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...

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.

> 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?

> 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?

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> AI-assisted coding, on the other hand, rekindled my passion for computers.

"Walking on stilts made me taller"?

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.

>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?

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

AI is not an abstraction and is not like moving up from assembly at all.

> 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.

Would you mind elaborating on where exactly the boundary between vibe coding and AI assisted coding lies?

Architecture is the first to be outsourced to AI, because AI shepherds have no idea how to do it.

You're describing software developers, even better, coders, not really engineers.

> 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.

This is where I’m at as well. It is incredibly liberating I feel very empowered

> 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!

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?

Herodotus wrote about finding people living in the ruins of a great city (Babylon) who had no idea who built it or how they built it.

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

I think this has long been the norm without AI. Just look at a lot of politians cheating with their university tests, outsourcing the work that lands them their titles to low earning ghost writers. Why do you think so many incompetent people rise to powerful managerial positions to make terrible decisions without consequences. It's probably going on for much longer than we all think because it's not always easy to find hard evidence and we're all trained to treat circumstantial evidence. How many scandals were there of influential people buying their kids into elite colleges? AI is just accelerating what's been ongoing already.

We know that use of AI has a negative result for students: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/09/08/students-who-dont-use-ai-...

I read your first sentence as:

> Everyone who writes enthusiastically about AI already has the benefit of not having worked with AI

... because if you really do, and you actaully a capable developer, you become much less enthusiastic.

Anyway, definitely agree with your point, and let us also remember that it is our human output and expression which LLMs are trained on.

Tech priests reciting blessings to the Omnisiah. Time to do the blessing of checking how much 5h usage I have left.

> 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.

Code in most organizations is a means to an end to produce an actual product.

The job of a SWE is to not produce the most sublime readable code with cute language bells and whistles that you can show off to your other programmer friends. Yes its fun to do and interesting, but the main value in writing code is to express your intent so you and other people that are working with you can actually build something of value.

Software has value to the people on your team reading it. The product that you create with your software has a far wider impact than just that. As such, there is for _sure_ optimization pressure on "professional software engineering" to be more productive and actually make the product better to use, faster, with more features users like. The user typically does not care that you used a new C++26 feature, as much as I enjoyed writing it for them.

If I can produce features for users faster and I can iterate on them faster, this is a boon to me. I can program by hand for fun all I want in my spare time, but if I want to produce value for someone else, it is economically infeasible for me to be a luddite, and I will simply be outcompeted. Previously you were outcompeted by smarter teams who out executed you (and who also worked more), and now you can be out executed by basically anyone using an LLM who actually understands that the end goal is making a product that is pleasant to use and actually has utility, not code that is pleasant to read.

You can be an "performative/artisanal programmer" just as you can do "performative/artisanal martial arts." Just know that there will not be a large market for it in the real world.

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.

I think you are slightly missing the mark of the historical reference.

What you say is true for modernized budō disciplines. They have very different purposes.

But this this is not what Musashi was concerned with. He was practicing kenjutsu (not kendo) / writing about hyōhō.

The primary criterion was absolutely murdering people as efficiently as possible in a life and death situation.

"The true Way of sword fencing is the craft of defeating the enemy in a fight, and nothing other than this"

Japanese martial arts generally come in 2 forms. -do (the way) and -jitsu (the art). -do forms are about self improvement, -jitsu forms are about effectiveness. You can see this with judo and jujitsu. Carmac is clearly aware of this difference as he says:

"We aren’t there yet, but carefully writing code completely by hand is moving from a -jitsu to a -do. "

IIRC Carmac has done judo (I'm not sure to what level).

> 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

That's a retroactively-applied justification to save the embarrassment for martial arts that don't make the cut for modern CQB.

When photography came out, artists redefined their purpose as not being about realism.

Similar has already happened with martial arts, as OP mentions, and you've grown up with the new definition/focus not the original one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49668392

As someone who did train one of the traditional martial arts for a few years, I appreciate the comparison.

I don't know how much weight your "just" is meant to carry, but I remember a culture of cope and excuses about why "my" flavor wasn't the winner of any MMA event.

But at least I got some exercise, strength, and flexibility out of it.

I think it's an interesting analogy, not to be dismissed so easily.

