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  PostOnce
  John Carmack is a personal hero of mine, so it pains me to say this:Carmack hasn't produced anything noteworthy since AI was invented, therefore, how productive can it really be?It could be he is doing incredible work in private... but it could also be that he's lost in the weeds, because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite?I remain a skeptic.
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  glimshe
  We are going from the era of manual, line-by-line mental model transcription to one where software engineers can focus on data structures, software architecture and algorithms.I love being able to quickly bring out the program that is already running in my head without having to worry about the grind of typing it into a format that the compiler understands. Dealing with API names. Syntax. Language quirks. Library gotchas. A sizeable portion of my successful career as a software engineer was spent on the tiresome process of interacting with a text editor/IDE to get a program to do what I wanted.I was there when people were still coding assembly. A slow torture where the simplest things took forever to get right.Once I've mentally solved the problem, the fun is mostly over for me. Pure vibe coding is dull and unsustainable with current technology for all but the simplest systems; AI-assisted coding, on the other hand, rekindled my passion for computers.
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  sriram_malhar
  Everyone who writes enthusiastically about AI already has the benefit of having worked without AI. They have been schooled in the basics. Enough of us know about data structures, concurrency, networks, language design etc. from the ground up that the knowledge is passed on. I worry about the world that we will be living in when a whole generation has skipped learning the basics the hard way. Given the attendance rates at various educational institutions, I fear that day is already here.
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  tkel
  Ironically, this post comes off as out of touch. The purpose of the various martial arts isn't just to win in a life-or-death brawl or murder people as efficiently as possible. Similarly, the point of programming isn't just to generate as much code as possible, or only to be more "productive".
• nickledave
  > In 2022, he left Oculus to work on his AGI startup, Keen Technologieshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmackoh
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  xyzsparetimexyz
  'Make sure you don't fall behind!!!' is my least favourite type of post about ai. There's resllt nothing to learn about ai. You're just typing and telling it what to do.
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  hermitcrab
  This resonated with me as someone who: has read the book of 5 rings (translated), has done quite a lot of martial arts and has been coding for ~50 years.I work for myself developing apps and selling online. So I have no employer pushing to use AI. But I feel a bit like a dinosaur watching the incoming comet.Currently, I just use MSCopilot as enhanced StackOverflow and I find it useful for that. But I have been nowhere near Cursor, Claude, harnesses, agents or 'vibe coding'.It seems my options are:1. Keep use AIs as an enhanced StackOverflow (e.g. to answer questions about APIs)2. Embrace the new AI coding toolsReally not convinced about option 2. I don't trust AIs with code bases that I have built over 20 years. Also, I'm not far off retiring and I'm not sure I can be bothered to completely change how I work (again). Would be interested to hear what conclusions any fellow coding dinosaurs have come to.
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  evolve-maz
  It's interesting to see how over the span of just a few years a lot of people went from:> Architecture astronauts are out of touch and shouldn't give any advice because they haven't written code in ages. Only the hands on engineers can shape it since the design evolves in step with writing the code.To> I focus on the architecture patterns and high level goals and let the LLM take care of the rest.Similar commentary was shared about anyone not writing the code daily, not just the architects.No gotchas, I just think it's something which calls for introspection.
• DavCreator
  https://xxcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/209844326221423009...
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  maplethorpe
  > But don’t be the out of touch Kung Fu master, heir to lifetimes of tradition, that gets mauled by an amateur MMA fighter.I have an issue with this analogy, since a professional MMA fighter is a highly skilled individual who has honed their body through years of training.A more apt analogy might be "don't be the kung fu master who believes they can survive an atomic bomb, dropped from far above by a pilot who does not understand how it works, but who has nevertheless been gifted the ability to deploy it."
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  alexpotato
  This post reminded me of the story about Jeet Kun Do [0] after Bruce Lee [1] died.JKD was supposed to be a martial art that adapted the best techniques from other martial arts. e.g. "have no style" because your style is constantly adapting.After Lee died, JKD broke into two camps:1. "We should only teach what Lee taught us and no more. e.g. the techniques he taught us are the core techniques."2. "Lee taught us to be constantly adapting from other martial arts so there is no list of core techniques."I've always loved this story as it highlights how humans have essentially two reactions to change: embracing it or fearing it.0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeet_Kune_Do1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Lee
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  RunSet
  I understand why people value the code John Carmack has released but I do not understand why people value his public statements."eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id"[0]"Great! I think Microsoft has been a good parent company for gaming IPs"[1]By sheer coincidence, John Carmack is peddling machine generated code.[2][0] https://web.archive.org/web/20081003111457/http://www.linuxg...[1] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1308069857913720832[2] https://80.lv/articles/john-carmack-s-agi-startup-keen-techn...
