Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
John Carmack compares programming's evolution to martial arts, warning against becoming obsolete.
John Carmack reflects on Musashi's Book of Five Rings, noting how martial arts evolved from battlefield necessities to sports and hobbies. He sees a parallel in programming: skills like hand-assembling opcodes are becoming obsolete. AI is making manual coding less critical, moving it from a practical "-jitsu" to a practiced "-do." He advises programmers to avoid being like an out-of-touch Kung Fu master defeated by an amateur MMA fighter, suggesting Musashi would have embraced assault rifles.
What commenters are saying
Commenters largely agree with Carmack's analogy, though they split on the implications. One camp sees AI-assisted coding as allowing focus on architecture and algorithms, reducing tedious syntax wrangling. Another camp views AI output as boring and unskillful, arguing that wrestling with code is essential for understanding problems. A top commenter describes a successful 2-month, 700k-LoC rewrite using AI, with 100% test coverage and improved structure. Others report messier experiences, with meaningless tests and brittle code. Concerns persist that AI enables throughput over quality, and that proper tooling (e.g., live programming) was often underutilized even before AI.