9 ms·

Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

• bamboozled 19d ago
  [flagged]
• glimshe 19d ago
  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.
  • skydhash 19d ago
    Have you tried live programming (smalltalk, LISP)? Or a proper Edit-Compile-Run cycle with a good editor? A lot of people are bashing old practices, but from y standpoint, it always seems like a lack of proper (usage of) tooling to streamline the coding phase of building software.
    • glimshe 19d ago
      Dear sir, I appreciate the help but, as I mentioned, I've been around since the Assembly days... Been there, done that. I currently have a crazy efficient Edit-Compile-Run setup and a great VSCode personal config, all of which were made a lot more crazy efficient with Codex.
      • huurtehoog 18d ago
        LISP has been around since 1959. To the point: the proclaimed advantage of operating at new levels of "abstraction" is not a novel contribution of LLMs to coding. Put another way: live coding, meta programming, high level abstraction, all have been possible for some 60 years now. Two generations! We don't need the monstrous amounts of accidental complexity involved in running dozens of GB in RAM for LLMs and all the "harness" apparatus, we have had from the right tooling for almost a century (!) now.
  • corv 19d ago
    I like your constructive outlook and I want to believe that we can now focus on the bigger picture, but I'm not really seeing it around me. Most everyone I know that's "AI-pilled" has spent the newfound capacity on throughput instead of altitude. Is anyone actually seeing a shift towards improved structure rather than more code, faster? We seem to be living in the Gatling-gun version of the picture John Carmack drew when modernity also ushered into precision marksmanship...
    • enraged_camel 19d ago
      >> Is anyone actually seeing a shift towards improved structure rather than more code, faster? Yes. At work we recently finished a complete rewrite of the platform. The old codebase got abandoned and two new codebases got stood up. Previous stack was Phoenix LiveView and the new one is Phoenix API + Vue /w TypeScript. Zero code shared between the two. We took the opportunity to re-architect a lot of the core functionality and get rid of the tech debt that had been hounding us and killing our velocity for the past six years. We finished the rewrite in two months. A little over 700k LoC total. 95% of it was planned, orchestrated and written by AI. We could have gotten it done faster, but we were well aware of the potential for slop and thus paid an absurd amount of attention to (and tokens for) code quality. For example, there is a 100% test coverage requirement in both server and client, combined with AI-driven review rules that say all tests must be non-vacuous, plus a ton of invariants enforced via deterministic checks. Everything from standard linting and formatting rules to AI-necessitated stuff like "comments cannot be more than five lines each" is in there. At the end of each week, we get together for ~30 minutes to review each bug that was fixed that week (there haven't been that many) and try to figure out if more deterministic checks can be added (or new ones extended) to prevent that class of bug from re-appearing. We actually have an Architecture epic with a dedicated Fable agent orchestrating all the initiatives and tickets in it and keeping track of improvements (and the occasional regression). So things like accessibility, usage of shared helpers, enforcement of common patterns, etc. are all kept track of. The difference between the old codebase and the two new ones has been night and day. The new codebases, combined, are ~35% larger than what we had before, and yet there are way fewer bugs (we actually got suspicious at first and had to check to make sure our logging instrumentation was configured correctly). Performance is also stellar, features have been a lot easier to add and extend, and everything is a lot easier to find. When someone asks a question or has an issue we have a pretty good idea of what part of the codebase to look in and we're usually right. It wasn't all unicorns and rainbows. Not everyone on the team was proficient with AI-driven development, so they had to be brought up to speed quickly and taught the tools and also what works and doesn't. Code reviews were also difficult and time-consuming. We had to deal with our anxieties about working in two new codebases none of us had authored much code in ourselves. What made all of it worse was that we were racing towards a deadline imposed by external factors so we all ended up working a lot of hours. It was essentially between getting it done this summer or waiting until next summer and we bit the bullet and did it. It absolutely would not have been possible without AI.
  • agentultra 19d ago
    I’m the opposite. I don’t believe there is a royal road to understanding anything. For me, the process of programming involves frustration. That is usually when I find my greatest insights. Syntax isn’t a big deal. Names either. You can look them up. Remember them. Language gotchas are annoying and sometimes problematic. To me, our job is understanding problems. And for me, understanding the problem involves wrestling with the code. I learn much from modelling problems in code, building theories, testing them. Once an LLM system has generated some code I haven’t learned anything. Even when I read through the solution. It doesn't require the same activation of my brain. There’s nothing quite like working through the problem yourself. LLMs definitely feel like they are draining my passion for computers. There were plenty of folks who checked out or were never truly passionate about programming. Now they’re louder than ever. “Nobody cares about code,” and, “optimizing is a waste of time.” Now we don’t even want to understand how it works, or whether it works at all. They repeat the lines their master have told them: get on board or get left behind. I’m pretty sure I am risking getting, “left behind.” But I’m okay with that. The tech is truly the least interesting thing to me. If I don’t have a career in 10 years… oh well. I’ll still be programming.
    • acedTrex 19d ago
      ya i find all LLM output to be incredibly boring and unskillful, I can ship vibe bugs fast with the best of them but it brings me no joy. I'll never let myself be left behind but the joy professionally of writing quality software is 100% gone.
