Programming is Art
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orchidfiles.com
What we understand as painting today is very different then what painting meant pre-camera. Now it is mostly a leisure activity and creative outlet. Where back in the day it was a serious occupation for capturing reality, and therefore creativity was taking second stage.
I hope that coding will go that way and even though I might lose my current occupation. I feel like that might be what is needed to get out of the stagnation of current day software development (compared to early computer history). Take the money out of coding, bring the creativity in, take out the investors and keep the enthusiasts. I think that might be good for the activity that we call programming.
Also "software engineering" involves vastly more then programming or coding, so I doubt software engineering will disappear.
Indeed that is one theory. He was also a master at his craft so this is exactly the transition period where the master of the old method is able to adapt a technology in a way later pupils likely can not, due to the experience without the tool at hand.
Sounds a lot like the AI transition we are making now.
Because most code is a stinking pile of shit.
But at least I can easily imagine a world where people indeed do this. :-)
Indeed yesterday I drew some pictures (on my computer) that visualize what actually happens in some rather mathematical algorithms.
The immediate rebuttal to that might be that "AI could just do it" but that's not entirely true - the sort of art that you (typically) see in a gallery isn't "an accurate representation of the world as viewed" just as a lot of "code as art" isn't "a problem solved with code". The camera captures (mostly accurate) images, and AI is usually writing "code that does a thing".
The expressiveness (can) come from a place that's deeply human, and can yield a product that is tangibly diifferent from what an efficient coding process would normally produce.
A few of us played a game when I was in batch at the Recurse Center - we called it Monstrosity. The game was to build a string in the absolutely least efficient way possible - using the largest stack, the most network hops, the most obfuscatory and difficult methods to create a character (bit-shifting algorithms to make ASCII, anyone?). It was beautiful, and it was the kind of thing that AI would never think to do (at least, not without significant cajoling and even then you'd be missing the point).
The code in these cases is usually wizardry understood by a select few, but the stories, optimizations, trickery and even formatting can be told to anyone who loves design.
It's absolutely amazing.
Replace the "photography" in this instance with a clay pigeon and the "painting" with a real pigeon.
Source please.
The invention of photography had a major impact on painting. In the decades
after the first photograph was produced in 1829, photographic processes improved
and became more widely practiced, depriving painting of much of its historic
purpose to provide an accurate record of the observable world.
Additionally there is a huge historical precedence for capturing images, basically for money either through being a painter in someone's service, patronage or working for commission. These painters would work and follow the directions of the commissioner, even though they may not have agreed with it. This is one of the reasons for the English "rectangular livestock" paintings.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/rectangular-cows/
In dutch there is a word "broodschilder" (literally bread painter) witch means painter who paints for a living (commercial) / hack painter. In history these painters often where seen as doing a craft in the same way a carpenter works with requirements and requests for the picture, make it happen. Often the painters where not even not able to sign their work (for example religious commission).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_painter
AI can be just a tool. You use it the same way you use a keyboard, a computer, a pencil, etc. I'm pretty sure you can build art with it, much like using any tool. People are making art with ascii. You can do art with anything.
But AI can also be much more than a tool, and why can't it have a soul? What's a soul anyway, except something that humans are making up to convince themselves that they are more than flesh and bones? Mythos will not do the same "art" as Fable or Astra would do. AI in 20 years will very likely produce art indistinguishable and as profound as human art. Obviously, humans at that time will always invent new criteria to say why this "art" is not good enough.
Contradictio. Going back to Seven...
> AI can be just a tool.
Nothing, ever, is just a tool.
Are you going to expand on this or should we stand in awe?
Programming is a craft. It's not an art, because creating code doesn't comment on, criticise, challenge, distill, or otherwise have anything to do with any human experience outside of programming.
A soul - and I mean this in the most atheistic, nonreligious sense you can imagine - is what you operationalize every single day when you're faced with hardship or any situation where you'd prefer not to be. It's also the dynamic that makes you feel joy in doing something beyond simple pleasure or happiness.
