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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 producti

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 21d ago
> because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite Wow that resonated by a scary amount.
- philjackson 21d ago
  Can you elaborate on this with real-world examples you've experienced?
  - N_Lens 21d 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 21d 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 21d 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.
        Daishiman 20d ago
        People who build good software with AI don't gloat about it being built with AI because it's not the most relevant part of it.
      - N_Lens 21d ago
        Yes, that's what I'm saying.
        mohamedkoubaa 20d ago
        I get flamed here whenever I say it's a skill issue, but it absolutely is. Not everyone has what it takes to be a successful CTO but that's the role you play if have 20 agents working on something you designed. I see you got downvoted too.
        skydhash 20d ago
        It would be a skill issue if someone would show they’re able to use it to produce good software while showcasing that it’s due to their mastery. Till this day, I don’t think there’s any such demonstration. Any defects of the technology is always blamed on skill issue.
        Daishiman 20d ago
        There's a ton of people out there in various unknown companies grinding away and managing a reasonable number of well-prompted, parallel agents with decent CI and deployment strategy making judicious use of human review. But that's boring and you can't build a YouTube audience around it.
        mohamedkoubaa 20d ago
        People who produce good software don't feel the need to show off how modern and agentic they are.
        owebmaster 20d ago
        We don't want them to show off, just make public software we can pay and use. What's yours?
    - anonzzzies 21d ago
      Yeah, that gives me the scary feeling that especially here people are overvalueing themselves by a lot. They find AI counterproductive because they simply never were good at what they do before AI. This is always always my read of people who value talking, meetings and office time as important: I have never met people who have that and who are not sales or just plain suck at their job; AI amplifies that. Also with salespeople who now send me presentations that just have a bucket loads of hallucinations in them: turns out they never read them but had interns write most of them: now they still cannot read and AI generated stuff looks plausible. I only have anecdotal experiences but this sure seems to resonate for the AI negativity around here. I could be wrong but it's so far removed from our experiences. LLMs are just tools indeed.
      - shjshshshs 21d ago
        You don’t value “talk”? I understand. I have a lot of those around me and they are super productive, all day, alone, in their little cubicles. Oblivious to everything around them. I don’t know what to say to those types anymore. Live and let live I guess.. or in this case, not live I suppose.
        anonzzzies 21d ago
        It usually is more like; I send an email or so which contains enough details to understand whatever we are doing. A person in that list sends it to 20 people. The next email is a zoom invite with 30 people of 1.5 hours to ‘go over the email together’. If these people have no influence, good or bad over the outcome, why would I waste this time while it usually just says they were too lazy or incompetent to read the email? Useful talk and meetings all day is fine, but these are just to write busy/billable hours for all these useless folk with no value for the project. And socially I like listening and talking, just not for this.
  - Yoric 21d ago
    Not GP, but I can. I'm currently working on porting a mid-sized project to a new architecture, new programming language and of course adding new features. Getting a new feature implemented is quite easy. You spend a few hours brainstorming specs with the agent, then ask it to implement it. This gives you extremely frequent code drops that add a new brick, add a new feature, etc. All of this with 100% code coverage (we also have mutation testing, strongly-typed code, standard and custom linters, etc.) Then you look at the code. Code that has passed review, generally. You realize that the database schema has been broken silently, and that the agent has rewritten the tests or the golden fixtures to match. You realize that it has made assumptions that contradict the specifications and the product is going to break once it's in the hand of users. You realize that the 100% code coverage is essentially a convenient lie, because the code and tests have been written to make passing easy. You realize that none of the security golden rules have been followed, and that has managed to happen because the agent has somehow deactivated linting. Why did it pass reviews? Well, because of deadlines. And because there is simply so much code (and so much unparsable/misleading documentation) that it's simply impossible to review all of this. And because things move so fast that nobody understands the CI pipeline anymore, and the explanations of the agent are convincing enough that surely, it knows better than you? On the upside, bugfixing becomes so fast! Just add a new test, wait a few dozen minutes, and a new Merge Request appears. With equally convincing/misleading explanations, and something else broken. After ~4 months, we had a bare bones deliverable, which we're now steadily expanding. If we had had to write the product manually, I suspect that it would have taken us at least one year, possibly two. So, that's the productivity increase. The productivity decrease is that what we have is not a product but a glorified demo, something that will work very nicely on the happy path, but on any other path, all bets are off.