      • fragmede 19d ago
        The possibility to have an agent implement every little thing that comes up in your mind as you're building doesn't spark the tiniest bit of joy? Previously, "ooh it would be cool if" had to answer to "yeah but it'll take too long". Now, it's more like, "how important is that really?" to stupid ideas that never would have seen the light of day before.
        • skydhash 19d ago
          > "ooh it would be cool if" had to answer to "yeah but it'll take too long". Now, it's more like, "how important is that really?" to stupid ideas that never would have seen the light of day before. My answer was it to "ooh it would be cool if" has always to build a PoC of the thing or a MVP, then I can flesh it out when I need more features. Sometimes a web app can be a single PHP script, and a cli command can be as simple as a single file C program. Or using tkinter with python for GUI. The answer to "ooh it would be cool if I can travel fast" is not "yeah but it'll take too long to build a car". It's "let's build a kick scooter first".
  • ghthor 19d ago
    This is where I’m at as well. It is incredibly liberating I feel very empowered
  • turpentine 19d ago
    > 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. Focusing on data structures, architecture and algorithms is what competency in programming has looked like since forever. Building systems out of smaller pieces gets you there. If your complaint above is that you were struggling with syntax and reading documentation, one might ask if you failed to progress past beginner levels, and now AI is just your cheat-code?
    • kaffekaka 19d ago
      I think you are not interpreting GP in the most charitable way. He simply said that not having to manually write all the code lets him spend his energy on bigger things. That is different from "struggling with syntax".
      • fodkodrasz 19d ago
        It is the same. I mean many mainstream languages made thinking in datastructures hard. Not a coincidence why functional languages, Haskell, F#, OCAML, Scala, Clojure, LISP, etc. had their enthusiast, as they felt just like what you claim. The datastructures already did the heavy lifting. The syntax was not something to struggle with, but it was the natural way to stick the bits together. JavaScript for one never gave me this feeling, and I always felt that either the language, or the libraries, but something was always a struggle to overcome. (Python too... seriously, working with collections is a pain in the "pythonic" way for someone who has experienced LINQ... and for most line of business apps it is all about working with collections.)
      • turpentine 19d ago
        Syntax is listed right there in the GP comment. They've given plenty of rope to hang themselves by. Someone who says that programming is not about working at the level of about data structures and algorithms without LLMs raises red flags.
    • staticautomatic 19d ago
      Do you remember how bad documentation was? I still have nightmares about Twisted.
  • flyingshelf 19d ago
    > AI-assisted coding, on the other hand, rekindled my passion for computers. AI-assisted coding isn't a thing. Why would anyone pay you to code when your competitor spends 1 minute spelling out a problem and doing the same thing for 59 more problems? As far as I'm concerned coding is dead as a profession, now we are Harness Managers.
    • flyingshelf 19d ago
      You guys can downvote all you want. If you don't already realize this you'll realize soon enough.
  • teiferer 19d ago
    > 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. That exact sentence could have been said 20 years as well as 40 years ago. I don't know how you programmed pre-LLM, but line-by-line has long been a thing of the past, if it ever existed. I'm sure the folks creating the Apollo software were thinking a lot about data structures, software architecture and algorithms.
    • yvdriess 19d ago
      They weren't. A lot of abstraction concepts like ADT, modularization, structured programming had to be developed over the following decades.
  • throwaway893257 19d ago
    > 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 prefer an AI that is good at data structures, architecture and algorithms. Then, finally, no more leetcode.
    • 0trip 18d ago
      leetcode and data structures are 2 different things. Just like a marathon and jogging in the park
  • _zoltan_ 19d ago
    a lot of people don't understand that the joy of making something is not coding but actually being able to build anything I want. AI just made it 50x better, as exactly as you said, we don't need to deal with the useless junk (what's the API syntax? what's the library syntax? oh it changed in the last 3 versions, let me look up the new API, this and that...). it's great.
    • omnicognate 19d ago
      > a lot of people don't understand that the joy of making something is not coding but actually being able to build anything I want I expect "a lot of people" understand perfectly well that that's where the joy comes from for you. Do you not understand that other people have different motivations?
      • _zoltan_ 19d ago
        coding for the sake of coding is, well, dumb.
        • stavros 19d ago
          Is painting for the sake of painting dumb too?
          • _zoltan_ 19d ago
            that's a dumb comparison. are you equating writing code to painting like Michaelangelo?
            • SoftTalker 18d ago
              Did Michaelangelo paint his works himself, or did he buy a bunch of slaves and give them some prompting?
              • _zoltan_ 18d ago
  • epolanski 19d ago
    You're describing software developers, even better, coders, not really engineers.
  • Yoric 19d ago
    > 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. That would be lovely. It's sad that we're being forced to vibe code, though, because my day-to-day experience of that is that the agent does not respect the data structures I feed it, nor the architecture, nor the algorithms. > 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. Agreed.
  • hermitcrab 19d ago
    >AI-assisted coding, on the other hand, rekindled my passion for computers. I would be interested to know what you mean by AI-assisted coding. I've been coding for 50 years (40 professionally) and maintain several largish C++ code bases for commercial apps. There is no way that I am going to let an AI scan (train on), let alone edit, my code. But I do ask MSCoPilot questions, basically using it like turbo-charged StackOverflow. And I do get some value from that, even if it is often wrong. Is that what you mean?
