Epic officially announces that Unreal Engine 6 and Fortnite will be entirely vibe-coded from now on

Epic Games has spent the last two weeks announcing its intention to embrace AI in every aspect of its production. The reason is that its CEO, Tim Sweeney, is convinced that it’s the future of programming and that it’s the way to set itself apart from its main competitor, Valve, and its store, Steam. Something the company has confirmed will be central to all its products.

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Programming is hard

Epic’s executive vice president of development, Marcus Wassmer, told This Week In Video Games that from now on they’re going to use AI both in Unreal Engine 6 and Fortnite and in everything they do at the company. “We’re doing pure vibe-coding. That means our engineers no longer write most of the code, but they still guide the tools to get the architectural result we want”.

According to him this is fine, because “we’re more concerned about the risk of moving ahead too slowly than skepticism toward AI,” following Silicon Valley’s mantra of moving fast and breaking things. He has also stated that “we’re not developing the engine ‘all at once’; we’re iterating with AI to ship features developers want and keep the engine within memory, performance, and scalability limits”. He was trying to make it clear that there is human review to make sure everything works properly, as if a human being were programming it.

He also said that going against AI is an unacceptable political act and that it attacks videogame developers’ opportunities. A peculiar line of reasoning that he didn’t explain. In any case, Steam today has serious problems in its store because of the number of very low-quality videogames created with AI, and some are outright clones of other games. So it seems Wassmer’s opinions aren’t based on anything verifiable.

The reality is that last week they launched a new version of their Epic Store client built with vibe-coding and, besides being buggy, its performance was pretty poor and it lacked features the old one already had. Although they’ve defended themselves by saying it’s still in beta, if Epic’s future looks like what they’ve already shown us with vibe-coding, that future looks pretty questionable.

Author: Álvaro Arbonés

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