    - 0xEF 21d ago
      This is the interesting bit > "Why did it pass reviews? Well, because of deadlines. And because there is simply so much code (and so much unparsable/misleading documentation) that it's simply impossible to review all of this. And because things move so fast that nobody understands the CI pipeline anymore, and the explanations of the agent are convincing enough that surely, it knows better than you?" I have come to realize that AI is so "successful" because the system in which it is being deployed was designed to push product as fast and cheaply as possible from the start. Humans are usually overworked and stretched to their breaking point, which I originally saw as the source of our broken software woes, which, like our streets in the US, just get a new layer of asphalt to cover up the crumbling bits each year instead of rebuilding the infrastructure with reliability and longevity in mind. My former employer was using both Claude and Codex for firmware that was driving an over-burdened power circuit that itself was partially designed with ChatGPT. All of the individuals involved approach LLMs with god-fearing reverance because they do not understand _how_ the LLM works, just that it _does_ in a "good enough" way and they can offload their thinking, which is something we all wish we could do because thinking is hard, time-consuming and costly. I get it. But like you mentioned, tests were being passed, not because the code was sound, but because the tests were altered to match the results. This is not necessarily the fault of the agent, either; it's just interpretting the prompt(s) - written by a flawed human, btw - with stochastic mechinations that seem to make a great deal of sense on the surface, but remain unable to be followed or repeated by the brains of (most of) its users. As a rresult, I had to deal with product that work great in the field...at least at first, before it start literally catching fire, ruining its own powertrain because everything the agents touched became too complex with too many subtle cracks in the veneer to review properly. The system (read; capitalism) demanded viable product quickly to please investors, and the burnt-out humans who decided to try this AI thing ended up trusting it nearly completely, so any ideas of repeatable and complete testing, diagnostics and root cause failure analysis morphed into a sloppy "it works on the bench" checklist before being sold to a customer who had come to trust that their deceptively simple product would just work as advertised. I'm going to die on the hill that AI as a replacement for our brains is precisely how we will make ourselves go extict, but I am old enough to already be regarded as a crufty dinosaur who is stuck in his ways, and I'm made peace with all of that. What I can't get my head around is watching people use this awesome tool (and it is, admittedly, awesome) to literally just speed up all the mistakes they were already making. Perhaps it is because I am aging, but slowing down and having a think seems more valuable to me now than it ever has, especially when creating something new. AI is powerful and, like any good tool, could be useful in the right hands, but more often than not I see it being used as an accelerant for all the worst parts of product development to appease a market that has suddenly been told they can now pick all three points on the Iron Triangle instead of just two. This makes about as much sense to me as taking a laxitive when you already are suffering diarrhea.
- anonzzzies 21d ago
  Again I don't get what people on HN are doing? Our client wants something: I mumble in my phone what they want, with some spec docs we had / made by mumbling in our phones: a working system comes out, we test it with our client, we fix. We sign a SLA, get paid 100k, a few weeks have passed. I mean, we should not measure everything in money, but for lack of a better measure for productivity, I cannot see how anyone finds it counterproductive. This was strictly impossible for our small team before recent AI and hiring more people didn't work for the pricing. Our profits jumped, revenue jumped, client count jumped. What are people here doing exactly that they are not riding the gravy train and even reporting all these negative AI experiences? We do spend all our time either code reviewing or talking with clients but the latter was already the case and the former was just better spaced out over time as this would before take many months.
  - csallen 21d ago
    Don't underestimate the power of motivated reasoning. Certain people don't like AI coding for various ideological reasons, and so they will, not coincidentally, consistently fail to find it productive or helpful.
    - lucianbr 21d ago
      As long as we don't underestimate the power of motivated reasoning for other certain people as well, who like AI coding for various ideological or financial reasons.
      - csallen 20d ago
        That's why I don't believe most AI hate I read on HN and I don't believe much AI hype I read on X.
  - sandworm101 21d ago
