John Carmack on AI in game programming

There is a fundamental business challenge at work -- games these days are &quot;worth less&quot;.<p>Not having no value, but being of less worth to investors and companies to invest in. This is simple fundamental economics, since game prices are not growing as fast as their input costs. For example, I spent $30 for Atari video games in the 1980s and it was a lot less expensive to produce. That game would cost $90 today with inflation.<p>For a comprehensive breakdown, see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamesindustry.biz&#x2F;are-video-games-really-more-expensive#:~:text=Even%20the%20%2469.99%20games%20that,the%20years%20in%20relative%20terms" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gamesindustry.biz&#x2F;are-video-games-really-more-ex...</a><p>If your costs are increasing and you can&#x27;t raise your price then your industry is being commoditized, or at least in a real quandary about how to move forward. AI could be a way to slow the huge, up-front costs that go into AAA games and help limit the risk to making new ones.<p>If this subject interests you, there is a great long-form interview with Matthew Ball on Stratechery: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratechery.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;an-interview-with-matthew-ball-about-the-gaming-slump&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratechery.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;an-interview-with-matthew-ball-...</a><p>Anyway, Carmack is right on the money on this one.

John, this isn&#x27;t a power tool. This is a copy machine.<p>And while I don&#x27;t have anything against copy machines per se, that&#x27;s not how it&#x27;s being sold to the public. The public is being told this copy machine is a really good power tool that can do lots of things. So what creatives are hearing is &quot;your work is interchangeable with a slightly smarter copy machine, so stop paying creatives and just rip them off&quot;.

Pasting it here:<p>“I think you are misunderstanding what this tech demo actually is, but I will engage with what I think your gripe is — AI tooling trivializing the skillsets of programmers, artists, and designers.<p>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.<p>Building power tools is central to all the progress in computers.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The world will be vastly wealthier in terms of the content available at any given cost.<p>Will there be more or less game developer jobs? That is an open question. It could go the way of farming, where labor saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone, or it could be like social media, where creative entrepreneurship has flourished at many different scales. Regardless, “don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy.” - John Carmack

I think people are arguing about two different topics on the same item:<p>- Technological advance<p>- Political and economical fallout once AI starts replacing a meaningful amount of jobs, and quickly<p>Me? I&#x27;m scared. That&#x27;s it.

I’m trying not to sound elitist but maybe this is just plain elitist. But it seems like lowering the barrier to entry to some skills too much just gets us too much crap, _and_ worst of all changes the economics so you can’t get anything good anymore. See: the movie industry.<p>And actually, the problem is not that my neighbor who’s passionate about video game design but makes bad games. I’m glad social media is full of that. It’s the highly capitalized content farms that flood the zone.

Using AI tools in a professional code base, currently, seems a bit dangerous to me. However I have changed my mind on using it for vibe coding.<p>I used to type in program source code from magazines and had no idea what I was doing until something broke then I had to fix it. If I am honest, that was how I learned how to code.<p>AI will either teach that kind of thing to the new generation, or coding will become irrelevant. Either way, I think that’s good.<p>But I still don’t want my bank or airplane guidance software using it.

Looks like a run-of-the-mill opinion. What&#x27;s the story here?

&gt;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.<p>Given the importance even today of understanding assembly compilation towards low level game performance, I&#x27;m surprised he&#x27;d say this. It wasn&#x27;t rendered obsolete, it was abstracted away from most of the stack. Meanwhile you need to understand assuembly even more intimately to look under the hood of a modern day game or game engine. esoteric does not mean outdated.<p>&gt;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.<p>Okay, I&#x27;ll believe it when I see it. You said the same about Oculus. I&#x27;m not even doubting that VR will evolve to a revolution one day. But technology&#x27;s march can be slow at times.<p>And that&#x27;s one of my top 3 problems; I think like VR&#x27;s hardware barrier, AI is hitting barriers on how iterations with LLMs work. It seems industry&#x27;s been brute forcing it and we clearly hit a wall already. But we haven&#x27;t rethought the approach yet. We&#x27;re just promising and prpmising.<p>&gt;there will be far better exemplars of the medium still created by dedicated teams of passionate developers.<p>Depends on how legal proceedings go. At least Quake is Open Source and kinda free ( I think). The vast majority of games probbaly won&#x27;t let you train that easily. They spent decades making it as hard as possible to back them up, after all.<p>&gt;“don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy.<p>If industry is going to fire you anyway, it&#x27;s the only move. If industry worked on fostering workers instead of replacing them, they wouldn&#x27;t be worried. Instead it&#x27;s finally starting to unionize to protect itself.

Just wait until we start creating user friendly IDE&#x27;s that automate the technical moat needed right now to go from code to running program.<p>Recently I (Gemini 2.5?) created an android app that calculates options prices given different sets of parameters set by the user. The hardest part of doing that is doing all the android studio leg work to get the pieces in place to eventually compile the code into an app and put it on your phone.<p>No real reason that cannot be automated to &quot;Paste the text the LLM gave you here, and the app icon will show up on your phone in a minute&quot; right now. I&#x27;m almost positive it is already being worked on somewhere.

Relevant, I guess: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.astralcodexten.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-colors-of-her-coat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.astralcodexten.com&#x2F;p&#x2F;the-colors-of-her-coat</a>

Finally somebody with a sane take.

&gt; It could go the way of farming, where labor saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone<p>Except that the quality of mass-farmed, labor-saving tech produced &#x27;stuff&#x27; is approaching a level of literal shit and the methods have poisoned air, water and soil to a horribly dumb degree.<p>Will the same happen to the analog&#x2F;digital soil, water, air in SWE, game dev and content creation? Likely. It started a while ago, before the big AI boom and that&#x27;s what young creators and devs see in their youth and get inspired, stimulated and motivated by: toxic, low quality shit that they have to shove down their throats and into their minds. &quot;I can do better&quot; is not something we see a lot anywhere; not in cinemas, not on the news, not in SaaS and sure as hell not in VC culture or portfolio capitalism.<p>Next generations brains are wired and minds nourished by the current environment. And we&#x27;ve been fucking up for a while, even if we leave out politics, news, culture and how we systemically perceive, portrait, never defuse and always escalate conflicts in a slow burn fashion.<p>All that wires brains, reinforces behaviors and thought patterns and perception and nourishes minds.<p>I like the comparison to farming. The end game is displayed in movies and games alike and it&#x27;s always dire, dry and satisfies no one.<p>There&#x27;s no case against AI, though, but a momentous one against experienced, educated people who have witnessed the shit show long enough and don&#x27;t need predictive algorithms to know what&#x27;s coming.<p>How silly it is to &#x27;let it happen&#x27;, to &#x27;let it be&#x27;.