• justinator
  "don’t be the out of touch Kung Fu master"posts on Twitter
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  jmull
  > But don’t be the out of touch Kung Fu master, heir to lifetimes of tradition, that gets mauled by an amateur MMA fighter.Seems like a fundamentally poor analogy. Software development is collaborative, not competitive.
• venvio
  It would seem that the AI craze has shown a flaw in stereotypical "software engineers": an obsession over quantity and speed over everything else. A desire to belong to the group, a desire to exhibit the fact that they are not being left behind. While FOMO is a thing for all peoples, those in tech are particularly susceptible, given the nature of the field.I have yet to see evidence that AI produces code that is higher in quality than human-written code. I have yet to see anyone show that burning through tokens is economically smarter than paying human engineers. All that is being revealed is how companies and software engineers truly feel about the work they do.This technology is impressive, and we cannot doubt this. However, it seems that those within Silicon Valley are desperate to showcase the innovative spirit which has been absent for two decades.
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  thih9
  > WorldEnder> Its just that, it used to be free. All I needed was a computer.https://xcancel.com/rustishard/status/2098853622263976328#mSame here.In particular regarding free as in freedom, so about access and control. Just like I never enjoyed working with proprietary coding platforms, OS, or IDEs, I’m not particularly excited about proprietary models.
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  ianpenney
  Why are we always at war?
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  yallpendantools
  > The introduction chronicled the evolution of swordsmanship and martial arts in general from pragmatic battlefield necessities to sports, historical curiosities, and hobbies.Eh? Martial arts has always been a mix of utility and cultural artifact.Greco-Roman wrestling flourished in a/alongside of military utility. Greeks and Romans had swords, shields, spears, bows and arrows. Boxing also traces its history all the way back to the Greeks.Japanese, Korean, and Chinese arts developed in a society with, also, swords, shields, spears, bows and arrows. Notably these cultures often included weapons training ("kobudo" in Japanese) in their curriculum but that did not phase out the empty-handed aspect of the art.Catch wrestling developed among sailors who would not be strangers to guns and rifles.BJJ developed, well, today.There has always been a component of sportsmanship and self-improvement in martial arts. Carmack misreads this introduction, methinks.
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  mycocola
  His analogy might be accidentally appropriate given MMA-fighters propensity to develop CTE.
• cadamsdotcom
  Yep. Having to type the code is a form of accidental complexity, and with it gone, you can focus more on the problem to solve, getting it down faster.Of course it's possible for it to go off the rails. Consider that a wildly swung sword can do damage you can't do with your bare hands. To prevent this, constrain your model to the solution shape you want by grounding it; give it contact with reality; ways to run the code it's generating and refine it to meet your goals; granular tests; etc.The new job is in how you wield the tools and it is at least as complex as the old.
• fwlr
  I assume he’s referring to videos like this? https://youtu.be/gEDaCIDvj6IIf so… Very poor choice of metaphor. Nothing resembles AI coding quite so much as the mystical master waving his hands in karate-style movements, seeing dozens of his opponents helplessly bowl themselves over, and eventually coming to believe he truly has the power to defeat any enemy.If I still edited videos I would have “make no mistakes” fly out of his hands, and the students would have little “you’re absolutely right” and “that’s on me” captions on them as they flip themselves over.
• codemog
  So what does this guy have to show for working on AI research for more than half a decade at this point? Apparently full time too.
• tugback
  Definitely felt like that stubbornly avoiding TypeScript for too long. My projects eventually forced me to adapt or be left behind.
• Krei-se
  He and others can host their brain in the cloud for all i care.
• phmx
  Also, don’t be the one who fights sharp swords with Marvin Minsky’s useless boxes.
