Is it possible to jump into this with a background as a senior dev or is it too late? I don't know where to get started, would you just look like a junior or entry level candidate by doing that?
I can’t say if this will change of course, and I only speak for a small gaming startup.
They are delusional or know nothing about how development works. I can promise you there's not a single major game studio left out there not leveraging AI in significant parts of their workflows at this point.
Can you explain what you mean by this? Do you evaluate the design without reviewing the generated code?
You're just staring at a screen pushing pixels all day. Whether I do that with Claude or without doesn't matter to me.
AI helps the most with boilerplate work: Those 3 hours of boring, follow-the-design coding can now be implemented in 5-10 minutes. I then jump into the more interesting work and cleanup.
Other things are easier. For example, saying "Refactor this class to use XYZ serialization library" and having it done in 5 minutes instead of 90 minutes frees me to do the more intellectually stimulating work.
Likewise, when it comes to AI and design, what I can do is type in ideas in a stream-of-conscious way into a prompt, and then it looks at code and comes out with sane text that I can go edit.
BUT: There's interesting things you can do with AI that are harder to do by hand. I ran an experiment where I asked AI to rewrite a method to not use an ORM, which is useful if you need to optimize some DB code. Shopify is having AI write two native versions of their mobile app instead of maintaining a React Native codebase. Lean on the tool to do interesting things that otherwise are too labor intense to do by hand.
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Don't be like the guy who rejects an IDE, or the guy who only works in assembly.
I didn't say LLMs are not useful. It makes some of the boring parts easy and less time consuming. But it does not add it to what makes building something rewarding, on its own.
Imagine building LEGO using a robot? Where is the fun in that?
Depends on what you're building!
We have a LOT of legos; I could easily see it being more fun to have a robot that we could prompt to find the "needle in a haystack" lego; or when building something big, to follow a pattern.
most eng roles at frontier companies don't require prior experience specifically with AI, there's a ton of regular engineering work required to train / serve models
This stuff has only existed for 3 years. Everyone is faking it and no one really knows what's right or wrong yet. You're more than qualified.
Personally seeing an "AI engineer" job posting I would not even apply, despite having many years experience in general, and experimenting/running models on my own hardware and being responsible at work for several skills, mcp and so on, it just feels that that kind of job is looking for some ex-openai/anthropic/ai-lab kind of skillset, which is not something a lot of people have; if this is what you are looking for of course it is what it is.
I think these days being "AI conversant" should be expected for senior/staff positions, it can also be listed a requirement, but not sure putting it as a job title, it feels more like having "IDE staff software engineer" which is not something anybody outside of jetbrains/vs.code would do.
sounds fun, I had fun fine-tuning some open weights models for local use, and I run a free public inference engine here: https://stateofutopia.com/services/ai/ it's fun.
where are you planning to run your models?