    Ya, AI is very good at generating number, be that code for software, images for ads, or banal prose for company blogs. AI not so good at growing corn, cooking eggs, biulding houses, running fiber, treating disease, changing brake pads, loading a truck... or any of the other millions of physical-world jobs on which the economy is biult. If you company is all about creating things that go on the internet, sure, AI is your thing. But for most companies the internet is a communications tool rather than a product. Those companies are not seeing the claimed productivity gains.
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hypfer 21d ago
I mean his post boils down to "Get on the bandwagon because you might otherwise miss out. All the cool kids do AI now." There are valid concerns there (and you should probably be playing around with LLMs), but he voiced none of them. He just led with a metaphor about obsolescence and then continued spreading FOMO with an authoritative voice.
- cheschire 21d ago
  Perhaps he is actually lamenting being the out of touch kung fu master, but his pride won't allow him to articulate the ways in which he identifies with that?
- simianparrot 21d ago
  He also runs an AI company now called Keen something. So he’s yet another biased hypester at this point.
alexashka 21d ago
Sure, among all these other people doing 'incredible work' for 30+ years publicly, well into their 50s, John Carmack sure is a disappointment by comparison.
- lowkeyokay 21d ago
  I sense sarcasm. But I think you misinterpreted the parent’s point. I read it as: yes, Carmack has made huge contributions but, has not publicly released anything noteworthy since the advent of AI coding. Of course that doesn’t mean he won’t, just that so far nothing he released has backed up his statement.
  - alexashka 21d ago
    Can you imagine a football fan going up to Ronaldo and saying hey, I saw an interview you did last week - I think you may be lost in the weeds there with your training regimen and outlook. I want to let you know - I remain a skeptic. I mean, when you start scoring goals like you did 5 years ago Ronaldo, but until then, I remain a skeptic about that training regimen. As for misinterpreting - maybe you're misinterpreting. Or maybe it's unproductive and dare I say presumptuous to reply to people you know nothing about with 'you're probably wrong and I'm probably right'. Do you do that in real life? Working out great, I can only assume given you've adopted a similar approach here, or?
    - owebmaster 21d ago
      Did Ronaldo say he's never been a better football player?
    - JackMorgan 21d ago
      Do you believe a 50 year old software engineer is mentally no longer able to work? Should they be forced to sit back and tell stories of the good old days because their knees are blown out? Do you believe that one of the greatest living programmers is so washed up at 50 that _even with the greatest LLM tools_ cannot ship something publicly in four years to back up his claims?
embedding-shape 21d ago
Would a person who is lost in the weeds come up with such excellent though-formulations like this? > Musashi would probably have been pretty enthusiastic about assault rifles. Musashi famously "retired to a cave, Reigandō, living as a hermit to write The Book of Five Rings" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyamoto_Musashi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyamoto_Musashi), for those not in the know. Edit: Had to re-read a bunch of stuff about Musashi, and to Carmack's credit, seems to have been a relatively pragmatic guy when it comes to the choice of weapons in a battle, talking both about the benefits and drawbacks of firearms (although they were slightly different ones than we have today)
- nxobject 21d ago
  I’d be pretty relieved, too, if I thought the scope of AI’s impact could be described by just an assault rifle.
- latexr 21d ago
  “Fun” fact: Even the creator of one of the most widely recognised and used assault riffles wasn’t enthusiastic about it by the end. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/13/262096410/letter-kalashnikov-suffered-remorse-over-rifle-he-invented https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/13/262096410...
epolanski 21d ago
I can achieve more with AI than without. What's the complain exactly? That AI still hasn't made my effort and thinking and directing and checking and ideas completely redundant and thus out of job? It's like you people see everything in black and white and miss that most of the real world is a gradient of shades of grey and quite never full black or white.
- latexr 21d ago
  > It's like you people see everything in black and white and miss that most of the real world is a gradient of shades of grey and quite never full black or white. I’d go even further. Shades of grey implies two extremes on a linear scale, but the world has colour, meaning wildly different interpretations that go in novel directions. However, ironically, your comment reads to me as extremely black and white—full of certainty, rigidity, possibly some bad faith interpretation and straw manning—while the one you’re criticising has (some) nuance and doubt and seems open to the idea of being wrong.
- owebmaster 21d ago
  > What's the complain exactly? What complain? OP asked a question. Carmack created Doom, Quake in 2, 3 years. What has he created in 4 years of AI? Should be exceptional if one of the most productive programmers ever says it makes him more productive. What does he have to show?
