War & Peace Quote by John Carmack

Carmack is quietly torpedoing the most common lie in software: that features are additive, a pile of Lego bricks you can keep snapping together as long as the sprint board says you can. His real unit of cost isn’t developer hours; it’s friction. Every new toggle, exception, and special-case path becomes a tiny tax on the future, paid out in slower iteration, harder debugging, and the creeping need to explain the system to itself.

The subtext is a worldview forged in performance-critical domains where complexity doesn’t just annoy you, it ruins you. Game engines and low-level systems don’t tolerate “we’ll clean it up later” optimism because later arrives as frame drops, fragile pipelines, or architectural dead-ends. Carmack’s point lands because he reframes “feature” as “commitment”: you’re not shipping an isolated capability, you’re choosing constraints that shape every next decision.

“The trick” is doing a lot of work here. It admits the pressure is real: users ask, competitors ship, managers demand. But it insists judgment matters more than heroics. Picking features that “don’t fight each other” is an argument for coherence over accumulation, for designing a product where capabilities compose instead of collide. It’s also a warning about organizational entropy: when teams add features to satisfy local needs, the product becomes a battleground of competing assumptions. Carmack’s discipline isn’t minimalist aestheticism; it’s strategic defense against the future you’re otherwise building into a corner.