I gave into 3D development recently. Started with Three.js, got into shaders, scenes, custom models, the whole thing.
And somewhere along the way, I realized something I wasn't expecting.
AI couldn't really help me here.
I started working in development before AI tools were what they are today. And honestly, it wasn't easy. Every concept I had to digest, every pattern I had to understand, it took real time. I'd sit with documentation for hours, get stuck on things that felt simple in hindsight, and slowly piece things together.
Then AI came around. And suddenly, a lot of that work was happening in seconds. Backend logic, API integrations, component structures. I'd describe what I needed and it would just appear. That was a shift I felt in my day-to-day in a real way.
So when I got into Three.js, I assumed the same thing. I'd describe a 3D scene, AI would help me build it, and I'd move fast the way I'd gotten used to moving.
That's not what happened.
The problem with 3D is that it lives in physical space. And AI, at its core, works with patterns. Text patterns, code patterns, data patterns. But when you're building something in three dimensions, you're thinking about depth, about how light hits a surface, about why an object feels heavy or floaty, about what happens when a camera moves through a scene and the perspective shifts.
That's not a pattern you can prompt your way through.
You have to feel it. You build something, look at it, realize it's off, and you don't even know why at first. Then slowly, you develop an eye for it. That spatial intuition takes time and it can't be shortcut.
And then there's the model side of it. If you actually want to build something real with 3D on the web, not just a spinning cube, you need custom 3D models. You need to understand file formats, how geometry is structured, how to optimize meshes for the browser without destroying the visual quality. AI can't design that for you. It can suggest, but the actual work, the decisions about what looks right in context, that's still on you.
I'd ask for help with a specific Three.js behavior and the responses would be technically correct but visually wrong. The code would run. The scene would look bad. And figuring out why took more effort than if I'd just worked through it myself from the start.
Now, I'm not saying AI won't get there. Honestly, I can't say that. The pace of this whole thing is unpredictable in a way that makes anyone who draws a hard line look foolish six months later.
But looking at where things are right now, 3D development still demands something that most of this tooling doesn't have. A sense of space. An understanding of how things exist and behave physically. The eye you build after staring at bad renders long enough to finally know what good looks like.
That can't be generated. Not yet. Maybe not for a while.
And after years of watching AI absorb one skill after another, there's something quietly interesting about finding a corner of development where you still just have to sit down and learn it the hard way.