I don't see him saying the point is volume of code. I see AI generating code, and if I question it, it can justify design choices pretty well. I can give it bug symptoms, and it can find and fix the bug. Usually.

But yes, the analogy breaks down in the fact that I understand what it's saying and understand when it's wrong, because I learned it in the first place.

Or maybe it doesn't break down completely. If an MMA (AI) tells me to move in a way where I know I'll lose my balance, or over extend, I will say no, because of my previously acquired experience.

The whole latter part of the post is exactly about that.

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.

There's nothing to learn about being an engineering manager. You tell your developers to write code, go on vacation, and come back to a completed product.

Also the thing that is infuriating is, do people obsessed with using AI for everything not realise that, they are surplus to the entire process? They are doing 'prompting' or whatever but the end goal will eventually be that they are obsolete and will not be required. Companies will just endlessly, automatically pump out AI generated stuff without any human intervention at all. The tools they gloat about will be closed up and they will not have access to them any more.

You're not really 'keeping up' with anything, you're just fooling yourself into being part of a process that wants to eradicate your presence.

It's almost like embracing this stuff is giving them an illusion of control they don't have

the point of AI hype is to increase shareholder value.

The system that solved Navier-Stokes certainly was not about OpenAI engineers just typing and telling it what to do.

Yup. More hype mania from someone with a financial interest in people abdicating their thought to AI.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It makes more sense to read his 'public statements' and judge them individually rather than in aggregate. No one is correct all the time.

As for this current post (just a tweet really, public statement sounds overly official), I think he's making sense. If you don't follow industry trends, you'll eventually be out of touch. Whether you're a senior software engineer or engineering manager, keeping current with the evolution of tech will make you better at your job. Today that happens to be related to following AI developments, but it applied equally to learning higher level programming languages in the 90s, or big data engineering practices in the 2010s.

1st link is broken

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.

Whatever his technical chops may be, Carmack has slid fully and comfortably into the role of “influencer” over the last decade.

how the mighty have fallen. maybe he finally got tired of it with the years but never realized it

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.

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.

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.

I was in the same boat around March. I started with Claude and giving it really specific instructions about what I wanted. That turned in to more interactive planning sessions where after we nailed everything down I said, ok just do it and I reviewed. The more I used it the more I let go of some things and the more I held on others. Now I have adapted my entire approach to use both local and cloud agents. Start small. Find what fits you. Also try out different models. Closed source is very strong, but you may actually prefer a bit less capable model that you give more direction to.

To effectively use AI-as-an-engineer as a seasoned developer, you must change how you work. It won't work otherwise. Your knowledge & experience wouldn't allow you to ship raw AI code, you'll end up being frustrated instead.

An alternative way is using it as a pair programmer, which is one step above enhanced StackOverflow.

There are two ways to do this: 1. Subscribe to ChatGPT Pro (or the 20x version) for just one month and use Codex to generate the system you want—whatever it may be. 2. Purchase a Mac Studio or DGX Spark and use the latest local models to securely audit your code.

You're reading something into that line that I don't see. I read it as sincere.

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.

"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.

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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.

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.

But he said amateur.

> because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite

Wow that resonated by a scary amount.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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

Well said, Kung fu master

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

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.

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.

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), 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)

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.

Common table expression?

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.

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.

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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

Competition drives innovation

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49668392

Within a company it's collaborative. Between companies it's absolutely competitive.

  > We're souless automatons feeding a machine god.

> 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....

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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.

It's funny that we almost agree except you have it 100% backwards.

The out of touch kung fu masters are all retired or close to it. They continue to shout about their big bet on AI as loudly as possible to protect their egos and, as a last ditch effort, whatever money they threw in.

After all, everyone who is mid-career and younger cannot possibly be a master of anything. Of course they're using AI at work, but that is an extremely far cry from the AI actually helping. They use it because it's shoved down their throats and they don't want to rock the boat. Working extra hours from home is the perfect way for everyone to save face.

In other words, the older generation is delusional. Nobody is surprised except the older generation.

I honestly feel personally attacked by this and I don't consider myself to be an out of touch kung fu master or technologist at all. It is just very odd to read such an inflammatory comment on HN and then have people pretend this is correct and perfectly socially acceptable to say.

Like put your shoes into the person you are arguing against, with some empathy, would you want to be treated this way?