Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess Obama never met people like Fabrice Bellard or John Carmack.
I bet John Carmack is just winging it in a lot of aspects of his life, too.
It's in some video or other, as it's a story Blow tells on himself when giving talks. He'd gone over the Doom source code when Carmack had open-sourced it, and Blow was appalled, because it was loaded with inefficient, crude, not-optimized stuff. Essentially, Doom source code was dumb and primitive.
Jonathan Blow's initial reaction was horror and contempt, because the code gave the impression that Carmack was just winging it most uncaringly. Later, Blow decided that this was a process of value judgement, and himself turned against trying to optimize and refine every little code style, in favor of doing stuff that didn't take nearly as much brain and ability to retain state. He took some of Carmack's dumbness and crudeness as an example of where to place your attention.
This is totally valid, while at the same time being a conscious decision to 'just wing it' in many senses. I do this myself, even on public-facing code. In a sense it's optimization and choosing to focus on areas where I can be more useful. At the same time, I'm literally just winging it and some of the things I'm not doing, I'm not doing because I'm too dumb to know how, and would be distracted by trying to learn. If I had great mastery of all these things it would affect my choices, but when I don't I'll take the Carmack path and ostentatiously do the 'crude' thing so I can lean on what I do have going for me.