• CamperBob2
  https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2098443262214230095 for convenience
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  wat10000
  Fighting is competitive and single-minded in a way that programming very much is not. The purpose of fighting is to defeat, often kill, an enemy who wants to do the same thing to you. In that world, there’s no room for anything but the most advanced techniques and technology.Most jobs, programming included, aren’t like that at all. There’s an element of competition, but you don’t get killed by somebody who does it better. Maybe they get paid more, but you can still have a job too.I read this advice like: in a world of backhoes, don’t be a guy with a shovel. Except a guy with a shovel is still very useful in the modern world. Backhoes are great but can’t do everything. And even for jobs they can, the shovel might be good enough.
• tsylba
  My problem with AI is not that they aren't useful, John. Like everything else in life the question is what we shape ourselves to be as a culture, as a community, what is the path we want to take. It's not on the same scale than ditching assembly instruction for a C compiler.I get why most people get with the flow of what competition taught us: if you can't fight them join them. Yet I think it's demoralising we're forced to live the life forced upon us by a few techbros without real collective intelligence about the use of our resources and goals for the future. Again, it always has been a bit like that but never at this scale.We're souless automatons feeding a machine god.
• jimbob45
  That’s great for martial artists where the new arts are objectively better and more robust against the wider array of attacks one must withstand today.But software…? He’s declaring victory at virtually every level but the highest. Who honestly thinks JS should be cemented as permanent? X86/RISCV? CMake? It’s cool to abstract away the lower tiers when our tools are this powerful but it seems silly to leave this much performance, readability, and extensibility on the table forever.
• latexr
  Is there a name for this pervasive psychological phenomenon where someone reads an ancient text and becomes convinced of its profound relevance to their own field? Seems to be especially common amongst the influencers of the tech sphere.
• einpoklum
  So, more people are excited for the vision of Idiocracy to be fully realized.
• hugodan
  Don’t tell me what to do
• Applejinx
  I guess in ten years we'll see which is the out of touch Kung Fu master.I do see a whole set of people doing mystical passes in the air, sometimes with wires holding 'em up, in a set of ritual beliefs propped up by vast accumulations of power, money and pride, not to be questioned.Didn't expect Carmack to be among those waving his hands about.If it's so amazing, let's see the amazing thing he does. Go ahead. I'm sure Doom needs a really on-point web page with Inter.
• jdw64
  I also code as a hobby. It seems like a pretty good thing to have as a hobby.
• acedTrex
  Use and learn the tools, even if it sucks and is painful. It does not take long to feel how they work at all.Once you have that you can pick and choose when to engage this new tool at will to "not fall behind."It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
• m3kw9
  I don't think with the models we have, you shouldn't need to even write a single line of code. What you need is to prompt it right, check for over engineering, check for edge cases, test it very thoroughly. That means don't accept it writing 10,000 lines of code that you cannot review or test properly. Make modules small enough that can be reviewed/tested properly.
• acyou
  The author of the work that John Carmack is referencing is named Musashi, which is also the (coincidental?) name of a WW2 Japanese Yamato class battleship, which is quite fitting. Musashi the battleship having met its end at the hand of carrier launched aircraft, which remain a dominant technology to this day.Aircraft carriers are to a small extent superseded in their own right by strategic bombers and ballistic missiles. We may see nuclear aircraft carriers eventually superseded to some extent by missile/drone swarms and missile/drone deployment platforms, or some other threat.If the new dominant technology, military in the sense of being used to dominate your adversaries in any arena, relies on data centers, is that infrastructure considered pretty robust? Will that data center infrastructure fully supersede the nuclear powered aircraft carriers, as has been done to battleships? Do hardened data centers and the software they run represent the main locus of national front line capability? Are AI researchers more like WW2 pilots, or are they more akin to the people who worked on the Manhattan project?This post makes me think harder about physical computer infrastructure. Continuing the metaphor, silicon fabs, computer manufacturing supply chains and their related infrastructure are certainly the WW2 drydocks of our modern conflict, the WW2 drydocks having been critical for the Americans to churn out aircraft carriers. And the drydocks were only one piece, but might have been considered one of the most brittle.Some seemingly brittle pieces of AI/data center infrastructure today are the fabs and the communication links. As far as I know, the fiber optic cables connecting continents are so exposed it's almost ridiculous, the cables lay directly on the ocean floor. If severing these links favors one or another global actor, my main question is why hasn't this already been done? You can ask the same questions about severing oil pipelines and the various global shipping chokepoints. I do wonder if fiber optic cables are defensible at all in the final analysis. And what life would/will be like without fiber optic connection between continents.I'm not sure how much more durable satellite links are, due to the cascading debris effects of Kessler syndrome.A key idea is that if the transoceanic communication links between the Americas and Eurasia were to be cut, either powers based in Eurasia or a power based in the Americas would gain an advantage.Semiconductor fabs... Well, if I were a military strategist in charge of national security, I definitely wouldn't publish the location of every fab. And a a self respecting superpower wouldn't leave its EUV machine production external, or would it?Fabless semiconductor companies and AI researchers are critical to current national security capabilities in the way that people who developed radar were critical to WWII. In the long enough term some people think that eventually data centers and the software running inside will supersede and encompass these functions. The question being increasingly not if, but when. Some people think that if it can be done by a computer, it eventually will be.It really is all about timing, the Japanese thought the Pacific conflict with the USA would be short.John, if the introduction of the translation of Book of Five Rings is so good, could you please share the identifying information including the translator or the person who wrote the introduction?