You know SQL? Think of "soul" as a view of the tables describing your intellectual and physical properties, left joined with your actions, which filters those actions that would otherwise not be simply mechanical or deterministic. Does that help?
What can you say besides "I don't feel a soul inside an LLM"? You don't feel it? OK, good for you, whatever.
I don't need "soul" concept to describe the human experience, and if you use it to describe technology, it only makes things more confusing. It only ends up as an attempt to state that some things are not "good" because they don't match your own vague concept of what is good or bad, without explaining why nor what this is.
What's your point, other than that you are misunderstanding the word? It needs no mystical or religious basis. If you have ever played music with someone or shared a difficult experience with a random human/whale/dog/squirrel which transcended transactional or intellectual communication and which caused you to view their interior world as something more than a clockwork sum of parts and neurons, then this is what is meant by "soul". If you want to be purely technological and psychological about it, it's that which emerges from a layer of intelligence that exhibits what Freud would describe as superego. Something that AI does not yet have.
It's only a vague concept if you haven't experienced it.
I'm not saying a soul is given by God or that one needs to believe anything in order to find a soul in oneself. What I'm saying is that the poster's comment is darkness and hopelessness and a hatred for his own species rolled up into one, and that such a perspective is both painfully inexperienced and profoundly awful for the person and for whoever they are convincing or it, because life contains much more richness (religious or secular) than what is disdained by this person.
What you find condescending in my statement isn't that it's religious, it's that I'm willing to tell them that they're missing out on life. In that respect, I don't mind being condescending, because not all philosophies or ways of living lead to equally happy results.
It's my prerogative to determine, and it's fairly trivial to identify, the difference between someone who has trouble forming their thoughts into words, and someone who like this poster is clearly stating an antagonistic and divorced relationship with life itself.
I'm capable and free to judge. Your knee jerk reaction itself is highly suspicious and redolent of someone else who's going through a divorce with living.
You should always question your own interpretation. Yes. When you find some evidence that you may be misunderstanding someone, then yes, you should certainly default to giving them the benefit of the doubt and ask yourself whether you've misunderstood something. This is pretty basic ethics and rhetoric.
But the meaning of the poster was quite clear. It was absolutist, in fact, and it was nihilistic, derogatory and dismissive toward any notion of intrinsic human value. Wouldn't you agree?
My advice to you would be: When you find yourself intervening in a conversation to support something transparently antihumanistic and evil, by claiming without any basis or merit that the other party in the conversation is misunderstanding it, maybe you should assume that you're failing to understand something.
Since always, it is often just not recognized. Perhaps the same way how a newspaper article has soul and a fingerprint of the author, though you may not recognize it while reading.
> You can do art with anything.
Sure and anything you do can be art.
I’m finding this fascinating personally. The lines people are drawing to try and keep themselves inside some definition they can mark as special.
Before AI I could look at a function and tell you who had written it from inside the (somewhat small) company I worked at.
If you see art only as more "content" to be mindlessly consumed, maybe.
I love code, you don't, fine. So be it.
Also, humans didn't evolve to write or read code, even the best programmers are terrible at it from an objective point of view, if we compare it to what is theoretically possible.
And, no, it is not a question about style or preferences, the code is messy and contains to me as a maintainer obvious bugs.
It's interesting you feel comfortable to comment with such authority on the capability of a tool you don't even use... Lisp is a bad programming language because my 10 year old brother wrote some really bad stuff, btw!
Basically, they still need a human guiding them pretty closely unless you’re happy to just ship a mountain of vibe coded mush.
That said, I haven’t tried Astra in earnest yet. We’ll see in a few weeks whether or not it is a step change.
These companies have many billion dollar investments and yet their main product is a bloated meh.
Just as they produce writing that isn't structured well for humans, they do the same with code. Sure, if you're willing for that code to be write-only and for agents to be the sole interface through which you interact with it, that works fine, but it is not better than what a professional, skilled human could produce. It's often full of pointless crap and design decisions that over index heavily on local structure that make very little sense when global system structure is considered.
