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.

https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1909311174845329874

The closest we've gone with Torvalds was using LLM's for non-important tasks.

In case you didn’t know, Linus does vibe code now:

https://github.com/torvalds/AudioNoise/blob/main/README.md

Or Knuth.