At GamesBeat Next 2026 in San Francisco, Megastructure CEO Rod Humble and Luke Dicken, former head of AI at Take-Two Interactive, took the stage in an intellectual debate around how AI has moved from hype to everyday tooling. TK Game Design game consultant Tadhg Kelly moderated.

Dicken opened by addressing a common line that he keeps hearing: “AI raises the bar without raising the ceiling.” According to Dicken, AI makes it easier to be less bad, such as catching gaps in a design doc, but developing new ideas remains within human territory. “Originality and new ways of doing things remains a very human thing,” he said.

Humble, a game developer since 1990, was more confident in his AI-related optimism. “This is the greatest time I’ve ever seen to be a game developer, like period, like no ifs ands or buts,” he said. He argued that left alone, AI tools “revert to the mean,” so developers need to use them in subversive ways, as the industry has done with past technologies.

Humble described a workflow in which agents write features, a swarm of agents handles QA, and an automated pipeline pushes builds live. He said building the orchestration software took six months of full-time agent coding and was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” He advised developers not to do the same, and applied the same rule to code: “Keep your filthy monkey hands out of the codebase.”

Dicken pushed back against the notion of the arms race. He said studios are burning through money as they chase after every new tool, and that a consensus toolchain will likely emerge in the next three to five years.

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