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Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

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Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#151

John Carmack is a personal hero of mine, so it pains me to say this: Carmack hasn't produced anything noteworthy since AI was invented, therefore, how productive can it really be? It could be he is doing incredible work in private... but it could also be that he's lost in the weeds, because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite? I remain a skeptic.

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.

> What's the complain exactly?

What complain? OP asked a question. Carmack created Doom, Quake in 2, 3 years. What has he created in 4 years of AI? Should be exceptional if one of the most productive programmers ever says it makes him more productive.

What does he have to show?

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sense sarcasm. But I think you misinterpreted the parent’s point. I read it as: yes, Carmack has made huge contributions but, has not publicly released anything noteworthy since the advent of AI coding. Of course that doesn’t mean he won’t, just that so far nothing he released has backed up his statement.

Can you imagine a football fan going up to Ronaldo and saying hey, I saw an interview you did last week - I think you may be lost in the weeds there with your training regimen and outlook. I want to let you know - I remain a skeptic. I mean, when you start scoring goals like you did 5 years ago Ronaldo, but until then, I remain a skeptic about that training regimen. As for misinterpreting - maybe you're misinterpreti…

Did Ronaldo say he's never been a better football player?

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#153
This resonated with me as someone who: has read the book of 5 rings (translated), has done quite a lot of martial arts and has been coding for ~50 years.

I work for myself developing apps and selling online. So I have no employer pushing to use AI. But I feel a bit like a dinosaur watching the incoming comet.

Currently, I just use MSCopilot as enhanced StackOverflow and I find it useful for that. But I have been nowhere near Cursor, Claude, harnesses, agents or 'vibe coding'.

It seems my options are:

1. Keep use AIs as an enhanced StackOverflow (e.g. to answer questions about APIs)

2. Embrace the new AI coding tools

Really not convinced about option 2. I don't trust AIs with code bases that I have built over 20 years. Also, I'm not far off retiring and I'm not sure I can be bothered to completely change how I work (again). Would be interested to hear what conclusions any fellow coding dinosaurs have come to.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#154

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 rate…

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-...

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#155

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 rate…

> 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 Tha…

I haven't been schooled in farming, but my understanding of food has greatly increased since we started growing our own vegetables.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite Wow that resonated by a scary amount.

Can you elaborate on this with real-world examples you've experienced?

AI amplifies existing process. For people without sufficient clarity I imagine it amplifies that lack of clarity, which is where it is factually unproductive while it still ‘seems’ to be productive (producing slop).

At the end of the day, LLMs are still tools.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#157
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Is anyone actually seeing a shift towards improved structure rather than more code, faster? Yes. At work we recently finished a complete rewrite of the platform. The old codebase got abandoned and two new codebases got stood up. Previous stack was Phoenix LiveView and the new one is Phoenix API + Vue /w TypeScript. Zero code shared between the two. We took the opportunity to re-architect a lot of the core function…

That is interesting, but... is it actually improving structure? We're mid-way through a similar process at work. Rewriting a legacy app in a new language, with new architecture and new features. And it's a mess. We're at 10x loc (admittedly, the new programming language is more verbose than the old one), comments make no sense. Yes, we have ~100% coverage, but most of the tests are meaningless. The agent keeps removi…

I thought stringly-typed was a typo. Apparently not.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/stringly-typed-vs-strongly-ty...

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Is anyone actually seeing a shift towards improved structure rather than more code, faster? Yes. At work we recently finished a complete rewrite of the platform. The old codebase got abandoned and two new codebases got stood up. Previous stack was Phoenix LiveView and the new one is Phoenix API + Vue /w TypeScript. Zero code shared between the two. We took the opportunity to re-architect a lot of the core function…

LLMs are a game-changer. You work more for less money.

Need to get the budget for those tokens somewhere.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite Wow that resonated by a scary amount.

Can you elaborate on this with real-world examples you've experienced?

Not GP, but I can.

I'm currently working on porting a mid-sized project to a new architecture, new programming language and of course adding new features.

Getting a new feature implemented is quite easy. You spend a few hours brainstorming specs with the agent, then ask it to implement it. This gives you extremely frequent code drops that add a new brick, add a new feature, etc. All of this with 100% code coverage (we also have mutation testing, strongly-typed code, standard and custom linters, etc.)

Then you look at the code. Code that has passed review, generally. You realize that the database schema has been broken silently, and that the agent has rewritten the tests or the golden fixtures to match. You realize that it has made assumptions that contradict the specifications and the product is going to break once it's in the hand of users. You realize that the 100% code coverage is essentially a convenient lie, because the code and tests have been written to make passing easy. You realize that none of the security golden rules have been followed, and that has managed to happen because the agent has somehow deactivated linting.

Why did it pass reviews? Well, because of deadlines. And because there is simply so much code (and so much unparsable/misleading documentation) that it's simply impossible to review all of this. And because things move so fast that nobody understands the CI pipeline anymore, and the explanations of the agent are convincing enough that surely, it knows better than you?

On the upside, bugfixing becomes so fast! Just add a new test, wait a few dozen minutes, and a new Merge Request appears. With equally convincing/misleading explanations, and something else broken.

After ~4 months, we had a bare bones deliverable, which we're now steadily expanding. If we had had to write the product manually, I suspect that it would have taken us at least one year, possibly two. So, that's the productivity increase. The productivity decrease is that what we have is not a product but a glorified demo, something that will work very nicely on the happy path, but on any other path, all bets are off.

Re: Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master

#160

John Carmack is a personal hero of mine, so it pains me to say this: Carmack hasn't produced anything noteworthy since AI was invented, therefore, how productive can it really be? It could be he is doing incredible work in private... but it could also be that he's lost in the weeds, because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite? I remain a skeptic.

> because AI is so counterproductive while feeling the opposite Wow that resonated by a scary amount.

Again I don't get what people on HN are doing? Our client wants something: I mumble in my phone what they want, with some spec docs we had / made by mumbling in our phones: a working system comes out, we test it with our client, we fix. We sign a SLA, get paid 100k, a few weeks have passed. I mean, we should not measure everything in money, but for lack of a better measure for productivity, I cannot see how anyone finds it counterproductive. This was strictly impossible for our small team before recent AI and hiring more people didn't work for the pricing. Our profits jumped, revenue jumped, client count jumped. What are people here doing exactly that they are not riding the gravy train and even reporting all these negative AI experiences?

We do spend all our time either code reviewing or talking with clients but the latter was already the case and the former was just better spaced out over time as this would before take many months.

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