Tesla Inc.‘s (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk declared technology as the most important advantage in war on Friday, weighing in on a debate over artificial intelligence’s (AI) role in coding.
Carmack’s Martial Arts Analogy
Musk’s comment came in response to a post from John Carmack, founder and CEO of AI start up Keen Technologies. Carmack, a veteran computer programmer and video game designer, argued in a detailed post on X that AI is making traditional hand-coding skills potentially obsolete.
He explained his point by comparing the development of AI with the way martial arts changed after World War II. Martial arts originally developed as a way to survive and fight on the battlefield, but later became a sport and a form of personal discipline.
He wrote, “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?” In martial arts terminology, “-jitsu” refers to techniques focused on combat, while “-do” refers to a practice focused on personal development. Carmack used this distinction to suggest manual coding may be shifting from a survival skill programmers need for their work to a specialized craft they practice by choice.
He also added that programmers should avoid becoming “the out of touch Kung Fu master… that gets mauled by an amateur MMA fighter.”
Industry Voices Split on AI’s Coding Takeover
Carmack’s remarks echo a broader industry shift.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in January that engineers at his company had already stopped writing code manually, predicting AI could handle most software engineering tasks within six to 12 months.
In May, OpenAI President Greg Brockman said AI coding tools went from writing 20% to 80% of developer code within a single month, while Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) CEO Sundar Pichai has said roughly 75% of new code at Google is now AI-generated.
Not everyone shares that enthusiasm. Minecraft creator Markus Persson called AI-assisted coding “an incredibly bad idea” in a January post on X, arguing it favors typing over logic.
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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