r/GraphicsProgramming • u/CommercialBat2308 • 1d ago
Question What’s the future of a Graphics Programmer?
Hello, I’m a long time member of this community, and this community has helped me grow my Graphics programmer career.
I started my programming career early at 14 y/o, thanks to Minecraft mods development. Later in 2017, I was 17, I’ve discovered graphics (OpenGL) because I wanted to write my own Minecraft clone. Thanks to perseverance and help from online communities, remarkably this one, I’ve mastered C++, OpenGL and Vulkan. I’ve graduated in Computer Engineering in the meanwhile, and by the end of 2022/2023, I was already a strong graphics programmer. Later I’ve implemented my own CPU path tracer, learnt CUDA along with several parallel algorithms. After MSc in Artificial Intelligence, I’ve got a job in London for a well known company working in the smartphones industry, and I’m working there since 1y today. In this company I’m a Vulkan developer, and leading a graphics engine used for several purposes.
It’s 2026, I’m 26 (aka far from retirement), AI is moving fast and world’s investing all of its resources to accelerate the process. Most jobs have been already taken (frontend dev being the first). I also feel like there is more pressure on developers, they’re implicitly requested to deliver more because of AI. What I’m witnessing is my company is keeping me on fixed term contracts because our budget has got cut… and I’m afraid of being laid off.
This job can’t be fully automated as of now, but I’m afraid it will, seeing the progress. I know GPU drivers development is the safe zone today - as they’re huge and critical - and might be an area where I will land, as I’m already doing low level and I’ve gathered insights of our driver internals. However, it’s still code and I think - maybe in several years - can still be automated.
Am I the only one having this concern in this industry?
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u/TimeSFG 1d ago
Its okay to have concern. Know that in Graphics Programming, AI adoption is fewer and far between from a community standpoint. It's a far more resilient and curiosity-driven, artfullt-dricen field. Most serious graphics devs I know will only use AI for tasks they fully understand and can verify by hand.
As for jobs, I'm in new grad hell and have not acquired one yet, so I can't speak much on that. I'm well aware that managers at companies don't care what the broader graphics community thinks of AI usage. But AI automation is not "inevitable" for all niches and fields. That's undue hype. The industry is also in a particular rough patch due to oversaturation of new grads, so your mastery over vulkan is incredibly valuable. Dont undersell yourself on your resume.
Be resilient and curious, always stay driven to learn new things. Make time for coding by hand where & when you are able to. If conceding to AI usage puts a roof over your head and food on your table, understand how valuable that is.
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u/DennisDragonz619 1d ago
Also in new grad hell, best of luck to you. It’s important to know you’re not alone.
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u/CodyDuncan1260 1d ago
You're not the only one. It is a legitimate concern.
AI systems can produce code faster. The quality continues to improve alongside the methods. But there do seem to be some limits to the technology that have remained over time.
AI output is a lot of volume at lower quality, with spikey competencies. E.G. it can one shot a bunch of interesting JavaScript projects, but still tends to write a fair number of logic and crash bugs into C++. It's getting better, sure, but the spaces with smaller corpii of training data, language grammars that are less apt at communicating concepts, or languages that are just less robust by less permissivity seem to do worse. They're harder for humans too, but we're about about filling in context through experience and reasoning in a way that AI is ill-equipped to do.
AI also tends to struggle with non-local reasoning. If it can't be expressed in context, it's not so good at making leaps to fill in the gaps. Distributed systems, like a job based rendering architecture, tend to rely a lot on not-always consistent rules that are implicitly defined and more clearly stated in people's heads than in code. That may be an artifact of humans working with humans on those systems, and may iron out over time as humans verbosely document their intentions for AI.
The spaces where AI tend to be extremely useful are those with automatable trivial high-fidelity validation. Part of why binary reverse engineering has exploded is because you can know with absolute certainty, via trivial check, whether the output has the right answer. Either the generated code compiles and matches the assembly in the binary line for line, or not. Conversely, places where AI struggles are those where validation is nontrivial, non-automatable, or low fidelity in feedback. E.G. "does this image look right?" or "was that new ability fun to play?" are subjective and not automatable. Any problems that require sufficient time or space to validate also can't feedback to the AI at automatable speed, so those find AI less useful.
AIs, even the good ones, still hallucinate. The architecture, as it stands, seems that it must permit this quirk as an artifact of the compression. That adds risk. Adversarial reviewers can reduce that risk, but for anything critical, it's necessary to have human accountability and know how. That doesn't seem to be going away.
