Even if you're 100% accurate that the advent of LLMs means that the field of software engineering has effectively devolved into prompt engineering and AI-wrangling, that is a change that we should fight with full-throated, actual-Luddite levels of defense. Your own analogy – the way a tiny, tiny core of 'real' engineers develop game engines, and then the entire field of game development just 'scripts' those engines – sends up a ton of red flags for me.

(Aside: as an erstwhile game developer 'just scripting game engines' is...underselling the craft of programming in game development, but whatever).

For a long time game development has been a weird shadow version of the rest of the tech industry. We're influenced by the same macro trends (e.g. ZIRP, VC fads) and the mood and zeitgeist generally rhyme as a result. But if you look at the drive to unionise game developers vs. same impulse in the mainstream tech industry the feeling is COMPLETELY different.

What's the incentive to unionise if you're a SWE at Meta, Palantir, or Google? Your job is pretty great, your work-life balance is at least not fundamentally out of control, and your STARTING salary puts you in the top 10% of US households. It is probably the last remaining holdout of the 1970s upper-middle-class dream jobs.

And if you're the equivalent engineer at EA, Activision, or Ubisoft? You can expect seasonal layoffs, a good work-life balance means you sleep at home instead of under your desk at least once a week, and your take-home pay is just sufficient to let you split the rent on an outer LA apartment that's just inside tolerable commuting range. Equity? What's that? Management treats you like a disposable cog AND BRAGS ABOUT IT, like they have for the last thirty years.

This is what we want to become? This is the future we're embracing?

It's safe to say that JetBrains IDEs are something other than "crappy VSCode clones."