A little ironic that the header image was generated using AI, but oh well...
Before, when I create a game, I would go to countless YouTube tutorials. Then getting yelled on countless forums because of my poor phrasing (thanks to my Filipino-English) and to my duplicate noob problems like “How to move your character in 2D platformer in Unity3D?”, especially on StackOverflow. Or Google this and that, and then getting deeper into the rabbit hole until I lost track of time.
Thanks to my passion in game development, I came across this beauty of Software Design Patterns, it’s like coding with make-up and cosmetics – making your code prim-and-prop for the other coders to read or decipher. Thanks to this thousand-page book of Unity, it introduced me to these new design patterns: Singleton Pattern, Factory Design Pattern, Observer Pattern, Object Pooling and many more. The beauty of learning them after countless errors, hours of debugging, and copy-pasting from who-knows-whom GitHub repos I’ve been led to. And the amount of effort I’ve exerted just to learn them and adding those to my game were truly exciting.
Now, thanks to AI, I’ll just tell it what to do, and it will generate the codes that I need. Sure, I can set it to just guide me instead of giving me the whole codebase, but when you’re on your work, and your boss says it must be done tomorrow, you bet your ass you will lean on AI (whether you like it or not), and pray it gets approved and be done with it. The beauty of programming is now dead. There’s no elegance in generating and becoming a code-monkey, or in today’s word, a vibe-coder, just to get paid with a minimum wage, especially in the Philippines, alongside the thousand-peso deductions because of government’s taxes and sketchy benefits.
I don’t know anymore if there’s any future left in coding, or in learning this Software Design Patterns to be exact. The beauty of learning how to code then moving on to design patterns, into tools and mastering other languages, and unit testing, and Git, and so on is now killed by AI. Who knows what will happen to our future coders? Maybe AI will takeover the role, and in return, coders will just guide AI in creating systems instead of coding those themselves.
This essay is just a way for me to express my frustration with today’s coding. Take it with a grain of salt.
About the Author:
Emmanuel Pangan
He's currently working as a Junior Programmer in a university, who’s also utilizing Google’s Antigravity in his work whether he likes it or not.
You can help me through support by: Buying me a Ko-fi ☕.