I think the question is less about the capabilities of LLMs and their outputs (because obviously that can change), but because they represent a workflow which codifies exactly that role I mention. You fulfill the role of a manager more than a programmer. You have a vague idea of the codebase, but lack any kind of intuitive mechanical understanding. There are many cases in which I can see an issue, identify the problem, and have it fixed faster than you could prompt an LLM to investigate. After a certain point of familiarity, all reasoning is local reasoning. That's the power of mechanical sympathy.
Many, many large shops don't give a shit. They've long since galloped into the dark woods of bureaucratic know-nothing hell. Let the LLM figure that shit out. Those shops are already optimizing for maximal output and churn, so the value proposition seems obvious. I've been smugly saying it for years, but LLMs have me saying it quite a lot more these days: "Sure looks like it sucks down there!"
That's a weird way of looking at it. Programming lives at the end of a well-worn path uncountably many millenia long, defined entirely by our biology. We didn't "evolve to do it" in the same way a duck didn't evolve to swim in a specific river.
Current models are in fact much better than the top models from a year ago. I have no idea how anyone could claim otherwise without a huge amount of motivated reasoning.
I think you’re letting your pride get the best of you. Writing software should not be about ego. It’s about making something helpful, or something beautiful, or at the very least financially useful. Interacting with software through a natural language interface does not mandate you are creating junk. I won’t tell you how to use the tool. But I am sure if you were sufficiently motivated you’d learn how to make it work for you.
> I think you’re letting your pride get the best of you. Writing software should not be about ego. It’s about making something helpful, or something beautiful
The things I'm the proudest of are, by far, the most useless and unhelpful ones. The ones I did for myself. The ones that made me think "wow, now I rock!" and the machine spit its guts crying "mummy help me". That's what the demoscene (to name one subculture) was all about. That's what hacking is all about in the first place.
> or at the very least financially useful
These have always been the ones I'm the most ashamed about. These were the things I would not have done for myself, but for other people. The ones that kept me living, not the ones that made me feel alive. What did you think I was talking about?
> But I am sure if you were sufficiently motivated you’d learn how to make it work for you.
I'm motivated to code. I'm not an architect, a QA tester, or whatever, I'm a coder. Now, wanna know what kind of person I am and how I made LLMs work for me long before you suggest it here? Read that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48072319#48073350
Then, come back and we can talk. I WILL NOT ASK A MACHINE SOMETHING I LOVE TO DO MYSELF, WHICH I TAKE PLEASURE FROM. If that looks like an idiotic and stubborn stance to you, FINE.
But as is: it just output stuff that will not scale properly, and wrangling it takes just as much time as me coding it up myself. So it's in my hands until then. I've found LLM's somewhat useful as a first-order discovery in documentation, and not much farther. Try to trust it as an oracle replacement of all search/documentation and you'll be burned once every few days.
There's lots of competing definitions of art, but I don't think the article has reasonably linked programming to any of them. Maybe there's a thin & stretched link to the concept of a starving artist.
I mean many Japanese people consider that pouring tea can be an art form.
And, it goes without saying, programming is just one activity of the many that encompass "software engineering". There are plenty of people whose hobby is programming, but probably far more whose hobby is actually software engineering, and are fine with LLMs handling the programming part.
25 years of corporate development beat that enjoyment out of me. AI is just the final nail in the coffin. I have no enjoyment left in coding; I firmly believe the current crop of programming languages will go in the same vein as human written assembly language did.
I don't believe the current LLM-based AI will replace most other jobs, but I think it is well suited to completely replace much of programming/IT and morph it into an unrecognizable job role.
That brings me joy after 30+ years of typing at the keyboard.
In the end though, it's the problem solving that makes this job fun. Minor dopamine hits when a minor thing gets fixed (or some weird bug resolves itself into a 8 bits/1 byte solution!). That's all gone when working with LLMs - it's perfect code each time ... until ... you have to understand what went wrong ... more LLMs, more Tokens, more cash burnt. But no problems understood nor solved, just prompt adjusting and virtual monkeys at virtual keyboards.