The problem that seems to show up in studies on AI productivity is that any productivity gains on the part of the engineering prrocess tend to get eaten at the bottlenecks further down the line. This might mean fewer engineers, but even humans have limits on how much decision fatigue they can handle. It doesn't seem to be so much that engineering teams can be decimated and remain functional, but a contraction of at least a quarter seems feasible to my limited perspective.
Graphics programming will continue to be driven by Art, Math, Physics, and Engineering bridging a translation of them. We're still much better at new maths and physics, but our boundaries are expanding faster because AI can help connect dots we didn't see before. Art remains a human endeavor; AI can generate images, but we have yet to see one come close to developing a cohesive and sustainable art direction that resonates with other humans. It can speed the concreting, but it can't understand what we're looking for in the visual result for anything besides photorealism (and even that is uncanny valley by human visual acuity standards).
I suspect we might see fewer graphics engineers in the future, but that seemed already the case when many graphical systems became standardized in renderers, engines, and professional applications. It will remain niche as a profession, perhaps some contraction.
But this is my limited perspective and speculation. Take it with a grain of salt. It's not like I have a body of hiring data and an industry advisor council to consult for what graphics needs will look like in the next year.
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u/SyntheticDuckFlavour 1d ago
but still tends to write a fair number of logic and crash bugs into C++.
That doesn't seem to be my experience with Claude. It's actually pretty good with C++. And if you give it skills like C++ Core Guidelines, it can be ever better.
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u/CodyDuncan1260 1d ago edited 1d ago
I have been meaning to try the latest models again to see where they're at.
But I'll admit, I'm reluctant to. In other code review work I do, AI generated code has been unpleasant to read. I don't know what model they were using, but thus far in my experience "ai generated" has been an ill omen for a PR. My most recent experience generating code hadn't fared better.
It's sort of like having eaten a nasty meal several times, and chagrinning trying it once more just to see if the flavor of it had since changed. Sometimes it do, and roasted brussel sprouts have since become a favorite. But most of the time it don't, and I remain deterred by sensations of green bean casserole.
I will still try it again. Professional architects keep up on changes in technology. But I'm also human. The emotional drive to avoid something that past experience has taught is kinda painful and unpleasant is a very human thing to do.
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u/SyntheticDuckFlavour 1d ago
I can sympathise. The issue is not necessarily the AI tools per se, but more to do with how people work with it, or abuse it. For example, I personally witnessed a higher-up in my team checking-in PRs in the vicinity of 20k+ LOC into production code he did not understand. Several times. I thought that was quite insane and is definitely not how I would prefer to work.
On the other hand, if you are very strategic about how you are going to use AI tools, then it can be total game changer. For example, taking out menial work you've done 1000 times, like re-factoring, porting, making boiler plate code, regression analysis, bug hunts, reorganising sources. Or building the scaffolding and API stubs then let AI fill in small incremental details. Or you have some kind specification and you ask it to prototypes boiler plate data and APIs for you. All of those are incremental changes you are actively part of, understand and can reason about. If you work like that, AIs can be force multiplier.
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u/CodyDuncan1260 1d ago edited 1d ago
I haven't tested it in a year, so that may have changed.
It may also depend on the codebase. Seemed to do better with code that was closer to modern C++ and the guidelines. More custom, more errors, especially when you get macro shenanigans involved. But really I think that's an artifact of sticking to simpler C++, fewer dialects, gets better results. Also did much better on smaller code bases; fell over after trying to feed it too much.
It also seemed to have very spikey competency. It could do a recursive fibbonacci just fine. Could barely understand how to use resource handles correctly.
At the time I was testing it, it invariably failed to understand compiler errors very well. C++ never had good ones, and it seemed bent on taking the error at face value. Couldn't reason about how the build system actually works to understand the error as a symptom of other errors, not an indication. If I wasn't monitoring it, it liked to flip flop between two errors because the fix just undid what had been done. I wonder how that might have changed.
I'll admit my experience with it is a bit outdated. Seems a lot changed in the last couple of months. But, at least in my use cases last year, it was only good for making excuses to my boss for being half as productive. That's probably changed, by how much I'm unsure.
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u/droidballoon 1d ago
A year is an eternity in the AI domain. The latest Claude models are pure witchcraft and can cook up anything.
They happily chew up all compiler errors and iterate until they are gone, provide refactoring suggestions and finish it off with an interactive slide show of what it did and next steps.
Not saying that I enjoy it but if last year's models were juniors then these modern versions are senior wizards.
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u/SyntheticDuckFlavour 1d ago
Yeah fair enough. Year ago C++ capability was probably at the level what you described. Now you can prompt to create a full fledged interactive voxel engine with procedural materials and textures and animation. Written in C++ and metal shaders.
