AI fixes decade-old Unreal Engine bugs to Epic Games acclaim

Epic Games is actively integrating artificial intelligence into Unreal Engine development, with neural networks already helping to fix bugs that had lingered for a decade and accelerate engine optimization.

Two weeks ago, Epic Games head Tim Sweeney announced a large-scale shift toward artificial intelligence tools. Now, Unreal Engine 5 Chief Technology Officer Markus Wassmer has stated in an interview that company employees are actively using Claude Code and Codex.

According to Wassmer, AI has already helped eliminate bugs that engineers had struggled with for a decade, speed up shader compression, and reduce update sizes. In addition, neural networks made it possible to rewrite a significant portion of the D3D12 rendering layer. Work that would have taken a single engineer six weeks took just one week, while simultaneously improving CPU load and reducing the number of errors.

Wassmer also stated that Epic Games programmers have almost entirely transitioned to “vibe coding,” meaning instead of writing code themselves, they primarily oversee and fix the results generated by AI.

The capabilities of this new approach will be evaluated in Unreal Engine 5.9 and especially Unreal Engine 6. At present, UE5 is regularly criticized for low performance and unstable image quality.