• neilv
  It's a good analogy that's probably occurred independently to a lot of us. Here's my version from a private email a few weeks ago:> [...] I don't like the "great equalizer" effect. [...] Like a kung-fu expert who wandered into a wild-west saloon of drunks all packing six-shooters. (I'm still working on this metaphor.)Might as well share the entire off-the-cuff email, replying to a great software engineer friend who recently went academic, when they asked what I thought about AI development.> "You're absolutely right," as the chatbots say.> I think Claude Code (which I think is currently regarded as the best brand for software development) is for banging out *something* when you don't care so much about the quality. Like most applications of generative AI (homework cheating, customer service, usual corporate ticket-closing).> And I'm definitely not thinking through the problem very well. The first time I noticed this was on UI design, where Claude would emit a generic *something*, and then the mode is to make incremental tweaks, rather than going through the mental exercises and holistic thinking.> So sometimes I'm thinking like a non-technical manager, giving initial spec, and then iterating on things I notice -- not thinking like a designer, architect, or engineer.> Or, like a senior engineer who has to mentor a hyperactive intern who bullshits and plagiarizes like crazy, and makes empty apologies like a sociopath when caught, but is the CEO's nephew, so you can't just fire and blacklist them. You just have to get *something* out of them.> I can do much better design and better implementation myself, but it's good enough. And it's better than at least half the industry software engineers, so a lot of people who never cared much nor got very good, are in trouble. And management is often a poor judge of skill, if they even care.> Besides the questions of its performance and utility, and all the ethics questions, I don't like the "great equalizer" effect. Now a lot more people can do (or seem to do) many of things I can do. And I'm having a lot of trouble job-hunting, and companies mostly want people to be using or building AI. Hence learning the robo-plagiarism tools. Like a kung-fu expert who wandered into a wild-west saloon of drunks all packing six-shooters. (I'm still working on this metaphor.)That conversation might've started when I showed friend my new gen-AI portfolio site, so the context would be realist assessment and handling it, spoken to someone who already knows I'm an enthusiastic hardcore engineer.
• cortesoft
  I mean, there is still a place in the world for a Kung Fu master… it’s just not as someone trying to win in an anything goes combat competition.If you think there are going to be as many jobs in the future for people writing all their code by hand, I hate to break it to you. However, there will still be some jobs, and fewer people who want to do it. It will still be a path for some people.
• rramadass
  Resubmission of I recently went through a translation of Musashi's Book of Five Rings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660833 (1 comment)
• sublinear
  So, don't be John Carmack. Got it.
• vatsachak
  Slop posting
• tobin1994
  [dead]
• bamboozled
  [flagged]
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  threethirtytwo
  HN is loaded with out of touch Kung Fu masters. They were the loudest skeptics against AI. Still a lot here.It's human nature. If your identity is defined by your kung fu and a technology is about to obsolesce your kung fu, then all logic goes out the window as you go all out in protecting your identity. It's mostly for themselves. They have to lie to themselves and tell themselves that they still "matter".