  - suby 21d ago
    You're comparing the challenge of building game engines in the 90's with the more open-ended AGI research. It's different enough that I don't think it's valid to conclude he's less productive now based on impact over time.
  - skydhash 21d ago
    That reminds me of something on my last job. Before AI, we had not so good communication, but if we had a question, the person on the other end will try to give you a passable answer. After AI, everyone seems to be a proxy for the LLM tools they're using and any misleading statement you point out is answered by "Why don't you use $llm_tool to check it out?".
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delusional 21d ago
> Carmack hasn't produced anything noteworthy since AI was invented, therefore, how productive can it really be? He's been spinning his wheels for a while. Carmack is a great example of how important working on the right stuff is. He's undoubtedly a brilliant programmer. Through him we get to see that a brilliant programmer working on non-programming tasks, can produce nothing.
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wiseowise 20d ago
As opposed to producing great things without AI? He hasn’t produced anything impressive since 90s/early 00s.
tomrod 20d ago
I'm a practical optimist. I see us as being in the age of engineering for AI -- like the early days of the steam engine. We're going to get a ton of things wrong and impractically implemented. But we don't anticipate the train conductor to build the steam engine on their train -- we just expect it to work as targeted. (Note I'm not being pollyannish here -- a lot of codegen downright sucks).
pibaker 20d ago
What had he produced in the years prior to AI getting good enough for coding? All I know is he was on Zuckerberg's sinking metaverse boat for years, and then nothing else. Maybe it's him, maybe it's his employer. I don't know. I am skeptical of AI's impact on work myself but I just don't think AI is the only thing to blame here.
- napo 20d ago
  Oculus was pretty fun and a really nice piece of hardware. What was painful was all the meta things on top of it, which I doubt was something he personally added.
  - throwaway63467 20d ago
    But he didn’t build the Oculus did he? Not sure what he worked on, software?
- jeltz 20d ago
  But as he has little to show the last decades we have very little reason to listen to him over some random blogger.
phendrenad2 20d ago
Actually, I'd expect someone like Carmack to be the least productive with AI. Carmack focused his career on high-performance 3d graphics tricks. Those are free now. What isn't free is knowing how to use them. In other words, the game engine is free, the game maps/zones/levels are costly. The "John Romero" part of the equation. Let's see what the idea people are making, not the code gurus.
neuroticnews25 20d ago
This comment frames it like he's a known vibecoder, is he?
Ekami 20d ago
Well said, Kung fu master
dartharva 20d ago
I mean.. I'd bet he has certainly made a lot more money since AI arrived than he did before
DiskoHexyl 20d ago
Carmack hasn't produced anything genuinely noteworthy after leaving id software, if we are being frank. His work at Armadillo aerospace was more akin to hobby, not really leading anywhere, a VR stint at facebook, again, is difficult to gauge at how large his personal contribution was, and this new AI thing is likely end with him leaving the company, again. Carmack is an amazing engineer, a genius even, but either the age of the individual contributor creating the entire thing from the ground up is over, and he's bored of it, trying to find a niche where this still works, or he is exploring the areas in which to apply his curiosity. What I'm saying is that his current productivity or lack of thereof isn't a marker of how AI is productive (or not) in general
masfoobar 19d ago
Its very different living in the late 80s to early 90s coming up with cool ideas that push affordable hardware to their limits just like John Carmack did with games like Keen, Wolf3d, Doom and Quake. It was at an era where someone good at their craft can get the recognition they deserve. However, while some things he managed to figure out himself.. other things were ideas from others. He simply tried it and reviewed the results! Looking in the games industry today - an 'individual' is not going to get the same recognition like John Carmack back in the day (or Ken Silverman, etc) This industry is LARGE. Any god-like programmer trying things within a large corporation is not likely to get noticed today as they hide away in the background pushing an in-house games engine forward. I am sure there are a fair number of John Carmacks out there. Invisible... nameless legends pushing things, etc. As for indie companies - why risk trying to be a 2026 version of John Carmack when Godot, Unreal, etc, exists. Its a different world today! Same thing for AI. I bet there have been some legendary programmers working on AI in the last 10 years. Again, nameless individuals behind the brand. If any names are mentioned... its likely CEO's or other higher ups... not the talent underneath. I guess thats good business strategy and works [for the business]. Focusing on John Carmack - I am not taking anything away from him. He is a legend. I am sure he contributed towards VR before and after Meta purchase. With AI.. I guess we will see. At the end of the day the guy could walk away and focus on hobbies. Still has a lot of batteries left. More power to him.

