Epic Games has chosen to speak in more detail about its use of generative AI in development. The company's executive vice president of development, Marcus Wassmer, answered questions and listed the tools in use along with concrete results.
"There are a number of tools in use, but probably the most obvious ones are Claude Code and Codex with their associated AI models," Wassmer explained. According to the company, the tools help across very different areas of development. Among the most significant results cited is the near-complete elimination of a non-deterministic bug in asset cooking that the teams had been fighting for about a decade. There is also an acceleration of shader compression work, which has significantly reduced patch sizes.
Image: Alcatraz714 — https://github.com/Alcatraz714/Unreal-Engine-Cpp-Shooter-Game
Among other examples, Wassmer mentioned a rewrite of a substantial part of the D3D12 rendering layer. The work, which he estimated would take a single engineer three to six weeks, was completed in about a week, with a gain in CPU time and fewer bugs. The tools are also used to keep internal test suites healthy and to expand their coverage.
Fortnite and the engine
On Fortnite, Wassmer described additions of automatic PC stability monitoring, automatic root cause analysis and automatic fix generation. According to him, these tools have sped up the resolution of long-running issues. At engine level, Epic has been able to attempt "some larger architectural refactors with AI" that it could not previously manage, thanks to the number of file changes required.
Wassmer also confirmed that vibe-coding is not limited to the Epic Store launcher, whose preview was released in the previous days, but is used in Unreal Engine development too. "Yes, we are vibe-coding things," he said. "That means our engineers are no longer writing the bulk of the code, but they are still guiding the tools to get the architectural result we want. We're not 'one-shotting' the engine; we're iterating with AI to ship features developers want and keep the engine within the memory, performance, and scalability envelopes."
Image: community.gamedev.tv — https://community.gamedev.tv/t/unreal-engine-4-editor-interface/106057
Epic's justification
In the interview Wassmer also explained why, in Epic's view, there is no real alternative. The reasoning is the one common across the industry: AI adoption is becoming widespread and the company cannot afford to fall behind. "We are more concerned about the risks of moving too slowly than we are about AI skepticism," he said.
Epic's position contrasts with that of CEO Tim Sweeney, who has opposed requiring developers to disclose their use of generative tools to customers. For now, the tension lies between a company publicly claiming its internal use of AI and other studios that prefer not to expose it.
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