  • flohofwoe 19d ago
    I kinda of agree, but still believe that writing most of the critical(!) code yourself has long term benefits. IME the initial mental model hardly survives contact with reality and all those little micro decisions that come up during implementation are good to do on your own and have in your own head instead of being buried in an LLM managed decision record where no human ever ventures. It all depends of course where the code sits between "low level mission critical code" and "high level throw-away code". every non-trivial project has code across that entire range. E.g. the lower level the code, the more I want to get directly involved, and that may mean typing each line manually to get that code directly into my head (IME for that purpose, writing is better than reading - have that manually written code reviewed by LLM instead). Of course that only works if you don't have a manager breathing down your neck who insists on prioritising implementation speed over quality ;) Also you should try assembly coding with modern (non-LLM) tooling, it feels incredibly more productive than with the primitive tools on slow machines of the past. Also: > software engineers can focus on data structures, software architecture and algorithms. Come on, this is was already "normal" decades before LLMs, that's why an entire zoo of high level languages was created which allow to describe a solution in a highly abstract (yet still precise) way. Replacing this high level problem specification in a programming language with a "sloppy" human language specification is arguably even a step back. (also tbf, I'm writing this comment while sitting in a cafe while the LLM at home is busy coding a GL mocking library ;) (which is exactly the boring type of throwaway code which should be automated)
  • Ekaros 19d ago
    How can you have proper real understanding of data structures and algorithms without at same time having line-by-line mental model? Or do you blindly trust what machine tells you at whatever time you are communicating with it? Architecture I might give not needing line-by-line model. But I really doubt the same with data structures and algorithms. Those are in the end build from lines.
    • jampekka 19d ago
      Djikstra seemed to manage? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#Use_of_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#Use_of_tech...
      • Ekaros 19d ago
        Seems to indicate to me that he had full mental model of everything. Whole thing in his head at once. Clearly having it in mental model sentence by sentence. AI would here be the word processor.
      • layer8 19d ago
        He still thought in terms of what the actual code would need to be, at that level of precision, and also wrote pseudo-code.
  • penguin_booze 19d ago
    > AI-assisted coding, on the other hand, rekindled my passion for computers. "Walking on stilts made me taller"?
    • Daishiman 18d ago
      More like, not having to read the docs of a library or a domain with a million gotchas is a bummer and best avoided if possible.
  • lelanthran 19d ago
    > 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. Why? What makes you think your data structure design, architecture and algorithms are ever going to surpass AI in the near future? You honestly can't see a (near) future where those 3 elements are done by AI, not by you?
    • deleted 19d ago
      [deleted]
    • glimshe 18d ago
      I can and I'd be okay with that too. The world doesn't have carriage makers anymore. Nobody is entitled to doing what they love or what they are good at. I certainly didn't as my job as a software engineer, despite being profitable, was far from what I like in the discipline. That said, I think AI is still many years or decades away from completely replacing the Software Engineering profession. My kids are entering college right for a CS degree and that's what I tell them. I have skin in the game as I'm ultimately responsible for them. I could be wrong, but anyone's opinion is at most an educated guess at this point.
  • SoftTalker 18d ago
    I'm exactly the opposite. I like knowing how the code works, what the data structures are, what APIs are being used, and yes even typing the code into the editor. When I'm working with LLMs there's less thinking. I'm bored. My brain is not fully engaged in the task. There's less sense of accomplishment in the finished product. I also prefer to drive cars with manual transmissions.
    • lowbloodsugar 18d ago
      Yes. You are the Kung Fu master in Carmack’s analogy.
      • vouaobrasil 18d ago
        Not necessarily a bad thing. Just because Carmack has an optimistic view and has some catchet in the programming world doesn't mean he's any more correct than a raving lunatic. Frankly, he said relatively little of substance and it's only made more irrelevant because he's said it from a priveleged position.
        • lowbloodsugar 16d ago
          >Not necessarily a bad thing. Agree. I made no judgement call. >Just because Carmack "Just because a man, who has some cachet with mountain climbers for being the first to climb mount everest doesn't mean he's any more correct about how to climb mount everest than a raving lunatic". That's your pitch? Carmac has shipped massive selling, fun games, using low-level, innovative techniques, back when such crazy shit was necessary. The issue is the difference between what is necessary ("Miyamoto") and what is prescriptive ("Kung Fu").
          • vouaobrasil 14d ago
            I agree, if he were talking about programming a game. But he's not. He's talking about how to have fun from a priveleged position.... If Carmack said, "you're wrong in your game design, here's how to do it instead", yeah I'd listen. Same as if Kasparov gave me chess advice. But if Kasparov said, "AI won't take the fun away from chess" then how the hell does he have any expertise on that when he's spent the majority of his chess career without AI. Let's keep in mind that he made it to world champion before Deep Blue beat him.
  • Seattle3503 18d ago
    > one where software engineers can focus on data structures, software architecture and algorithms. I see this a lot and I'm not sure why people don't think AI will be able to do this too. The self-play training that got them writing code can be used for this too.