skrebbel 21d ago

> because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite Wow that resonated by a scary amount.

philjackson 21d ago
Can you elaborate on this with real-world examples you've experienced?
- N_Lens 21d 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 21d 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 21d 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.
      - Daishiman 20d ago
        People who build good software with AI don't gloat about it being built with AI because it's not the most relevant part of it.
    - N_Lens 21d ago
      Yes, that's what I'm saying.
      - mohamedkoubaa 20d ago
        I get flamed here whenever I say it's a skill issue, but it absolutely is. Not everyone has what it takes to be a successful CTO but that's the role you play if have 20 agents working on something you designed. I see you got downvoted too.
        skydhash 20d ago
        It would be a skill issue if someone would show they’re able to use it to produce good software while showcasing that it’s due to their mastery. Till this day, I don’t think there’s any such demonstration. Any defects of the technology is always blamed on skill issue.
        Daishiman 20d ago
        There's a ton of people out there in various unknown companies grinding away and managing a reasonable number of well-prompted, parallel agents with decent CI and deployment strategy making judicious use of human review. But that's boring and you can't build a YouTube audience around it.
        mohamedkoubaa 20d ago
        People who produce good software don't feel the need to show off how modern and agentic they are.
        owebmaster 20d ago
        We don't want them to show off, just make public software we can pay and use. What's yours?
  - anonzzzies 21d ago
    Yeah, that gives me the scary feeling that especially here people are overvalueing themselves by a lot. They find AI counterproductive because they simply never were good at what they do before AI. This is always always my read of people who value talking, meetings and office time as important: I have never met people who have that and who are not sales or just plain suck at their job; AI amplifies that. Also with salespeople who now send me presentations that just have a bucket loads of hallucinations in them: turns out they never read them but had interns write most of them: now they still cannot read and AI generated stuff looks plausible. I only have anecdotal experiences but this sure seems to resonate for the AI negativity around here. I could be wrong but it's so far removed from our experiences. LLMs are just tools indeed.
    - shjshshshs 21d ago
      You don’t value “talk”? I understand. I have a lot of those around me and they are super productive, all day, alone, in their little cubicles. Oblivious to everything around them. I don’t know what to say to those types anymore. Live and let live I guess.. or in this case, not live I suppose.
      - anonzzzies 21d ago
        It usually is more like; I send an email or so which contains enough details to understand whatever we are doing. A person in that list sends it to 20 people. The next email is a zoom invite with 30 people of 1.5 hours to ‘go over the email together’. If these people have no influence, good or bad over the outcome, why would I waste this time while it usually just says they were too lazy or incompetent to read the email? Useful talk and meetings all day is fine, but these are just to write busy/billable hours for all these useless folk with no value for the project. And socially I like listening and talking, just not for this.
- Yoric 21d ago
  Not GP, but I can. I'm currently working on porting a mid-sized project to a new architecture, new programming language and of course adding new features. Getting a new feature implemented is quite easy. You spend a few hours brainstorming specs with the agent, then ask it to implement it. This gives you extremely frequent code drops that add a new brick, add a new feature, etc. All of this with 100% code coverage (we also have mutation testing, strongly-typed code, standard and custom linters, etc.) Then you look at the code. Code that has passed review, generally. You realize that the database schema has been broken silently, and that the agent has rewritten the tests or the golden fixtures to match. You realize that it has made assumptions that contradict the specifications and the product is going to break once it's in the hand of users. You realize that the 100% code coverage is essentially a convenient lie, because the code and tests have been written to make passing easy. You realize that none of the security golden rules have been followed, and that has managed to happen because the agent has somehow deactivated linting. Why did it pass reviews? Well, because of deadlines. And because there is simply so much code (and so much unparsable/misleading documentation) that it's simply impossible to review all of this. And because things move so fast that nobody understands the CI pipeline anymore, and the explanations of the agent are convincing enough that surely, it knows better than you? On the upside, bugfixing becomes so fast! Just add a new test, wait a few dozen minutes, and a new Merge Request appears. With equally convincing/misleading explanations, and something else broken. After ~4 months, we had a bare bones deliverable, which we're now steadily expanding. If we had had to write the product manually, I suspect that it would have taken us at least one year, possibly two. So, that's the productivity increase. The productivity decrease is that what we have is not a product but a glorified demo, something that will work very nicely on the happy path, but on any other path, all bets are off.
