Don't be the out of touch Kung Fu master
- ID
- 23965
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 13 Sep 2026, 5:51 AM
- Fetched
- 15 Sep 2026, 4:45 AM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2098443262214230095
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 6.0
- Created
- 15 Sep 2026, 5:51 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_codersai_ml_learners
What happened
John Carmack draws an analogy between martial arts evolving from battlefield necessities into hobbies and programming skills losing practical necessity as AI advances. He cites hand-assembling opcodes as a skill that already went this way, and warns developers not to be the 'out of touch Kung Fu master' who gets beaten by an amateur using newer tools. He suggests hand-writing code is shifting from a practical combat skill (-jitsu) to an art form (-do).
Why it matters
Carmack is articulating a shift many builders feel but few state plainly: the market value of meticulous hand-coding is declining relative to AI-assisted workflows. The practical question for the audience is which of their current skills are still -jitsu (worth optimizing for real-world shipping) and which are becoming -do (worth keeping for craft, but not to bet a career or startup on).
Discussion angle
Which specific programming skills in your current stack do you think are already moving from -jitsu to -do, and how do you decide how much time to invest in deepening them versus learning AI-assisted approaches?