    • unethical_ban 18d ago
      In the long term, I think you're correct. In the medium term, AI still won't know your business-specific workflows and data relationships, and humans are needed to define those things and let the AI build the scaffolding around it.
    • Daishiman 18d ago
      Given enough context for a business problem, sure. But LLMs are not in a condition to judge how you should pick the technical solution to a business problem with several stakeholders, risks, and so on.
      • Seattle3503 18d ago
        With the speed AI moves, a lot of technical decisions become reversible. And while engineering often makes decisions that could lie elsewhere in the business, outside of engineering, I could imagine those decisions moving elsewhere in a fully AI world. Do you have examples of things that would be hard to train for? One that could be compensated for with changes elsewhere in the business process?
        • Daishiman 18d ago
          Yes, if Alex from BizDev is a scheming moron who consistently lies about the priority of features, it’s hard to keep an LLM on the loop about it when transcribing meetings and feature requests. If your boss is gonna be unavailable for a month and that means that a junior devs garbage PRs will be getting merged because the second in command is much laxer then you need to be aware for that and so on. What I mean is that these things decant into technical decisions and even with all the AI in the world running a DB schema migration does not become any more trivial.
  • abathologist 18d ago
    > 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. This is what declarative programming gives us, not what LLM-based generation offers. > 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. Using natural instead of a formal language to get probabilistic results based on token fields is not bypassing arbitrary constraints of the compiler, it is dereliction of the responsibility to know and articulate precisely what you are specifying.
  • dtj1123 18d ago
    Would you mind elaborating on where exactly the boundary between vibe coding and AI assisted coding lies?
  • archagon 18d ago
    AI is not an abstraction and is not like moving up from assembly at all.
    • andrekandre 16d ago
      not that i disagree, but its funny because i just came back from a presentation from a "chief ai officer" where he boldly stated that ai is the next big abstraction for programmers (even had fancy charts and tables to boot)
      • archagon 16d ago
        I find it disturbing how often supposed professionals make this claim.
  • GoblinSlayer 18d ago
    Architecture is the first to be outsourced to AI, because AI shepherds have no idea how to do it.
  • Chris_Newton 18d ago
    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. Hadn’t good developers been focussing on those things, and other high-level modelling that relates the software system back to the underlying real world domain, for many years before the LLMs were in the picture? I’d even say that it’s one of the most reliable markers of a more senior/experienced developer that their code reads like a clear and logical explanation of what the system does and why, with concerns well separated and minor details and technicalities abstracted away so they don’t clutter the rest of the code.
  • duxup 18d ago
    I think I feel similarly to you. M currently re-writing an app that I wrote years ago. All the issues came from data structures, queries, architecture that didn’t fit what emerged as the use case. Now I can focus on those things and work far faster, and even ADJUST architecture, theorize about pros and cons of changes as I work … sometimes I find that some adjustments are easier than I thought. The result is far faster development, and a more optimal result where I can stay focused on improvements / efficiency rather than random minutia.
  • vouaobrasil 18d ago
    There will always be people who will like it because they are the ones getting ahead and get some reward. If a person is rewarded for something, it's unlikely that they'll care how the reward comes or be critical of the mechanism. It's just human nature; AI has incredible downsides but those who get ahead won't mind, as long as they get ahead. I bet thieves feel a rush when they rob a store. Does that also make it right?
  • bitwize 18d ago
    > 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. AI is getting good at picking those as well. Frontier models can be fed a vague problem, analyze the code base, and pick out an architectural solution that makes sense. We're going from a world that needs specialized "software engineers" to speak the language of the machine into one where ordinary people need only sit down and think, "what exactly would solve my problem here?", spell it out in ordinary procedural language, and get a software solution that employs best practices without the intervention of professional computer-touchers. Tim Bryce was right 20 years ago. Abolish programmers, bring back systems analysts!
  • josebmneto 17d ago
    Kinda agree with this. And your point is valid for most of the problems that we solve today as software engineers. However, you cannot forget that there are problems where - all the knowledge of - AI don't help. Problems where letting AI do the work for you means putting more time and effort than doing yourself. Problems where you need to be so precise in your prompt/spec that at that point you're coding in English. But English don't compile. I like the idea of power tools vs hand tools. AI is a power tool, but that are times that the most pragmatic approach is using a hand tool.
• CamperBob2 19d ago
  https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2098443262214230095 https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2098443262214230095 for convenience
• RunSet 19d ago
  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 https://web.archive.org/web/20081003111457/http://www.linuxg... [1] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1308069857913720832 https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1308069857913720832 [2] https://80.lv/articles/john-carmack-s-agi-startup-keen-technologies-raises-usd20-milllion https://80.lv/articles/john-carmack-s-agi-startup-keen-techn...
  • the_interloper 19d ago
    1st link is broken
    • RunSet 19d ago
      https://web.archive.org/web/20081003111457/http://www.linuxgames.com/archives/9374 https://web.archive.org/web/20081003111457/http://www.linuxg...