Oh, well - here's to the bright future of electric creativity out of the tube.
That doesn't take anything away from the knowledge work that happens when you develop software, but the code itself is not the art. The solution is the art.
Perhaps like most popular art, it's more about the story behind it.
Nearly every designer and artist knows that artisan stuff does not bring in the money, but rather commissions for "everyday stuff"; in German there exists the term "Eisdielen-Jobs" [1] ("ice cream parlor jobs") for commissioned, boring, "everyday" design jobs like, as the term implies, creating the design and illustrations for a menu map of an ice cream parlor.
--
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/karriere/illustrator-als-beruf-kreati...
Good code is pretty much the solution with some boilerplate tacked on.
But I'd take them every time over a definition of art being "something for which there is a market". Screw that.
This. Applies to me while writing text, writing code and writing data analyses.
Should we replace "programming" and "programmers" with "weaving" and "weavers" in this write-up and refer to history and how it worked out for weavers during the industrial revolution, I think it is clear where all this is going.
I know some people are mad about this and I am as well. However, as someone that is 20+ years in the field, I feel I've seen enough to say things are fundamentally and irreversibly changing.
> Replace detailed unique clothes with cookie cutter bland clothes
> Replace a job with craftsmanship and skill to a mind numbing boring job that possesses very little skill
> The machines still do a much worse job than a good tailor, but most of the public don’t care and can’t even judge good quality vs bad.
> We got a lot more clothes and freed a certain class of people to go work on other stuff (this second point is a bit doubtful as in the immediate future they just worked in sweatshops but eventually maybe? )
So yeah kind of a stupid trade in retrospect, I suspect programming will go the same way. We’ll drown in mountains of functional slop, all apps currently will be made by agents. Public will have more software / don’t care and a good human programmer will still clock agents in code quality, which is a subjective aesthetic metric.
Programs are not clothes that we dress and undress, specially when running on our cellphones, they are more like organs.
If you loved the art of writing code, and also enjoyed getting paid a boatload for that activity, you’re losing out in the trade as AI shifts the focus of software from coding to designing.
I do think that we could see a golden age in Programming as Art, similar to how chess is more popular than ever before, even though your phone could defeat Magnus Carlsen. All except a few superstar streamers will likely be doing it for love and not for money. But it’ll be easier to pick up and to learn than ever before, for those interested in doing so.
I enjoyed being able to pay rent. A drop from my peak of 160k to 80k would have sucked but would make due as a single male. Going from 160k to 0 dollars and suddenly the job market stiffens up for 3 years is what radicalizes me.
Addiction, it's a kind of addiction impossible to fight
I am 60yo and I code everyday for the sake of it. I use AI extensively as it helps me create more apps than before, one every couple of days. I don't sell them, I hoard them like if having more apps makes my universe bigger. My addiction has no sense at all but I don't try to fight it as it produces immense frustration and much greater pleasure, and that extreme change in moods is what makes the addiction stronger, just like a gambler or a fentanyl abuser
That's me, and I don't want to be cured
This is exactly why I can't understand the AI mental health stuff about it being demotivating. I find it exciting to build apps in the same way, I don't pump out apps like a machine gun, but I do manage to make high quality apps I can maintain myself, as I've discovered. It just takes effort, which I'm willing to put in with AI. Never understood the hate around that. It's possible to have "soul" or anything that normal, "artisanal" apps have if you put in effort, and AI made it easier, at least for me, to put in effort.
Edit: I see you changed your comment and now introduced it being a craft, which changes the comment entirely.
While some artists turn the labor-intensive aspects of crafting into a part of their expression (including any angles on tradition and social-economic factors), like Ai Weiweis[0] installation Sunflower Seeds[1] in the Tate Modern in London, others might focus on the community aspect of crafting as part of their media, like how Thomas Hirschhorns[2] installation Musée précaire Albinet[3][4][5] close to Paris takes crafting as a means to "be present and produce something together on location", as "agreement", as part of a community in a public space, and as inclusion of anybody beyond differences in the understanding of Art. AFAICR he could even get the Mona Lisa from the Louvre for a few days to exhibit it there.
