Has anyone used AI like deepseek or even chatgpt to assist in writing code? I have and to be honest I think AI assistants like deepseek are an incredible resource if needed. deepseek is supposed to be more intuitive and helpful in writing classes or methods for Unity c#, and I have tried them both. And I found that deepseek is the better choice for being so much more helpful.

I mean, if you have an idea you want to implement and your not shure what to do, you could ask a fellow coder for assistance, but then they might scratch their head also while your scratching your's to figure out how to do the thing you want. Then you both work on it, trial and error and a week or so goes by and you figure out some method that works, but the time it took to come up with a solution took away time from the rest of the games development and not only for you, but kept your fellow coder's time away from what they were working on.

I had an idea where i have a compass in the upper right of the screen, it's a circle compass, with direction letter's of N,E,S,W to indicate what direction the player was headed, and they rotated around that rect. But in the middle circle was a rear view camera image of what is behind the player. So, ok.. I wrote most of the c# code to make that happen and it worked fine. But I have about 240 objectives scattered around the game map that the player must pick up, and I wanted to show them around the compass ring. And if those obj's were farther away they would show up smaller in scale to indicate that. Plus there is only one enemy who hunts down the player, and I needed the icon for that enemy to also show up somewhere in the compass ring.

I was not about to ask a friend coder to help me on that. That's a lot of math and angles, and most important TIME. could take day's, maybe a week or two.

So i turned to deepseek AI, and i told it exactly what i wanted, and in around 20 seconds or less, it posted the code i needed to do it. That code needed ajustment from me, with my added code it worked flawlessly and efficiently, and it even recomended way's to make it more efficient like pooling the instantiated objective icons and a lot more info I did not think about.

In the end, my compass improvement's are working flawlessly with help from deepseek, and it only took around 2 hour's with ajustments and new code from me to make it work.

My game idea is riddled with around 50 plus scripts, and I wrote them all, and deepseek has added around 2% of it's own scripts to my project, but I do not regret using it. deepseek has reduced my developing time considerably. And I will use it again when I need help with any new issue.

AI is a funny topic. Am I cheating? or using an incredibly helpful resource? 

by the end of the day what you are really using is a helpfuk tool that can expand your game mechanics there is no cheating just helpful tool usage aka the ai in question

It's using an incredibly helpful resource. It isn't about wowing people with your advanced code that no one will care about, but the end result and mechanics that you've made. If you're already a competent coder, ai will act as an enhancer. You mentioned that you had to adjust the code yourself to get it to work exactly how you wanted it to. 

To reply to the other fellows in this comment section:

No, it's not at all the same thing as pushing a ball throwing machine, since again, you're not being judged by the quality of your code like a basketball player would be by his ability to shoot 3 pointers. You're being judged by if the game works or not. 

Yes, it is ALWAYS helpful to learn more about coding if you have the time. Why not? But if you're not using AI due to feeling bad about it, you're just slowing yourself down. You know enough to make adjustments if needed. I think you're already skilled enough to have AI help you.

Weeks and weeks of time and effort has been cut down to minutes. You have a game to build; absolutely make use of the tools available to speed that process up.

I can understand the why using AI generated art, stolen from artists and the like, may be bad, but darn near ALL code that's on the internet has been put there explicitly so it can be used to help other coders. MOST CODERS copy and paste code directly from stack overflow anyways. If anyone claims otherwise, they are lying to you. 

 If you're already a competent coder, ai will act as an enhancer

Not according to actual research.

you're not being judged by the quality of your code

First of all, you should definitely be judged by the quality of your code, and 10x more harshly if you're letting AI do it for you. However, this isn't even relevant to the question: am I cheating. Cheating and getting bad results is still cheating.

If I wrote some code, maybe to script a scene, and then asked  another coder friend to look at it, and see if i they could improve the code to make it more effcient, and my friend showed me a more simplistic way to do it and gain some cpu cycles, is that cheating? I would be learning a lesson, like every other coder does to improve, from asking a friend to even working the google machine to see if anyone else has run into some similar issue and found a decent solution. I mean learning is seeing and watching what other's do. Everyone learns from their own mistakes, and are forever striving to be better. And if my friend showed another friend my same non efficent code and that friend improved on it better, and I was sent the final code... even though relying on friends or searching forums, and posting questions can be annoying to the forum police... It does not matter what question you ask, the forum police just linger waiting to jump on someone for asking a question they know the answer to but instead of posting a helpful response instead they post "quit wasting peoples time and google it!" But then there are the more kinder people, who knew the struggle to find the answer and are more than happy to help. If my friends who helped me with my coding needed my help, I would obviously lend a hand to the extent of what I know. But if by asking for their help when they are working on their own project's, and the time I took away from their development to help me would make me down right guilty. But they are friends and are more than willing to help... and I owe them a favor. I think of myself as a very talented modeler with blender. Now... even though that code I needed help on was team effort now, and we posted it to DeepSeek and DeepSeek came back with far more efficient code that we never figured out and now learned from.. and we all said "WOW!" that code was better than the team! I would say now. @Magicsofa for saying "First of all, you should definitely be judged by the quality of your code, and 10x more harshly if you're letting AI do it for you." Are you serious??? are you one of those selfrighteous coder's who knows everything and judges everyone else by your shear knowledge?  And @Josh's Junk Drawer to say "If you use AI to make games you're a lazy hack and a plagiarist. Do it the right way, learn how to code for yourself." Trust me, I'm no lazy hack. And as for a plagiarist? Using a friends code, or AI's is very helpful. You learn from better coder's regardless if they are human's or not.