  • tclancy 19d ago
    I have a new theory as of this moment. Elon Musk, Paul Graham, Steve Yegge and now, sadly John Carmack. Your average hacker scoffs at the idea of religion or faith, but somehow is comfortable with complete unquestioning fealty to whichever person who did something interesting with technology in the past and made enough money to afford drugs you don’t get arrested for and then they started prophesying. Before you stone me, remember every prophet was downvoted in their own forum.
    • zulux 19d ago
      The nice thing about religious faith is that most minds can hold only one at a time. I may believe in an oddly resurrected deity who took the shape of a man, but I don't have room for anything crazier. "We are fools for Christ's sake." 1 Corinthians 4:10
• cadamsdotcom 19d ago
  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.
• rramadass 19d ago
  Resubmission of I recently went through a translation of Musashi's Book of Five Rings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660833 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660833 (1 comment)
• xyzsparetimexyz 19d ago
  '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.
  • acestus5 19d ago
    the point of AI hype is to increase shareholder value.
  • fooker 19d ago
    This is like saying there's nothing to learn about programming, you're just telling a computer what to do. :) It's partly true, but where this logic gets stuck is software engineering, for both the cases. Just telling the AI what to do won't get you to good software, especially when you want to use dozens of agents working in parallel, when you have something correctness sensitive, when you want the AI to try and solve a research problem you have a hunch about but not a concrete solution.
    • zem 19d ago
      but the solution, ironically, is not learning more about ai, but learning more about good software engineering, so you can tell when the ai is not doing it
      • fooker 19d ago
        No, software engineering is fundamentally changed because of AI. No amount of digging our heads in the sand is going to undo that. For example, the traditional best practice cycle of "small incremental change, code review, test, commit" is pretty much obsolete now. The way ten collaborating agents can make short work of a complex project is not something that fits in with our existing software engineering wisdom at all. We are still trying to figure out the new science of software engineering. And the best way to get better now is to just figure out what works and what does not for your use case.
        • 19d ago
• ianpenney 19d ago
  Why are we always at war?
  • tclancy 19d ago
    Because someone profits from it. If your man had truly embraced Zen after, y’know, becoming wealthy enough to never need anything, it feels like freedom from want would have come pretty easy. Instead we have to find our examples in poor people after they die. This post brought to you by DraftKings. Reach Nirvana and its five bucks off your next bet on the Bardo!
  • nxobject 19d ago
    It's funny, but to relax I was reading Tim Berners-Lee's FAQ for kids. He has a section about "I'm interested in Math -- what exciting stuff is there we don't do at school?". He quickly sketches out what ideas might get us to Maxwell's Equation, ironically enough. But, what a joy it is to see a person who believes in the public domain, and who we have everything to thank for right now, saying "The main thing is, to have fun." https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids.html https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids.html
  • cm2012 18d ago
    Competition drives innovation
• cortesoft 19d ago
  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.
• nickledave 19d ago
  > In 2022, he left Oculus to work on his AGI startup, Keen Technologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack oh
  • daveguy 18d ago
    Yup. More hype mania from someone with a financial interest in people abdicating their thought to AI.
• vatsachak 19d ago
  Slop posting
• justinator 19d ago
  "don’t be the out of touch Kung Fu master" posts on Twitter
• tkel 19d ago
  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".
  • deleted 19d ago
    [deleted]
  • motionlessveloc 19d ago
    In Musashi's era, meaning the late 1500s, kendo (sword fighting) was absolutely about being as "productive" (read: lethal) as possible. As it happens, this was also the era when firearms had just been introduced to Japan. In 1575 Oda Nobunaga demolished the Takeda cavalry at the Battle of Nagashino, marking the first time firearms had been used at scale in Japanese combat, and in 1600 Musashi participated in the decisive Battle of Sekigahara where both sides used them extensively.
    • LarsDu88 19d ago
      The end of the Sengoku Jidai was triggered by a warlord (Nobunaga) who equipped his armies with massed ashigaru levies armed with long spears and tanegashima arquebuses. It was absolutely a technological brawl where the valiant highly trained cavalry of warlord's like Takeda Shingen got mowed down by the bullets of musketeers stationed behind well prepared and covered firing positions. If it was still going on today, the warlords would be adopting drone warfare and vibecoded 3d printed cruise missiles.
      • dragontamer 18d ago
        Everyone in Sengoku Era Japan had access and knowledge of guns and cannons. The key for Nobunaga is "Ashigaru". Nobunaga gave the guns to the peasants. That also means that Nobunaga mass produced the guns to a level that no one else was doing. Yes it was a technological brawl, but inadvertently it was one that worked with and uplifted the Ashigaru into a real combat force.
• m3kw9 19d ago
  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.
• sriram_malhar 19d ago
  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.
  • jansport123 19d ago
    Right, I weirdly feel like we are entering an era where industry doesn’t invest that much in training the next generation - it feels like a rich getting richer scenario in all aspects of society
    • nxobject 19d ago
      I think mathematics is feeling that concern with training acutely. The average math department pays its way by teaching in all forms and all levels: they don’t bring in the magnitude of grant money that concretely impacts a university’s budget. But they are already dealing with the consequences of that - that’s why universities that are cutting due to “low student demand” are going after math programs.
