Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master – John Carmack

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".

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.

> WorldEnder

> Its just that, it used to be free. All I needed was a computer.

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.

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.

'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.

> In 2022, he left Oculus to work on his AGI startup, Keen Technologies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack

oh

"don’t be the out of touch Kung Fu master"

posts on Twitter

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.

https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2098443262214230095 for convenience

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.

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.

Why are we always at war?

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.

Resubmission of I recently went through a translation of Musashi's Book of Five Rings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49660833 (1 comment)

[flagged]

Slop posting

I understand why people value the code John Carmack has released but I do not understand why people value his public statements.

"eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id"[0]

"Great! I think Microsoft has been a good parent company for gaming IPs"[1]

By sheer coincidence, John Carmack is peddling machine generated code.[2]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20081003111457/http://www.linuxg...

[1] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1308069857913720832

[2] https://80.lv/articles/john-carmack-s-agi-startup-keen-techn...