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Indie devs are in a tough spot: don't use AI, and watch everyone else ship games x5 faster than you or use it and be damned. I don't think there are many coders left that are not using AI agents for coding right now, it's just that effective (been coding games for 28 years, professionally for 20)

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What stops you from doing so? Can't be the "productivity gains", I have yet to see an example in production where its context window was actually big enough to get a correct answer AND get to that answer before a human does (or could have)

It became actually useful not too long ago, before it was at best ok to speed up boilerplate, opus/sonnet 4.6 can implement entire systems from tech design specifications and even do tools we never had time to do, using agents not a chat window

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I would not find that useful. Most of my AAA work has not been implementing entire systems or tools as quickly as possible, it has been looking carefully at the complete context of existing code and situation and making small, safe tweaks that get the designer exactly what they want

I don't see why I'd bother with using a genAI to write the code on larger subsystems and features, either. Talking with designers to decide what code should be written, compile/cook times (including CI), and waiting for code reviews are far bigger bottlenecks than my typing speed IME

Yeah code reviews have been the biggest bottleneck in AAA for me, I know lots of studios are reviews how they tackle those too, AI can flag a lot of issues and help there too, a bit like the old static code analyzers but much better, doesn't necessarily cut on time but leads to less mistakes

Why would I write a tech design specification just to hand to an AI when doing that saves me almost no cognitive load over just writing the code and testing it myself? The code is the easiest part of the whole process!

In fact, my experience with writing tech specs before writing the code is very mixed. There's always a ton of nuances that don't get captured even when the person writing it is actually good at writing English (which many programmers are not). And any misunderstanding in the spec stage propagates...