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  • 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 Guns superseded swords, cars superseded horses, but coding agents haven’t superseded code itself.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…
  • 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.

  • 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...

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

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

    oh

  • '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.
  • 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".
    by tkel
  • 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.
  • 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.

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