Besides, I think it's safe to say that any work in the field of Performing Arts is based on an analysis of their craft.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_Weiwei
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunflower_Seeds_(artwork)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hirschhorn
[3]: https://www.thomashirschhorn.com/musee-precaire-albinet/
[4]: https://www.thomashirschhorn.com/about-the-musee-precaire-al...
[5]: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mus%C3%A9e_pr%C3%A9caire_Albin...
Does any of it really matter?
A Urinal[1] can be Art. A collection of programs[2] can be Art. Why?
Because we define it as such. Art isn't clearly defined nor should it be. Art is an expression of an idea, and at the same time, it isn't. It depends on what you think, what I believe and what everyone else knows.
Art for me is the expression of the fact that nothing makes sense yet we act as if we understand the sense behind it all, and at the same time, I dunno.
This is not a pipe[3]. As this is not a program or is it? Apparently this can be a prompt to generate code - nowadays.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)
I've never once in my life looked at a piece of code and thought "I am in the presence of god". However, the systems composed by code can often elicit this response.
For anything much more complicated than undergraduate level academic exercises, the right design media isn't the code itself, it's the modules and their interfaces and how they are interconnected. This sort of thing is much more effectively captured in diagrams than in linear constructs like code.
To put a finer point on it, the design of any non-trivial system is much more effectively communicated as diagrams. You wouldn't try to convey how such a system works to the new hire, by wading through hex dumps of the executables, or even assembly listings. I've been on projects and had 300K (bytes not sloc!) of C++ source dumped on me, though, and something like that is immune to all but the simplest tweaks until you suffer the pain of distilling a set of accurate diagrams of what's going on.
Once asked a favorite and very important professor who helped us start teaching, isn't, in their opinion, programming an art, given it has all markings of creative writing. She said, "yes, dear, we actually thought about it at one conference during the 70s, and concluded very much it is in fact art, but then aslo decided it is to be understood as engineering, because art would not sound too serious with the mathematicians."
:D perhaps I changed a word or two, but this was the general message. still wonder which conference this might've been. I hope she forgives me for retelling the story in such a blunt manner, from where she is in the afterlife.
You make similar kind of choices while programming as well. Hence, programming is definitely an art since there are many ways something can be implemented, almost to the level that you can recognize who has written the code by seeing the code itself. Most such programmers don't even have the visibility to higher level goals of the org they are working in, I used to be in this group earlier.
I remember it used to be a 'problem' for a lot of senior developers, who used to ask for consistency in how code is written, like spacing between keywords, indentation, start/end of parenthesis, naming convention, etc. Wondering if they'll settle for more 'Soul' in the code now :). Or maybe, they have permanently shifted to the other groups now - where only the output matters.
This is an very broad definition of 'art'. By this metric, I'm pretty sure me choosing what to have for lunch is art.
If choosing what to have for lunch is making you involve your imagination and analyse choices, then I guess it would fall in the category of art.
And due to restraints of time, budget and prior experiences, you might go for default choices anyways.
OK. Well I am clearly an art master of lunch planning. Who knew?
You must have 'mastered' this art. Unless you are willing to share this mastery and ask for feedback, only you would know!
A big component of art is self-expression. There is very little of it when you're being paid to write code, except maybe choosing your editor theme and minor stylistic choices of your source code.
It didn't stop AlphaGo from beating the best human go players, though.
if err != nil { return nil, err }
As an old man now, I can think back over my lifetime of programming, and I remember all the ideas I've had but had no time or energy to execute.
I've landed 5 super fun ideas in the last 5 months.
It feels like flying. This is truly an amazing time to be alive.
I think because a program is textual, people incorrectly draw analogical conclusions for programs based on their experience with written works, in which the medium of expression and the artwork coincide. However, this is not the case for programs because many equivalent programs can produce the same end result (runtime user experience) and we do not typically incorporate the program itself in our judgement of the artistic merits of the runtime experience. In writing the form and content are inextricably linked to a much stronger extent.
