The thing with Jonathan Blow is this, it's incredibly easy to tell ahead of time what he will think about any particular subject.

Anything that makes code more available to "normies" is something Jonathan Blow will absolutely hate. Why? Because Jonathan Blow HAS to be the smartest guy in the room, if he's somehow not the smartest guy in the room, there is something wrong with the room, nothing is ever wrong with Jonathan Blow.

So of course, Jonathan Blow thinks AI coding is terrible, only Jonathan Blow can be the best coder in the world, anyone who thinks otherwise is a total moron.

If you don't hand-roll your own programming language and game engine to make your own game, you're a moron. Hell, he even has a video where he basically says if you don't make your own version of JSON and associated parser, you're a fucking idiot.

What I'm saying is this, Jonathan Blow's ego only sustains itself on the idea that he is right about everything and the smartest person on any given topic. The idea that AI might be better at coding than him causes him to implode in a narcissistic rage.

Accurate evaluation. People like JB are hit the hardest by AI revolution imo. I also think that it is understated just how many people in academia or in other fields care only about their ego and that they might do something they are going to be remembered forever for aka have a legacy.

You might be right about some of these things, but you made this guy sounds sympathetic to me.

This industry has been disparaging quality and efficiency in favor of servile laziness and cheap ignorance for so long, and it feels refreshing to hear that some people are still fighting against that trend, risking going too far like this article certainly does.

Yes, of course, if you are using json in a data pipeline then you may not be a moron but in that moment you are doing something idiotic. Yes of course sometime the right decision is to create a language specific for a given task, and if you have never considered it you should question why.

You're not alone, I find him to be completely insufferable.

Funny, I independently arrived at the exact same conclusion. He's incredibly easy to read and predict because every single opinion he holds is based on his ego. Like for example, when people ask him why he developed his own engine for his games, he'll answer that it's because other devs take shortcuts and he doesn't. But dude, the entire point of not making your own engine or language is not because anyone's lazy, but because it allows you to focus your precious time on more important stuff like the actual gameplay, the story, etc. Maybe then it wouldn't take more than 10 years to release a video game.

This is why he's refused to publicly release Jai despite it being in a working condition. As long as he holds it behind a gate, people say "Jai is an interesting and mysterious language". He can talk about it and share what he wants on his own terms, it a control thing. As soon as he releases it, it gets benchmarked and compared against everything else on everyone else's terms.