Justice & Law Quote by John Carmack

Carmack is puncturing the myth of the lone wizard coder, not to diminish genius but to relocate it in time. The line reads like a brag on behalf of technology itself: hardware progress doesn’t just make games prettier, it steadily converts yesterday’s black magic into tomorrow’s checkbox feature. That’s Moore’s Law as cultural force, a ratchet that drags the baseline of “competent” upward until the elite tricks become routine.

The intent is pragmatic, almost managerial. If you’re building graphics tech, you can’t fetishize cleverness for its own sake because cleverness has an expiration date. A breakthrough shader hack or a brutal memory optimization might win you a year or two; then GPUs get faster, drivers get smarter, engines abstract the technique, and the advantage collapses into the common toolbox. What remains valuable isn’t the trick but the judgment: choosing which hard problems are worth solving now versus waiting for silicon to do the work later.

Subtext: engineering prestige is unstable. The industry loves hero narratives, yet Carmack is reminding his own tribe that status built on specialized difficulty will be eroded by progress and commodification. It’s also a quiet defense of abstraction layers and engines: they aren’t dumbing things down; they’re the mechanism by which competence absorbs brilliance.

Context matters. Carmack came up in an era when real-time 3D was a knife fight against constraints. His observation is both a prediction and a warning: if you don’t keep moving to the next frontier, you’ll be outpaced not by a smarter rival, but by the calendar.