Many people here are talking about programming as a tool you use to solve problems and build systems, but that’s just the subset of programming tasks corporations pay you to do. Programming is for many other things and it can be as expressive or constrained as you like.
Programming for money means managing a codebase and that's more akin to biology. You add inhibitors, promoters, etc. depending on the current requirements of the environment.
When excel is good enough to do that, people will use excel and not pay you to manage a monolith or even allow R/D to start from a blank slate with a new take.
What you create on a blank slate with your ideas might be art, but it's usually not evolving, you keep the picture, album etc. frozen in that state.
And I totally resonate with the pleasure of crafting code and the artistic aspect of it.
However, it is not just that, and when it comes to making a living, then the story changes.
And for that second part, man is AI a killer tool.
And I'll add,: even for the first part, the story isn't black and white.
If you use AI very carefully and in a collaborative manner, meaning not for the "creative writing" part, but for the "looking over your shoulder part" and "making suggestions" part.
Isn't this the case with all art?
There are many commercial artist that are putting some of their creative input to the side to make something that sells. That doesn't stop it from being art.
There are photographers that in their daily lives make school pictures or journalistic picutres while they may be more interested in making artistic pictures.
The same used to be for painters (a lot of the great painters actually) used to mostly make portraits or commission pieces to order, not to their taste.
Same goes for writers, videographers and other arts.
On that at least we agree (ignoring the rubbish about "AI", unless it describes an artificial intelligence with at least peer-level (i. e. human-level) agency, and not a language model). The same goes for the ridiculous, but for chatbot lovers certainly convenient, notion that art stops being art because money (or some other form of compensation) changed hands. That's just a reheated version of the tosh incompetents threw at artists since time immemorial. I remember the last time when it was very en vogue: the pathetic "anti-art" movements of the 90s.
And programming? Processes and their manifestations, depending on definitions of course, can indeed be art. Just like writing and its manifestations (e. g. poems, novels).
To provide an example, I will use an existing comment here from WCSTombs: "programming is primarily problem solving, which isn't fundamentally artistic because its main goal is correctness and fitness for purpose".
I don't consider the programming I do at work to be art or expect to ever approach art. It fits their definition. But I could see some of the programming I do for pleasure to fall within that category. Correctness is nice I guess, but fitness for purpose was never a consideration in my hobby programming, quite the opposite, actually.
I was programming for a long time before I ever starting programming for money, which is why I feel strongly about this distinction, but it may be that in the current day and age, I am just being a boomer about the whole thing.
Maybe fewer and fewer, but the mistakes will never be totally eliminated. This is why those wanting to learn how to write software shouldn't get discouraged that 'Oh, AI will replace human programmers'.
The very same thing that allows humans to make errors, find errors, learn from it, fix it...AI can/will do too. Then what?
You lack imagination.
You can still get some value from his works below without committing to his metaphysics.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Lila
At its very high points programming approaches art, but programming is primarily problem solving, which isn't fundamentally artistic because its main goal is correctness and fitness for purpose, not aesthetic value. I'm pretty sure for most of us the choice to use LLMs or not has nothing to do with it being art or not art. If I estimate a cost-benefit analysis, the true cost of using the LLM is much more than it would likely ever provide, so it makes little logical sense to use them except in very limited situations.
By the way, I have to say this is a really strange type of article, an explanation of the supposed opinions and attitudes of non-AI-users written by an AI user, seemingly without any input from the former group. It reads a bit as if it's building a strawman to justify the author's own views.
Code is beauty
Creativity is king
I would argue that problem solving is actually what makes any art art. When making "traditional art" you are constantly solving problems. For example, how do I make this piece of rock look like a greek god, what parts to chip off, what tools to use etc.
Art is not always made for aesthetic value, most traditional art is probably created for profit. That doesn't make it not art.
I think you might have the (in my opinion wrong) notion that there is only one "correct" way to write code. This is not true, so much so that you can identify a programmer by their signature style. Similarly to how you may identify a writer by his writing style.
