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

2026-09-12 | original

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Why This Matters

John Carmack, one of programming's most respected figures, argues that hand-writing code is shifting from a practical necessity to a craft hobby as AI takes over more of the work — the same way swordsmanship became a sport. Coming from a legendary low-level optimizer, the message carries weight for developers debating how much of their hard-won skill still matters commercially. His warning is blunt: revere tradition if you like, but don't let it leave you outmatched by someone using better tools.

Key Takeaways

Carmack compares AI's impact on coding to martial arts' shift from battlefield '-jitsu' to ceremonial '-do', citing how hand-assembling opcodes already became a lost art.
He validates coding-by-hand as a legitimate passion project, likening it to the retro computing scene, while stressing it's no longer where the competitive edge lies.
The core warning: mastery of outdated methods offers no protection against someone wielding more effective tools — Musashi, he suggests, would have embraced assault rifles.

Worth a Look

The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi — This is the very classic Carmack was reading when he started musing on how skills drift from battlefield necessity to hobby. Musashi's treatise on strategy, adaptability and not clinging to form reads surprisingly well as advice for programmers in the AI era. A short, sharp book worth keeping on the desk.

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I recently went through a translation of Musashi’s Book of Five Rings. The introduction chronicled the evolution of swordsmanship and martial arts in general from pragmatic battlefield necessities to sports, historical curiosities, and hobbies. It was interesting to hear how in the post-WW2 occupation when martial arts were banned, Judo was represented as equivalent to western wrestling, and Kendo later to western fencing. The poignant undercurrent for me is that I can see many programming skills following that path. There are probably dozens of people reading this that remember hand assembling opcodes to hex and still have some magic numbers burned into their memory, but even the small group of people still programming in assembly today (hey,

!) don’t work at that primitive level now. AI is making many other programming skills much less critical. We aren’t there yet, but carefully writing code completely by hand is moving from a -jitsu to a -do. Code-do? Codo? That’s ok! The retro computing scene is delightful, full of people building and exercising old skills for the love of it. But don’t be the out of touch Kung Fu master, heir to lifetimes of tradition, that gets mauled by an amateur MMA fighter. Musashi would probably have been pretty enthusiastic about assault rifles.

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