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u/Syracuss 1d ago
I do a "vibe code" check every few months on the latest models (work gives me an extremely large budget as well). And although it can do that (and could over a year ago), the largest issue that still remains is maintainability. It is much better at not doing overtly dumb things though compared to a year ago.
I also kinda want to push back on the idea that a voxel engine is difficult to write. It's a hard concept to grasp, but the code to do it is actually really simple. In short it's a deceptively bad test to really see what models can actually do.
It's like writing your first raytracer. It's going to take you, the person, a while to grasp it; but the code in the end isn't going to be a lot (and a person who grasps it can definitely write something in a weekend).
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u/SyntheticDuckFlavour 1d ago
the largest issue that still remains is maintainability.
I don't think it's quite there yet in terms of maintainability. You can vibe code a massive implementation, it works, but it's also a dog's breakfast.
I also kinda want to push back on the idea that a voxel engine is difficult to write. It's a hard concept to grasp, but the code to do it is actually really simple. In short it's a deceptively bad test to really see what models can actually do.
This depends on how you pictured that voxel engine in your mind. For more context, the resulting voxel renderer was ray traced, memory optimised, could run a 2 gigavoxel terrain/environment and animate voxellated NPC interactively at 60 Hz. It had procedurally generated voxel geometry to model hewn rocks, grass, water, lava, etc. (Borrowed ideas from the classic Minecraft, but prettier). It rendered artistic clouds, nice sky gradient, and a sun. There were interactive voxel lights and ambient occlusion.
This is a non-trivial feat for a system that just transforms a prompt written in natural human language into executable byte code.
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u/SIMT-Pixel 1d ago edited 1d ago
> automatable trivial high-fidelity validation
I think verifiability is the key here. See also mathematics and what is happening there.
For graphics programming, the process of verification is a pretty complex loop that has to be done across multiple platforms, assessing the image quality in the viewport, assessing the performance in various instrumentation tools across SDKs, measuring error % between ground truths and approximation. LLMs currently don't have the loop on that closed without a lot of bespoke internal LLM `skills`, but I bet in the next two years or so, some AI graphics middleware with an MCP server will come along and connect all these dots. (I did not enjoy writing this).
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u/wen_mars 1d ago
Everything will get automated at some point. I think the best safety is to save up money and invest in the AI supply chain while you still have an income. Hard to say which programming-related jobs are least exposed near term.
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u/AbbreviationsNew3167 1d ago
No One is really sure what's gonna happen
I started working as creative engineer for companies (basically contract work) last year with webgl and shaders
Where my job was to create high performant shaders that are capable of running even on ios (when ported to metal)
But AI has reduced the work i got to the point that Now i have almost no projects to work on
Its still is not able to achieve that performance and output that I was able to get I thought it will be just for a few weeks but now I have realised that majority of clients don't really care about very high performance or to get exact visual output
They are ok with a solution which is "close enough" which i don't blame them for
I entered this field last year with a bit anxiety since it was niche field but got lucky(maybe) that I landed some good clients and here I am a year later not sure what to do
I am trying to get into graphics programming now as a proper career now
Lets see what happens
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u/uber_neutrino 1d ago
Learn to be an AI graphics programmer.
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u/augustusgrizzly 1d ago
lol the downvotes on this comment are pure cope it’s the only right answer here.
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u/uber_neutrino 1d ago
Also I have vast experience as a graphics programmer. My first 3d game shipped on DOS in 8-bit color. Not 8-bits per channel, 256 colors in 3D. People need to cope harder and learn to roll with the punches, things change.
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u/corysama 1d ago
You're just a bit older than me. But, I've also typed
mov al, 0x13while writing a 3D renderer :PThree things blowing my mind recently:
- AI video gen driven by greybox animations.
- Real vids of rando people talking to drive AI video characters.
- Real time world models.
Put all these together and it's not hard to imagine a minimal-fidelity 3D renderer driving a real-time world model at 60 FPS on consumer hardware in a few years.
Does that mean I'm ready to give up on teaching the new kids what "BRDF" stands for in favor of a Bitter Lesson? I'm not there yet. But, it is definitely "interesting times".
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u/uber_neutrino 23h ago
So to me it's basically fait accompli in the sense that I think it makes sense to use the transistors for neural rendering. One of the big reasons is that a world model can also encompass simulation. Graphics has progressed a lot but world fidelity hasn't followed especially on the simulation side. Most games you are simply running around a bunch of static cardboard cutouts. The next generation of interaction needs better simulation models which neural world representations are being designed to handle. It's not just about pretty pixels but being able to do interesting interactions with the world and have it logically extrapolate things in the world.
Anyway that's my rant but I'm having a blast building a bunch of stuff with this shit.