Lol... you literally asked if you were cheating, now you're mad that you got a response? I never said anything about my own programming skills. Just that I think having a machine statistically spit out answers for you is cheating. Cheaters are never good at the actual game, they can only be good at cheating. They think that the end result is all that matters. That is what I was responding to in regard to judging your code. MagnusCart implied that you will only be judged on the end product, so it doesn't matter how you get there. In other words, they think it is fine to cheat as long as the resulting product looks good. By the same logic, someone who uses a machine to shoot baskets for them is a good basketball player.

Having a friend improve your code isn't learning. The learning part comes when you reach an understanding as to WHY their changes make it better. There is a reason good teachers ask you to explain your answers. Now that's not to say you can't learn from the code that AI produces for you, but just like Googling everything, the instant gratification makes it so easy to just get answers and never really learn. Ironically, people end up learning only when the AI does things wrong, because then they actually have to engage with the problem.

You should also consider that even calling it AI is questionable. It doesn't solve problems, it only conglomerates data and produces answers based on statistics. This is why it sometimes produces wrong answers. Not because it was mistaken about the solution to a problem, but because that wrong answer was simply calculated as being the most probable. 

If AI is generating a significant portion of your code, then it's good to indicate this out of respect for your users.

If your use of AI is marginal, for example, optimizing something you created or helping you with small goals, such as showing you syntax you don't remember or simplifying repetitive tasks, then it's generally accepted that the AI was an additional tool and not the creator of the code. In these cases, it's not usually mentioned.

Not all users want to play games created with AI, and it's out of respect for them that it's good to indicate this.

The problem is that many developers want to take advantage of the benefits of creating a game with AI, but they don't want to risk losing players. That's cheating, because you know you're hiding sensitive information that benefits you and "harms" your players.

Out of respect for your users, be honest. Many players don't care whether the code or the art was created by an AI. Go for those players, but respect the decision of those who don't want games created by AI. And if you really want to reach this second segment of players, then don't use AI.

EDIT:

 Regarding cheating, let's see, unless it's a competition or you're hiding information, it's simply the way you work.

Going back to the example given above, if a basketball player had that machine in a professional tournament, then it would be cheating.

If, on the other hand, it's simply a friendly tournament and all the players have access to that machine, and the people watching them KNOW they're going to use that machine, then it wouldn't be cheating, because you're not hiding information or having an unfair advantage.

I'd say it's the same here. If you like using AI, let them know with the appropriate TAGs, and if you participate in a JAM, make sure it's one that allows the use of AI. As long as you respect those rules, I don't see you cheating.

@hechelion that was a good reply and a decent opinion on what my question was. I have used deepseek AI in helping with some code to get further along in my game's development because involving friends or googling a solution could take day's or even weeks of downtime until a soultion was found. And after using AI, I found it gave some ok soulutions, and sometimes perfect solutions. but some of those solutions needed some tlc from me before they worked. I have been so busy latetly with adding new things to my game, and most of the coding i do myself. And I do not feel the need to specifcally state that my game was helped or include's AI to make it work.

I opened up DeepSeek Ai and asked it a question "if i use the code you showed me to help in a game i am doing, do you consider it plagarism?" and then after it's response, I asked it another question "so, you would not sue me?" and it's responses were amazing.

I encourage anyone to ask those questions to DeepSeek and see what it say's. It's free to ask.

Right now.. my game has over 100 c# scripts written, and better than 99% of them were written by me. DeepSeek helped on around 3 or more? some help that made my developing time shorter, with tweaks and ajustments from me. 

So in the end.. I guess I answered my own question in this post. That No!. I do not consider asking an AI for help with coding as much as I would ask a fellow developer for help also. I would never think of googling a solution or watching a tutorial on youtube in that way also. They are all great resources and a means to an end. 

yeah, that sounds like what i'm doing, except I fired AI. It has a 900IQ, but it's an a$$hole