Clint Hocking, the former director of Assassin's Creed: Codename Hexe, sat down with Edge Magazine to talk about AI in game development and ended up sharing something more personal: he tried to teach himself to code using ChatGPT, and it went badly.
"It was brutal. ChatGPT kind of sucked. It didn't really know how to code. Everything was broken," Hocking told Edge, in a feature centered on generative AI's growing role in the games industry.
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Six months of broken code and late nights
Hocking, who also directed Far Cry 2 before leading the Hexe project at Ubisoft, spent roughly half a year trying to learn JavaScript with ChatGPT as his guide. The process, by his own account, was less "AI tutor" and more "AI obstacle course." He described much of the experience as trying to debug code he didn't yet understand, written by a tool that apparently didn't understand it much better.
Here's the thing: he did eventually learn JavaScript. But Hocking acknowledged he learned it despite ChatGPT rather than because of it, describing the AI as more of an unruly tutor than a reliable shortcut. The tool's output was broken often enough that he had to figure out what was wrong himself, which, in a roundabout way, forced the actual learning.
That's a meaningful distinction. The popular pitch for AI-assisted coding is that it lowers the barrier to entry. Hocking's experience suggests the barrier is still very much there, it just changes shape.
What Hocking thinks about AI in game development
Despite the rough personal experience, Hocking told Edge he believes AI integration into game production is inevitable. He's not alone in that view across the industry, but his framing is more nuanced than most executive-level takes.
Hocking also addressed Ubisoft's own relationship with AI tools directly, stating that no one at the company lost their job to AI during his time there. He noted that Ubisoft had explored generative technologies that could have powered NPC behavior in Watch Dogs: Legion, his last major project at the studio before moving to Hexe.
Hocking served as director on both the Assassin's Creed Infinity platform and Assassin's Creed: Codename Hexe before departing Ubisoft. He is also known for directing Far Cry 2.
The broader Edge feature frames these conversations around a games industry increasingly pressured to find cost efficiencies, with AI tools positioned as one answer. What makes Hocking's account stand out is that it comes from someone who tested the technology hands-on, not as a product evaluation but as a genuine attempt to acquire a new skill.
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The gap between the pitch and the reality
The "vibe coding" conversation has been getting louder across the industry. Several developers and executives have floated the idea that AI could eventually let non-programmers build functional game systems by describing what they want in plain language. Hocking's story is a useful data point against the more optimistic versions of that argument.
Spending six months debugging broken AI-generated JavaScript, often late at night, is not most people's idea of a frictionless creative tool. The key here is that Hocking had the persistence to push through it. Most people trying to pick up a new skill don't.
That said, the AI coding tools available now are meaningfully different from what Hocking was using when he started this experiment, and the pace of improvement in this space has been fast. Whether current tools would have shortened his six-month slog is an open question.
For players watching how action adventure games like the Assassin's Creed series get built, stories like this are a useful reality check on how much of the development process AI is actually handling versus how much it is complicating. Check out the Assassin's Creed: Codename Hexe guide collection as more details on the game continue to surface.