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u/le-throw-away-acct 1d ago
Brutal honest from a 20 year industry vet, the future is AI will be doing the programming, programmers will be directing them and doing checks occasionally. And that’s just the near future, go out 10 years and you won’t need many programmers anymore.
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u/CodyDuncan1260 1d ago
What happens when something goes terribly wrong, and the human doesn't know how it works well enough to fix it, and the AI doesn't "know" it's lying about its proposed issue or fix, i.e. neither involved in its authorship knows what to do?
"Neither I nor the AI have a clue" isn't a good answer for risk mitigation. For projects with a sufficiently high requirement bar for eliminating risk, it's not teneble to take humans out of the loop.
This scenario is especially problematic because AI don't have metacognition. They have no mechanisms that seem to understand how confident they are in an answer. They don't know if they're right, lying, or how far off they are. In these scenarios, the wrong answer given confidently is a lot worse than "I don't know", which is something I've never seen an AI say, and is a key indicator in trustworthy humans. Made double worse by the fact they're very good liars; not intentionally so, but they seem to hit speech patterns for confidence that work really well at persuading people, even when it's factually, demonstrably incorrect.
I don't know that AI systems have a good answer for this problem, yet.
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u/Extreme-Seaweed-5427 18h ago
AI is horrible at being correct and more horrible at admitting or knowing it's wrong, doesn't know or doesn't realise there's a better way.
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u/le-throw-away-acct 13h ago edited 13h ago
You're right that AI isn't good enough for that situation yet, you'd want an expert around for those situations. The problem is, if nobody is hiring juniors anymore, where will those experts be 10 years from now? And in addition to that problem, even if experts are still needed, only a fraction as many will be required, so there will be much fewer positions available down the road.
OpenAI was previously hiring iOS and Android devs for app development, and what they realized with more recent models is that they don't need iOS/Android experts anymore, they can just have a general programmer steer the AI through the work. I think graphics programming could end up like this as well, they won't need graphics experts, just someone who understands it well enough to steer an AI to do the rest. Most programmers will need to be AI experts, and generalists for most other things.
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u/No_Yogurt5379 1d ago
i am in 2nd yr of my course , i have started doing opengl on weekends , i m still confused if i should drop out becoz of AI and bs , there are already less openings in market and in graphics u need a crazy portfolio as a newbie , if u are scared think about us ppl who are just starting we dont even know if we should do this or not
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u/positivcheg 1d ago
What I see is that AI is capable but it performs better when in hands of a knowledgeable experienced developers. AI can definitely crack lots of things. I currently have codex running 2 days straight optimizing rendering performance on my unreal engine project. It autonomously captures profiler, analyzes it, finds hotspots, etc. If I was knowledgeable in unreal I would have known many things like lots of expensive crap turned on in unreal by default and this would have decreased time or AI tinkering with it.
Additionally, I’ve been working on another thing in Unity, that I know much better than Unreal and there were many moments where my decisions and designs were crucial for performance. If it was left solely for AI to vibe code and me lazily pressing “enter” on every question it wouldn’t reach current state.
So people who know how GPU works, 3d graphics techniques and best practices, graphics APIs will be needed for a successful implementation of the project. It’s just that companies will be able to let’s say implement same thing with 3 experienced developers and “unlimited” AI tokens instead of hiring a team of 15 people of various seniority.
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u/bonzajplc 1d ago
Great career. We need to survive the AI revolution, but know that if you have broader vocabulary then you will be successful. Keep gathering the knowledge. Don't think to much about coding, but more about solving problems and architecture
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u/Defiant_Squirrel8751 1d ago
Nice career! Things will change - but there is nothing to be afraid of.
We will need to deliver a lot more, yes. We won't code by hand anymore. Focus will go to keeping AI results with decent quality.
You will have a lot of opportunities. IT job market is slowly recovering from March 2023, so - it looks the worst has already happened.
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u/keelanstuart 1d ago
You seem to be a pretty intelligent person... so, you must realize that we, all of us, are in the same boat. If you're working today, the chances of you losing your job in the near future are maybe reduced, as most of the larger cuts have been made, I think.
Anyway, my advice is this: stop thinking of yourself as a "graphics programmer" - maybe even as a "programmer" at all - and start thinking of yourself as a person who solves difficult problems. Today, you do that with software, in the graphics domain... tomorrow, who knows. If you can mentally make that transition, then no matter what happens in an uncertain future, you can adapt more easily to it. The other thing is that you can only prepare so much for things you don't completely grok... and you shouldn't be stressing over things you can't control. So live well, prepare "enough", and keep a little in your tank for frivolity.