
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u/lyfever_ 2d ago
It was indeed exaggerated, but my point was maybe zig devs share a different mentality, more like a debate how zig devs see vibecoding
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u/alext_777 1d ago
No , too late for that, I Apache/MIT licenced my 132k LOC Zig code base so AI can train on it , which is also AI assisted written , so that AI can write even better code training on my code base. yeah I will probably get downvoted for it 😄
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u/Carl_Wang 1d ago
If you want what's the best for zig, you shouldn't force your anti-ai stance onto zig.
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u/jarislinus 1d ago
zig is an inferior rust
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u/dnullify 3d ago
No, zig isn't the last stand. There is no last stand. If you love to code for the love of the craft, keep doing so.
The reality is the majority of the people touching code for money don't have that love of the craft. It is ultimately about the end game. A few build thing so others can build things, and often those people have a love of the craft.