Let’s start with a fact: AI is changing how developers write code. I’m not going to cite statistics about how many developers use AI or what percentage of code is now AI-generated. You’ve seen those numbers everywhere. What I want to talk about is something more personal: how AI is changing the entry point for junior developers trying to land their first job.

I remember my first programming class in high school, when the teacher introduced the print function. I genuinely thought it would send text to a physical printer. It’s a silly memory, but it stuck with me for a reason: back then, misunderstanding one function meant your code didn’t work, and you had to figure out why. Closing that gap yourself, one function at a time, was simply how learning to code worked. Today, a beginner can accept AI-generated code that runs perfectly without understanding a single line of it. The gap between “it works” and “I know why it works” has never been wider.

Has AI lowered the barrier to entry?

You’d think so, but I don’t believe it has. If anything, the opposite. The job market for juniors is brutal right now, and while layoffs have many causes, AI is clearly reshaping who companies need. Here’s the uncomfortable math: if AI can make a complete beginner somewhat productive, imagine what it does for a senior developer with ten years of experience. The senior knows exactly what to ask for, spots bad output instantly, and lets AI handle the boilerplate, the tests, and the repetitive refactoring — the very tasks that used to be handed to juniors so they could learn. That senior, armed with AI, can now do the work that used to require a whole team of juniors. The tool that was supposed to open the door is helping someone else close it.

What I saw firsthand

I recently worked as a project manager at a new game studio, where part of my job was helping game development interns learn to code. Very quickly, I ran into a problem.

Every task I assigned, the interns implemented with AI. At first, it looked great. Fast results, working features. But as the tasks grew more complex, the project turned into a mess that none of them could understand, because none of them had actually written it. At one point, the project had three different movement systems running at the same time. Every time something broke, instead of fixing the existing code, the AI had simply generated a new system on top of the old one, and nobody noticed. They couldn’t debug it, extend it, or explain it. My instinct was to ban AI entirely: “Learn to code first, use AI later.”

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that advice might already be outdated. These interns will spend their entire careers working alongside AI. Telling them to pretend it doesn’t exist isn’t teaching; it’s nostalgia.

So how should a new developer learn?

That’s the real question, and I don’t think anyone has fully answered it yet. Has AI changed not just how we code, but how we should learn to code? I believe it has, and figuring out that new learning path is what I want to explore next.

When I started learning game development in Unity, the path was obvious: open YouTube, find a tutorial, and follow along every click inside the Unity editor, every line of C#, typed out with the instructor. That follow-along format shaped a whole generation of developers. But there’s no equivalent yet for the AI era. No tutorial that teaches you how to use AI as a learning tool instead of a crutch.

So that’s what I’m thinking about building: a video tutorial series on learning game development with AI, done the right way. The format would be hands-on, just like those old Unity tutorials, but the steps look different now. In each part, we’d write a prompt together and look at what the AI gives back. Then, instead of pasting it in and moving on, we’d slow down: Is this code actually well-structured? What does each part of it mean? And when something breaks, because it will, how do we debug it ourselves instead of just asking the AI to “fix it”?

The goal is simple: by the end, you should understand your project as well as if you had written every line yourself. You’ll just have gotten there faster. If you want to break into game development right now, stick around. This is exactly the missing piece.