  - 0xEF 21d ago
    This is the interesting bit > "Why did it pass reviews? Well, because of deadlines. And because there is simply so much code (and so much unparsable/misleading documentation) that it's simply impossible to review all of this. And because things move so fast that nobody understands the CI pipeline anymore, and the explanations of the agent are convincing enough that surely, it knows better than you?" I have come to realize that AI is so "successful" because the system in which it is being deployed was designed to push product as fast and cheaply as possible from the start. Humans are usually overworked and stretched to their breaking point, which I originally saw as the source of our broken software woes, which, like our streets in the US, just get a new layer of asphalt to cover up the crumbling bits each year instead of rebuilding the infrastructure with reliability and longevity in mind. My former employer was using both Claude and Codex for firmware that was driving an over-burdened power circuit that itself was partially designed with ChatGPT. All of the individuals involved approach LLMs with god-fearing reverance because they do not understand _how_ the LLM works, just that it _does_ in a "good enough" way and they can offload their thinking, which is something we all wish we could do because thinking is hard, time-consuming and costly. I get it. But like you mentioned, tests were being passed, not because the code was sound, but because the tests were altered to match the results. This is not necessarily the fault of the agent, either; it's just interpretting the prompt(s) - written by a flawed human, btw - with stochastic mechinations that seem to make a great deal of sense on the surface, but remain unable to be followed or repeated by the brains of (most of) its users. As a rresult, I had to deal with product that work great in the field...at least at first, before it start literally catching fire, ruining its own powertrain because everything the agents touched became too complex with too many subtle cracks in the veneer to review properly. The system (read; capitalism) demanded viable product quickly to please investors, and the burnt-out humans who decided to try this AI thing ended up trusting it nearly completely, so any ideas of repeatable and complete testing, diagnostics and root cause failure analysis morphed into a sloppy "it works on the bench" checklist before being sold to a customer who had come to trust that their deceptively simple product would just work as advertised. I'm going to die on the hill that AI as a replacement for our brains is precisely how we will make ourselves go extict, but I am old enough to already be regarded as a crufty dinosaur who is stuck in his ways, and I'm made peace with all of that. What I can't get my head around is watching people use this awesome tool (and it is, admittedly, awesome) to literally just speed up all the mistakes they were already making. Perhaps it is because I am aging, but slowing down and having a think seems more valuable to me now than it ever has, especially when creating something new. AI is powerful and, like any good tool, could be useful in the right hands, but more often than not I see it being used as an accelerant for all the worst parts of product development to appease a market that has suddenly been told they can now pick all three points on the Iron Triangle instead of just two. This makes about as much sense to me as taking a laxitive when you already are suffering diarrhea.
anonzzzies 21d ago
Again I don't get what people on HN are doing? Our client wants something: I mumble in my phone what they want, with some spec docs we had / made by mumbling in our phones: a working system comes out, we test it with our client, we fix. We sign a SLA, get paid 100k, a few weeks have passed. I mean, we should not measure everything in money, but for lack of a better measure for productivity, I cannot see how anyone finds it counterproductive. This was strictly impossible for our small team before recent AI and hiring more people didn't work for the pricing. Our profits jumped, revenue jumped, client count jumped. What are people here doing exactly that they are not riding the gravy train and even reporting all these negative AI experiences? We do spend all our time either code reviewing or talking with clients but the latter was already the case and the former was just better spaced out over time as this would before take many months.
- csallen 21d ago
  Don't underestimate the power of motivated reasoning. Certain people don't like AI coding for various ideological reasons, and so they will, not coincidentally, consistently fail to find it productive or helpful.
  - lucianbr 21d ago
    As long as we don't underestimate the power of motivated reasoning for other certain people as well, who like AI coding for various ideological or financial reasons.
    - csallen 20d ago
      That's why I don't believe most AI hate I read on HN and I don't believe much AI hype I read on X.
- sandworm101 21d ago
  Ya, AI is very good at generating number, be that code for software, images for ads, or banal prose for company blogs. AI not so good at growing corn, cooking eggs, biulding houses, running fiber, treating disease, changing brake pads, loading a truck... or any of the other millions of physical-world jobs on which the economy is biult. If you company is all about creating things that go on the internet, sure, AI is your thing. But for most companies the internet is a communications tool rather than a product. Those companies are not seeing the claimed productivity gains.