I'm bothered by the exact quote you pulled from the article, although I didn't mention it, because it's reticent of a certain hypocritical hot take among founders and business/marketing types who can be "generous" toward their engineers because they believe that their own artistic contribution to the project is some messianic vision of it that far outweighs the quotidian questions about how it's actually built. I didn't really want to weigh in on what I felt was that tendency in the post, because I do work successfully with a lot of people like that and I often admire the sweat and work they put into their own side of running things... but those kinds of statements do come off as somewhat patronizing if they're not backed up by truly massive amounts of hard work.
When you have scoured your deepest understanding for hours - or days - in order to rewrite a function so that it is easier to read, shorter, more correct, and a thoughtful expression of your own insights and understanding; then you will see how programming can be art.
I find it incredible when the concepts in a system fall into place and start lining up and you get these unexpected relationships that "just work". It's beautiful in the same way mathematics is beautiful. It's lovely when something is made of lots of pieces at first and then suddenly collapse and simplify into a single structure.
I also enjoy other bits of programming. I like the flow state, I like the act of creation, I like feeling like I have an impact, I like being paid. So it's not like people fall into one category or another, and it's not like programming is one single thing. There's room within any discipline for creativity and for art.
I think many professional artists probably spend much of their time problem-solving, too --- authors trying to fit plot points together, sculptors working out which materials will work with which ones.
It is more than that in the sense that I have a lot of obligations to understanding the code. The reason is that if I don't understand the code, I will not be able to answer questions that are asked to me. And those answers are generally very important for the future of the business.
Code is art in the sense that I need to arrange it such as I can actually make it maintainable, readable, easy to add new features and make it that I can answers questions very easily.
LLMs remove this ability because it doesn't let me the time to absorb the change as such that I can guaranties those 4 requirements. It just concentrate on adding new features without making sure it doesn't break the other 3 requirements.
To guaranties those for 4 points, I need a mental map of the code which llm generally remove. The more we use llms, the less of a mental map you have of the code
But I'm 46 and I was never able to make a living painting, writing or playing music, although I spent years trying my hand at those things while waiting tables and driving cab. Apparently the only creative output people are willing to pay for from me is what I can do with creative code. And that's fine. To me, it's just as expressive and it still lets me incorporate all the narrative and visual ideas I have, if they let me be free with it. I get $300/hr to be free with it, even now when in theory you could ask AI to do it, and I feel well compensated and appreciated.
But that being said, art is a luxury that only makes sense to pay for if you either want it to simply appreciate it, or if you see some advantage for your business by comissioning it or sponsoring it. You write as someone who views building their business as a sort of art, and those are the kinds of people I've been lucky to partner with, who also view their creative employees as artists who provide hard-to-calculate extra value through their perspective and creativity. But that's a genuinely hard sell to investors these days. I mean, my specialty was bespoke websites and apps for 20 years. But I was sought out for that. I never once went and tried to convince someone that bespoke code and art would be better for their bottom line. In fact, I spent most of that time telling people to get a wordpress site or to hire the cheapest offshore freelancers who could build them a minimum viable product.
I'm glad that people who are building their dreams still appreciate the artistry that we engineers and designers put into what we build, but I'm even less sure it's good business for a startup now than I was 20 years ago.
I suppose the one thing you do get if you hire an artist (speaking also as someone who is in charge of hiring them) is some measure of loyalty and the lucky chance at seeing something that no one has done before. That's hard to quantify on a spreadsheet, and it may only reflect slowly over time on your customers' loyalty to you. A google doodle or some other tiny, fertile patch of ground that you're willing to pay $5k a month for to some whacko like me or one of my artists.... that may end up being the heart and soul of an otherwise sterile, interchangeable brand. But we have far fewer saints and patrons than we did in the 90s, and I have to admit, overall the culture has degraded to the point that very few people care anymore about authentic or original art... of any discipline.
The fact that you are making this a us vs them situation makes you seem like you are more humble-bragging that you belong on the “actually doing something” side while all the other are on the “they need my expertise and my expertise alone”.
