Nice! Oculus creator Palmer Luckey’s company Anduril is teaming up with Qualcomm to make ultra rugged computers in America. As much of mobile computing has evolved into fragile art, there’s a huge unmet demand for durable work tools.

When I was writing Unreal Engine 1, my time was divided as follows: - Around 30% went to seriously deep coding on hard problems: assembly language texture mappers, C++ BSP trees, data persistence, object oriented systems design, and networking. - Around 70% was just typing and refactoring large bodies of code needed for a complete engine feature set. This was not hard, and while I was doing it my mind was mostly on the deeper coding topics, thinking and planning for what's next. It didn't feel much different from vibe coding today, except that it was just me typing code on an IBM Model M keyboard rather than prompting it and reviewing the results. So, it has always seemed perfectly logical that we would rely on AI for that 70%, once the AI could do it with a similar quality standard as we could, which has never been perfection. It came as no surprise that, after a few years of AI model evolution, it was able to take the reigns on that 70% and free up programmers' time for more valuable tasks. What's more of a surprise is the emergence of AI as a sort of insta-Carmack able to solve hard technical problems quite cleverly and often cleanly, and that it's able to reason about and work in complex 3D scenes both by operating the tools and by directly understanding the raw data files. I abandoned assembly language in 1998 when out-of-order CPUs made much simpler C/C++ code faster, and never I missed it. If prompting through architectural documents, concept art, and design plans can transcend typing code and tweaking vertices, that will enable developers to spend their time on higher-level, higher value technical and creative tasks. What matters is the end product, whether it's a game or an engine. Anything developers can do to try out more ideas and make better software and games faster is a win for everyone.

The games we've long wanted, which didn't exist because they'd cost several times more to make than they'd earn back, will soon become possible. As will the games developers wanted to build, but couldn't with the resources available. It'll be a new golden age of gaming.

@FilmGamerOne Right now it's highly variable, from 20% in some areas (like the most technical areas of UE dev) to 5x for other areas (like web dev). By this time next year I expect very little will be less than 3x of January 2026 efficiency.

We have a huge pivot underway here at Epic, moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration. The aim isn't to do the same stuff with fewer people, but to enable everyone here to build MORE and BETTER stuff, and to bring the benefits to all teams using Unreal.

Interestingly, Fab seller revenue increased significantly in September. AI acceleration has led to more demand for content, and many devs are using AI assistants to build scenes including buying building blocks from Fab.

This would be terrible for the next generation of humanity. The apps and games of today are the paintbrushes and tree forts of yesterday. Fortnite has Creative Mode, Roblox has Roblox studio, and being a digital creator is in everyone’s reach, till politicians take it away.

@georgebsocial If one made this as a movie, I think today's world models would be perfectly capable of making it "locally playable" like this without allowing much deviation from the movie. This would be doable at AAA levels long before a long-duration open world game. @DLeitersdorf

Apple broke mobile gaming, in three ways. First, by using its 30% junk fees to inflate prices of in-game purchases, extracting the far majority of profit from games on the App Store, and depriving developers of the ability to reinvest.

I read all 644 pages of the Epic vs Apple Court Case so you wouldn’t have to... Here are the 10 most interesting facts I found 1. There were 100,000 app store submissions in 2021 (probably way higher now) 2. There are ~500 app store reviewers in total 3. Each app store review takes 6-12 minutes avg 4. Some reviews took under a minute — one app got a 32-second review 5. Reviewers were hired if they "could breathe... could think” 6. Apple's internal term for removing apps flagged by press was "throwing an app under the bus” 7. Apple's own calculations put App Store margins at ~79.6% in 2018 8. 3-4% of iOS users switch to android each year 9. Apple's own fraud lead said "App Store charts aren't really a discovery tool at all... mostly the bots and/or humans responding to incentives" 10. >2,000,000 apps have been removed from the app store — more apps than currently exist now

This is a great real-world example of AI-assisted coding: Linus Torvalds just fixed a nasty Linux kernel GPU bug with substantial help from AI. The bug caused part of Intel Xe GPU compression metadata storage to be incorrectly exposed as usable VRAM, resulting in corrupted page tables and black screens. The eventual fix was basically a one-liner: round_up() → round_down(). Finding it was the hard part: 24 debugging patches and 18 kernel boots. Linus says AI did much of the grunt work, repeatedly adding debug code and analyzing the results as he narrowed down the problem. The funniest part: the AI repeatedly told him the problem was "impossible and unsolvable" and suggested giving up. Linus kept pushing it until they found the bug. And then he let the AI write the commit message. 😄

Since journalists didn’t dig deep when covering this story, I did and here is the Apple EU junk fee situation in detail: - EC will likely bless Apple’s 5% junk fee on competing stores given EU principles on IP and FRAND. - EC will not accept Apple’s 15-20% junk fee on competing payments. The DMA clearly says “free of charge”. However the commission does not intend to stand alone in rejecting Apple’s terms given the US Trade Representative’s threats of tariff relation. So Apple’s 15-20% competition tax will be a temporary status quo in Europe until the US Court rules on Apple junk fees, likely later this year. Apple, in their court filing to the US Supreme Court, opined that whatever the US court decides on anticompetitive junk fees will set precedent for the rest of the world. International regulators received this as a clear signal from Apple to them. This likely pushes relief for European consumers and developers into 2027. Stay tuned for our court filings in a few weeks to counter Apple’s justification of its proposed 15-20% US junk fees, which they made with explicit disregard for the clear statements of the court and for the competitive dynamics the court sought to restore in its injunction.

🚨 Epic just added MCP to UEFN. I wanted to see if it was actually useful, so I gave Claude Code a stress test: "Build a Rube Goldberg machine with real physics" It built it, tested it, broke it, debugged it & kept rebuilding until it worked. This is pretty wild. 👀