  • Razengan 19d ago
    > I worry about the world that we will be living in when a whole generation has skipped learning the basics the hard way. Have you been schooled in farming? Raising livestock? Milking cattle? Does your ability to cook good food depend upon your ability to till soil and sow seeds? I don't mean that in ass way but re: what other comments said: > it feels like a rich getting richer scenario in all aspects of society That's a problem with society, not technology. Holding back technology won't fix society.
    • sriram_malhar 19d ago
      > Have you been schooled in farming? Raising livestock? Milking cattle? Does your ability to cook good food ... Pushing that analogy, AI is the equivalent of automating everything from tilling, growing, all the way to cooking. It is as if the human is involved at the beginning in specifying what they want, and at the end, in plating up the food and consuming the product. The next generation will have no clue about the entire farm-to-table chain. It's not there yet, but rapidly making it a reality. Also, there is no one "tech". Different pieces of technology have different levels of effect on the world, and different timelines in which the world can come to terms with it. AI is the thermonuclear weapon introduced to a musket world ... it came upon us suddenly, and instantly flattened the talent/merit based economy. Now everyone has access to the same exoskeleton; the difference between muscles is not important. The second huge difference between AI (and ordinary tech) is that a literal handful of people are in control of its economics. That kind of power breeds fascism. > That's a problem with society, not technology. Semantics. The tech directly enables the incredible power imbalance, and helps seize the means of consensus and debate and reporting. There is no incentive/mechanism left to fix society. An advanced society like the US is weaponized against vaccines, and social media and AI are to blame.
• acedTrex 19d ago
  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.
• thih9 19d ago
  > WorldEnder > Its just that, it used to be free. All I needed was a computer. https://xcancel.com/rustishard/status/2098853622263976328#m https://xcancel.com/rustishard/status/2098853622263976328#m Same 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.
  • soundworlds 19d ago
    Check out DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, just released, and I am enjoying it more than Claude. No one can run it locally.. Yet.. But give it a few years and I wouldn't be surprised if models of that capability were standard for programming laptops.
    • thih9 19d ago
      We don't know the training set so it's still not very transparent - and means giving away some control. Then again, it does look better than closed weights
• threethirtytwo 19d ago
  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".
  • yallpendantools 19d ago
    I've been doing martial arts for more than 20 years, some in TMA, some in modern boxing/kickboxing. I have yet to meet an "out of touch Kung Fu master" in person. Nobody thinks they can clear the bar or win in a ruleset they haven't trained for. I mean I don't deny Frank Dux, George Dilman, and the DUST guy exist, nor do I support their claims. It's just that they are larger-than-life personalities to start with and I haven't met them in person. Similarly, most of the programmers skeptical about AI---me included---don't really do so out of a threat to a domain we've mastered. The problem is, models, to this day, need supervision so they understand requirements, so they know where to properly look for prior art, so that they "understand" the existing architecture. That includes you, Claude. Our kung fu has been six months away from obsolescence since roundabouts 2022 and in 2026 they even rehired a bunch of out-of-touch kung fu masters.
    • cindyllm 19d ago
      [dead]
    • hermitcrab 18d ago
      >It's just that they are larger-than-life personalities That is a very generous assessment of Frank Dux and George Dillman. Dillman at least started off as the real deal. Dux was a total fantasist. I still find it hard to believe any bought into his 'blood sport' story, let alone made a film about it.
    • threethirtytwo 18d ago
      People who are out of touch don’t know they are out of touch. Thats why you haven’t met one. Because they all declare themselves as relevant. And this is also why you can’t recognize yourself as out of touch. How do you recognize someone who isn’t lying to themselves? It’s hard. There’s no definitive answer but lies people tell themselves tend to be rosy and comforting. When someone tells you their own identity has been eviscrerated by AI that’s not a comforting lie. It’s more than likely a practical analysis.
• yallpendantools 19d ago
  > 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.
  • rramadass 19d ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49668392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49668392
• tsylba 19d ago
  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.
  • andrekandre 16d ago
    > We're souless automatons feeding a machine god. whats the machine, capitalism?
• codemog 19d ago
  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.
• mycocola 19d ago
  His analogy might be accidentally appropriate given MMA-fighters propensity to develop CTE.
  • orthogonal-wren 19d ago
    Common table expression?
    • fragmede 19d ago
      > Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a progressive degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head injuries and hits to the head.
    • deleted 18d ago
      [deleted]
• sublinear 19d ago
  So, don't be John Carmack. Got it.
• acyou 19d ago
  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?
• evolve-maz 19d ago
  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.
  • Krei-se 19d ago
    I think they are lying to themselves. The patterns change with the hardware and environment, i sure code different and use other data structures when having to account for VRAM now, network security, etc. Going from the specification to the code is not a one way street. You adapt the whole chain. Saying the only thing that matters is the spec is squinting your eyes and hoping for the best. You stop learning how things actually end up in memory, compute, storage and network this way. Not sure how you can build a secure and fast spec then. And even if you do know i never understand why not typing it out. You can use a lib if you don't want to worry about these details or know you are not skilled enough (tls f.e. ...). But having AI do it introduces uncertainty where there can be determinism. I think it's just laziness and people not liking the pain of learning or needing to show off whatever first. Who knows. Still don't see a reason to use these tools outside of learning or whatever i used a google search for before.