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hypfer 21d ago

I mean his post boils down to "Get on the bandwagon because you might otherwise miss out. All the cool kids do AI now." There are valid concerns there (and you should probably be playing around with LLMs), but he voiced none of them. He just led with a metaphor about obsolescence and then continued spreading FOMO with an authoritative voice.

cheschire 21d ago
Perhaps he is actually lamenting being the out of touch kung fu master, but his pride won't allow him to articulate the ways in which he identifies with that?
simianparrot 21d ago
He also runs an AI company now called Keen something. So he’s yet another biased hypester at this point.

alexashka 21d ago

Sure, among all these other people doing 'incredible work' for 30+ years publicly, well into their 50s, John Carmack sure is a disappointment by comparison.

lowkeyokay 21d ago
I sense sarcasm. But I think you misinterpreted the parent’s point. I read it as: yes, Carmack has made huge contributions but, has not publicly released anything noteworthy since the advent of AI coding. Of course that doesn’t mean he won’t, just that so far nothing he released has backed up his statement.
- alexashka 21d ago
  Can you imagine a football fan going up to Ronaldo and saying hey, I saw an interview you did last week - I think you may be lost in the weeds there with your training regimen and outlook. I want to let you know - I remain a skeptic. I mean, when you start scoring goals like you did 5 years ago Ronaldo, but until then, I remain a skeptic about that training regimen. As for misinterpreting - maybe you're misinterpreting. Or maybe it's unproductive and dare I say presumptuous to reply to people you know nothing about with 'you're probably wrong and I'm probably right'. Do you do that in real life? Working out great, I can only assume given you've adopted a similar approach here, or?
  - owebmaster 21d ago
    Did Ronaldo say he's never been a better football player?
  - JackMorgan 21d ago
    Do you believe a 50 year old software engineer is mentally no longer able to work? Should they be forced to sit back and tell stories of the good old days because their knees are blown out? Do you believe that one of the greatest living programmers is so washed up at 50 that _even with the greatest LLM tools_ cannot ship something publicly in four years to back up his claims?

embedding-shape 21d ago

Would a person who is lost in the weeds come up with such excellent though-formulations like this? > Musashi would probably have been pretty enthusiastic about assault rifles. Musashi famously "retired to a cave, Reigandō, living as a hermit to write The Book of Five Rings" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyamoto_Musashi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miyamoto_Musashi), for those not in the know. Edit: Had to re-read a bunch of stuff about Musashi, and to Carmack's credit, seems to have been a relatively pragmatic guy when it comes to the choice of weapons in a battle, talking both about the benefits and drawbacks of firearms (although they were slightly different ones than we have today)

nxobject 21d ago
I’d be pretty relieved, too, if I thought the scope of AI’s impact could be described by just an assault rifle.
latexr 21d ago
“Fun” fact: Even the creator of one of the most widely recognised and used assault riffles wasn’t enthusiastic about it by the end. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/13/262096410/letter-kalashnikov-suffered-remorse-over-rifle-he-invented https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/13/262096410...

epolanski 21d ago

I can achieve more with AI than without. What's the complain exactly? That AI still hasn't made my effort and thinking and directing and checking and ideas completely redundant and thus out of job? It's like you people see everything in black and white and miss that most of the real world is a gradient of shades of grey and quite never full black or white.

latexr 21d ago
> It's like you people see everything in black and white and miss that most of the real world is a gradient of shades of grey and quite never full black or white. I’d go even further. Shades of grey implies two extremes on a linear scale, but the world has colour, meaning wildly different interpretations that go in novel directions. However, ironically, your comment reads to me as extremely black and white—full of certainty, rigidity, possibly some bad faith interpretation and straw manning—while the one you’re criticising has (some) nuance and doubt and seems open to the idea of being wrong.
owebmaster 21d ago
> What's the complain exactly? What complain? OP asked a question. Carmack created Doom, Quake in 2, 3 years. What has he created in 4 years of AI? Should be exceptional if one of the most productive programmers ever says it makes him more productive. What does he have to show?
- suby 21d ago
  You're comparing the challenge of building game engines in the 90's with the more open-ended AGI research. It's different enough that I don't think it's valid to conclude he's less productive now based on impact over time.
- skydhash 21d ago
  That reminds me of something on my last job. Before AI, we had not so good communication, but if we had a question, the person on the other end will try to give you a passable answer. After AI, everyone seems to be a proxy for the LLM tools they're using and any misleading statement you point out is answered by "Why don't you use $llm_tool to check it out?".

