Carmack: AI Is Turning Hand-Written Code Into a Martial Art, Not a Job Skill

John Carmack draws a parallel between the history of Japanese swordsmanship and the trajectory of programming. Reading a translation of Musashi’s Book of Five Rings, he was struck by how martial arts drifted from battlefield necessity to sport, hobby, and historical curiosity—Judo recast as wrestling, Kendo as fencing during the post-war occupation. He sees software skills heading down the same road: hand-assembling opcodes to hex was once essential and is now a fading memory, and even the handful of people still writing assembly (he nods to FFmpeg) no longer operate at that raw level.

His central claim is that AI is rapidly eroding the value of many programming skills. Carefully writing code entirely by hand, he argues, is shifting from a practical craft (a ‘-jitsu’) to a discipline practiced for its own sake (a ‘-do’). He’s careful to say this isn’t a loss to mourn—the retro computing scene shows how much joy people find in keeping obsolete skills alive purely for love of the craft.

The warning underneath is competitive, not sentimental: don’t be the tradition-bound kung fu master who gets beaten by a scrappy MMA amateur using whatever actually works. Mastery of a deep, elegant, but outdated technique offers no protection against someone willing to pick up more effective tools. Carmack’s closing quip—that Musashi himself would probably have embraced assault rifles—captures the pragmatism he thinks programmers should adopt toward AI.