  • GMoromisato 18d ago
    I'm one of (if not the) original architecture astronaut, so you may not want to listen to me, but you're sliding from "architecture astronauts are bad" (true) to "architecture doesn't matter" (false). Arguably, architecture is the only thing that ever mattered. Below the level of architecture you're dealing either with algorithms or API calls. Algorithms can be validated by tests and API calls can be validated by tests and the type system. But architecture is the one thing that could make or break a project and that you can't test for ahead of time. You either know how to create a good architecture or you don't. In fact, the whole point of the Spolsky's Architecture Astronauts' essay is that bad architecture (and bad architects) are a big problem. AI works amazingly well below the level of architecture, but (I've found) it's not very good at architecture.
• jimbob45 19d ago
  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.
• PostOnce 19d ago
  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.
  • skrebbel 19d ago
    > because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite Wow that resonated by a scary amount.
    • philjackson 19d ago
      Can you elaborate on this with real-world examples you've experienced?
      • N_Lens 19d ago
        AI amplifies existing process. For people without sufficient clarity I imagine it amplifies that lack of clarity, which is where it is factually unproductive while it still ‘seems’ to be productive (producing slop). At the end of the day, LLMs are still tools.
        • skydhash 19d ago
          > For people without sufficient clarity I imagine it amplifies that lack of clarity, which is where it is factually unproductive while it still ‘seem’ to be productive Convenient way of saying "you're holding it wrong".
          • owebmaster 19d ago
            Then when asked for examples of what they built using AI, what they have to show is boring slop worse than "git cloning" a mature project.
• DavCreator 19d ago
  https://xxcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2098443262214230095 https://xxcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/209844326221423009...
  • historyrepeatin 18d ago
    [dead]
• einpoklum 19d ago
  So, more people are excited for the vision of Idiocracy to be fully realized.
• hugodan 19d ago
  Don’t tell me what to do
• maplethorpe 19d ago
  > 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."
  • ozim 19d ago
    I would say analogy is still apt. When you look at King Fu master as a software dev who refuses to use AI and MMA fighter as a dev who embraces AI. Vibe coders who know nothing about software development are untrained rubes who got mechanical arm that thinks for itself, they can maul MMA fighter, they can maul Kung Fu master but at the same time arm might just rip off their own face.
  • stavros 19d ago
    But he said amateur.
  • hermitcrab 18d ago
    Some context. Many styles of Kung Fu/Gung Fu do not spar in any meaningful sense. Consequently, they have an overinflated opinion of their own ability and generally do very badly against MMA fighters (who do lots of sparring and pressure testing). There are lots of videos on Youtube of Kung Fu 'masters' getting battered by relatively inexperienced MMA fighters. This was sufficiently embarrassing for Chinese martial arts that they created a sport oriented form called Sanda. I once saw an early black and white film of 2 Chinese Kung Fu masters fighting in a ring. Some sort of grudge match I think. It was embarrassing. You would see better technique outside a Wetherspoons pub at 2am.
• phmx 19d ago
  Also, don’t be the one who fights sharp swords with Marvin Minsky’s useless boxes.
• alexpotato 19d ago
  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_Do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeet_Kune_Do 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Lee
  • latexr 19d ago
    This is reductive to the level of the people misusing the Douglas Adams quote, with a sprinkle of false dichotomy. Fear and embrace aren’t the only options, and neither camp is entirely positive or negative. There is plenty of middle ground which should be exercised. If anything, the reason we’re living in an increasingly shitty shit show shower is that too many people are too eager to selfishly embrace too much, with complete disregard for others or long term outcomes.
  • dingaling 19d ago
    "as it highlights how humans have essentially two reactions to change" I'd wager that the most common reaction to change is actually "wearily accept it as there is no realistic option". Most change is deleterious to those affected; it requires them to change how they live or work, or pay more, just to maintain the status quo. This sort of change is usually imposed by large organisations against which the individual is helpless. When people are faced with that sort of change it's little wonder they complain about it, but eventually they have to submit to it or face a degredation in their life or work. Then those who imposed the change roll their eyes and say "ugh, people are so afraid of change," being insulated from and benefitting from it. The next time you receive a ToS update from your $FAVORITEVENDOR that negatively affects how you do something, or a new tax filing requirement from $GOV that takes up more of your personal time, do come on here and post about how you embraced the change.
• latexr 19d ago
  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.
• jdw64 19d ago
  I also code as a hobby. It seems like a pretty good thing to have as a hobby.
• Krei-se 19d ago
  He and others can host their brain in the cloud for all i care.
• Applejinx 19d ago
  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.
• hermitcrab 19d ago
  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 tools Really 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.
  • ghthor 19d ago
    My suggestion would be just to try it. Get an openrouter account, add 50$ to it and setup pi agent to use it with a cheap and fast model; I personally use 5.6-Luna. Run it on a throwaway system, pick a codebase you’ve always wanted to fix something about but didn’t have the time. Like you wanted to do a major refactoring or do a library migration to a better maintained library. Or you want to rewrite part of a program in rust for performance/security improvements. The hardest part for me is sometimes it is hard to write what I want in a prompt; but you don’t have to put everything into the prompt, you can make a code edit as an example and then say; look at this diff, it is doing X; look for and apply this some transformation across codebase Y If you have a good codebase, AI will have good patterns to follow and will produce pretty good code; and you can quickly iterate on the results (maybe over new context windows) and get high quality code that looks very close, if not indistinguishable from the pre-existing code.
