How big of a Carmack fan are you really, if you don't know one of his most well known takes on programming? (And you definitely don't need to be a fan.) Carmack has been heavily in favor of leveraging power tools since way back. Direct quote from the man himself: > I will engage with what I think your gripe is — AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers. > My first games involved hand assembling machine code and turning graph paper characters into hex digits. Software progress has made that work as irrelevant as chariot wheel maintenance. > Building power tools is central to all the progress in computers. > Game engines have radically expanded the range of people involved in game dev, even as they deemphasized the importance of much of my beloved system engineering. > AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics. > Yes, we will get to a world where you can get an interactive game (or novel, or movie) out of a prompt, but there will be far better exemplars of the medium still created by dedicated teams of passionate developers. > The world will be vastly wealthier in terms of the content available at any given cost. x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/190931117484…

So how do you rectify your anecdotal experience against those made by public figures in the industry who we can all agree are at least pretty good engineers? I think that's important because if we want to stay ~anonymous, neither you nor I can verify the reputation of one another (and therefore, one another's relative master of the "Craft"). Here are some well known names who are now saying they regularly use LLM's for development. For many of these folks, that wasn't true 1-2 years ago: - Donald Knuth: www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/%7Eknuth/pa…... - Linus Torvalds: arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/hobby-github…... - John Carmack: x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/190931117484… My point being - some random guy on the internet says LLM's have never been useful for them and they only output garbage vs. some of the best engineers in the field using the same tools, and saying the exact opposite of what you are.