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delusional 21d ago

> Carmack hasn't produced anything noteworthy since AI was invented, therefore, how productive can it really be? He's been spinning his wheels for a while. Carmack is a great example of how important working on the right stuff is. He's undoubtedly a brilliant programmer. Through him we get to see that a brilliant programmer working on non-programming tasks, can produce nothing.

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wiseowise 20d ago

As opposed to producing great things without AI? He hasn’t produced anything impressive since 90s/early 00s.

tomrod 20d ago

I'm a practical optimist. I see us as being in the age of engineering for AI -- like the early days of the steam engine. We're going to get a ton of things wrong and impractically implemented. But we don't anticipate the train conductor to build the steam engine on their train -- we just expect it to work as targeted. (Note I'm not being pollyannish here -- a lot of codegen downright sucks).

pibaker 20d ago

What had he produced in the years prior to AI getting good enough for coding? All I know is he was on Zuckerberg's sinking metaverse boat for years, and then nothing else. Maybe it's him, maybe it's his employer. I don't know. I am skeptical of AI's impact on work myself but I just don't think AI is the only thing to blame here.

napo 20d ago
Oculus was pretty fun and a really nice piece of hardware. What was painful was all the meta things on top of it, which I doubt was something he personally added.
- throwaway63467 20d ago
  But he didn’t build the Oculus did he? Not sure what he worked on, software?
jeltz 20d ago
But as he has little to show the last decades we have very little reason to listen to him over some random blogger.

phendrenad2 20d ago

Actually, I'd expect someone like Carmack to be the least productive with AI. Carmack focused his career on high-performance 3d graphics tricks. Those are free now. What isn't free is knowing how to use them. In other words, the game engine is free, the game maps/zones/levels are costly. The "John Romero" part of the equation. Let's see what the idea people are making, not the code gurus.

neuroticnews25 20d ago

This comment frames it like he's a known vibecoder, is he?

Ekami 20d ago

Well said, Kung fu master

dartharva 20d ago

I mean.. I'd bet he has certainly made a lot more money since AI arrived than he did before

DiskoHexyl 20d ago

Carmack hasn't produced anything genuinely noteworthy after leaving id software, if we are being frank. His work at Armadillo aerospace was more akin to hobby, not really leading anywhere, a VR stint at facebook, again, is difficult to gauge at how large his personal contribution was, and this new AI thing is likely end with him leaving the company, again. Carmack is an amazing engineer, a genius even, but either the age of the individual contributor creating the entire thing from the ground up is over, and he's bored of it, trying to find a niche where this still works, or he is exploring the areas in which to apply his curiosity. What I'm saying is that his current productivity or lack of thereof isn't a marker of how AI is productive (or not) in general

masfoobar 19d ago

Its very different living in the late 80s to early 90s coming up with cool ideas that push affordable hardware to their limits just like John Carmack did with games like Keen, Wolf3d, Doom and Quake. It was at an era where someone good at their craft can get the recognition they deserve. However, while some things he managed to figure out himself.. other things were ideas from others. He simply tried it and reviewed the results! Looking in the games industry today - an 'individual' is not going to get the same recognition like John Carmack back in the day (or Ken Silverman, etc) This industry is LARGE. Any god-like programmer trying things within a large corporation is not likely to get noticed today as they hide away in the background pushing an in-house games engine forward. I am sure there are a fair number of John Carmacks out there. Invisible... nameless legends pushing things, etc. As for indie companies - why risk trying to be a 2026 version of John Carmack when Godot, Unreal, etc, exists. Its a different world today! Same thing for AI. I bet there have been some legendary programmers working on AI in the last 10 years. Again, nameless individuals behind the brand. If any names are mentioned... its likely CEO's or other higher ups... not the talent underneath. I guess thats good business strategy and works [for the business]. Focusing on John Carmack - I am not taking anything away from him. He is a legend. I am sure he contributed towards VR before and after Meta purchase. With AI.. I guess we will see. At the end of the day the guy could walk away and focus on hobbies. Still has a lot of batteries left. More power to him.