    • heaney-555 19d ago
      >use it with a cheap and fast model Also try it with a frontier model though. With $20 for a one-month sub you can get a decent amount of GPT-6 Astra usage.
    • hermitcrab 18d ago
• tugback 19d ago
  Definitely felt like that stubbornly avoiding TypeScript for too long. My projects eventually forced me to adapt or be left behind.
• tobin1994 19d ago
  [dead]
• jmull 19d ago
  > 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.
  • heaney-555 19d ago
    Within a company it's collaborative. Between companies it's absolutely competitive.
    • jmull 18d ago
      Open source is collaborative, and isn't exactly a niche thing, even at commercial companies.
      • heaney-555 18d ago
        Again, within the project sure. But there is fierce competition between different open-source projects!
• fwlr 19d ago
  I assume he’s referring to videos like this? https://youtu.be/gEDaCIDvj6I https://youtu.be/gEDaCIDvj6I If 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.
• wat10000 19d ago
  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.
  • sseagull 19d ago
    It does say something about our culture, doesn't it? That something as mundane and non-violent as computer programming gets compared with violent combat. I suppose it comes down to how hyper-competitive some people are, particularly the "greats", that working on software is in the same category as fisticuffs.
    • andrekandre 16d ago
      > something as mundane and non-violent as computer programming gets compared with violent combat ever worked at s large corporation?
• venvio 19d ago
  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.
  • andrekandre 16d ago
    > obsession over quantity and speed over everything else i think this is a problem larger than just programming; we see it everywhere in western(ish) culture more and more ime....
    • venvio 16d ago
      Andre, I agree with you wholeheartedly; I was just talking with one of my friends yesterday about this. I don't think AI is causing most of the problems we are discussing, it is simply exacerbating them to such a degree that they are hard to ignore.
      • andrekandre 16d ago
        thanks for the thoughtful reply ^^ yes, regardless how one feels about "ai", its obvious to me its basically gasoline being dumped on this "faster and more" culture we are all suffering from...
• neilv 19d ago
  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.
• awr-asjkt 18d ago
  Shut up and show us the code, Carmack! Now that you take AI money, you are a hollow influencer. BTW, for you it would have been pretty bad if coding had been solved in the Quake-3 era. Quake-3 was technically sound but had excruciatingly boring and bland gameplay. Fortunately, coding has not been solved.
• jasonmp85 18d ago
  [dead]
• pipeline_peak 18d ago
  Why is Carmack still someone we look up to in the present? I'm aware of what he did in the past but compared to the likes of Torvalds and Bellard he doesn't seem to still be doing anything noteworthy other than yet another AI company.
• InstantIndian 18d ago
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  • cindyllm 18d ago
    [dead]
• uncomputation 18d ago
  Really embarrassing to see Carmack fall so low and have such little respect for the art of programming he once advanced. Unlike swords and martial arts in combat, code is still needed. It’s not like there’s some new medium that doesn’t use code at all. It’s just a question of who is writing that code: a human or a statistical model. Guns superseded swords, cars superseded horses, but coding agents haven’t superseded code itself. A better analogy would be if, instead of guns, we ended up using advanced kung-fu fighting robots. Which would actually be sick…
  • sitzkrieg 18d ago
    how the mighty have fallen. maybe he finally got tired of it with the years but never realized it
  • archagon 18d ago
    Whatever his technical chops may be, Carmack has slid fully and comfortably into the role of “influencer” over the last decade.
• torlok 18d ago
  Would love to see Carmack create a product with AI, instead of stealth promoting his shovel company on the worst website on the internet.
• IronyMan1 18d ago
  I like ai, with IT i can Program again, after being Out of Touch with it for some years. I can Focus in the Thing i actually want to do instead of setting Up 5 different ENVs only to find out that the Framework only works with an Intel processor
• brcmthrowaway 18d ago
  > Musashi would probably have been pretty enthusiastic about assault rifles. Cringed.
• tripzilch 18d ago
  > The retro computing scene is delightful that was truly, deeply, unnecessarily condescending of him. it's so full of self-importance, even if he truly believes that whatever code he's writing is more important than anything else, it's really an unnecessary dig especially coming from some guy who by many people is mostly known for his accomplishments in an era that many people would call retro computing now sure I know this guy is almost literally the definition of the 10x programmer and he can choose to work on whatever he wants, so whatever he decided to work on is probably the most important thing to him, and if that's VR, that's ... also a choice. doesn't mean he should be this condescending about what other people are doing
  • usef- 18d ago
    You're reading something into that line that I don't see. I read it as sincere.
• darepublic 18d ago
  There is a purely strategic reason for keeping some hand code skills exercised. If you outsource the coding away completely you become dependent on entities that can pull the plug on you. Not arguing it's the right choice to rein in the agentic coding just that there is some rationale for doing so