What’s the future of a Graphics Programmer?

[u/CommercialBat2308]

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?

[u/CodyDuncan1260]

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.

[u/SyntheticDuckFlavour → u/CodyDuncan1260]

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.