C’mon now man. You’re 46. This is the type of talk that belongs in high school.
It's not us vs them, my main point was that most people don't need bespoke art as code these days.
The ones who do choose the people who can do it. Humble brag? Sure ;)
I would prefer to say "fascination", because for some people, writing code is their fascination. Is it art if only they would label it so? Because I'm pretty sure that if a "code artist" showed their code to 10 other experienced developers, not only would some of the others not consider it art, but likely some of the others would consider it low quality.
Are code golfers artists? Fetishists? What if they believe theirs is the only way - the true artistry of coding? Would all of our single-responsibility, immutable core/imperative shell hybrid-functional code be discounted as garbage? (Not poking at the code golfers; I think they do it for the challenge, not because they believe that is how code should be written; but it illustrates an extreme.)
For most people, I think it's fair to say they write code because they are trying to make something happen. If their code runs without errors, in the necessary time, and without exhausting the computer's memory, then I believe most would consider that code "good": it does the job.
Are they working with others? Will others need to read it? If so, perhaps the most artistic code is not the best code to write. I know many professionals dislike working with the code artist who makes code that is unreadable to all but the most skilled developers, because it causes friction and leads to misunderstandings and bugs.
Now we have reached the point where general purpose code is so easily and correctly built by our AI tools that there is no practical point to writing it ourselves.
Are the AI-naysayers, the purists, writing their own libraries? Are they building everything from scratch? If not, they are not the true code artists. They have made practical concessions. They just haven't graduated to the realization that code is a commodity.
I suspect the people most against use of AI for building are the people who lack the creativity - the idea sources - and live just to translate requirements into code. They will gradually find fewer opportunities, and this threat is what probably makes them get emotional when looking at AI-built products.
Yeah, until they spend several years working on a game, then try vibe coding and AI makes a better one in 4 minutes. Not that I'd know anything about that.
People tend to naturally develop feelings toward whatever they work with for a prolonged period of time and that applies to programming languages too. Mainstream languages for software development generally prioritize correctness, reliability, performance and other engineering concerns primarily, and then try to make the language ergonomic to the possible degree. In the meanwhile, those engineering judgements acquire aesthetic feelings.
When someone says that a particular language's code snippet is beautiful, they almost always mean that the engineering effort that went into the language's design that made that particular captivating expression or statement possible is credit worthy. Its more like a way to appreciating the engineering effort and not treating it literally as "art".
I would have agreed with the "art" part to a certain degree if at least a few mainstream programming languages are substantially more denotational in their semantics but unfortunately, almost all of them adhere to operational semantics mostly and that is basically "my" issue with treating programming as "art". Even when it is art, it can't be for software development(with imperative languages) in particular. So, to proof assistants, purely functional languages, Lisp dialects, there might be some "art" involved. And this is why the concept of "art" for programming is fundamentally fucked up. NVM.
> If I learned PHP, I could build back-end applications. If I learned HTML and CSS, I could build websites.
So, what have you been doing for the last 10 years and why i see only 2026 in your github?
Looking at the wayback machine, the site was first published in January 2026 with no blog. Then in Feb, the site was updated with a blog archive, including posts from 2025, before the site's blog functionality was active.
The blog post ends:
>I don’t use AI when writing. It produces soulless, bland text. AI slop that no one wants to read
But if you look back through earlier essays you see stuff like this:
>Technology evolves. Complacency endures. Building something means taking responsibility for its survival. It’s respect for time that can never be regained
Which has all of the hallmarks of a Claude generated essay (or just a human failing the Turing test).
I've been suspicious of this for about a year now.
This blog is written under a pseudonym. Therefore, there is no history for this blog before 2025. Social media accounts and GitHub are also set up under this brand.
> Which has all of the hallmarks of a Claude generated essay (or just a human failing the Turing test).
This was my first blog post, and I used AI to edit it. I wrote 10 drafts before I ended up with the version I published on my blog. And I don't like this post. I wrote it myself. AI only suggested phrasing that I thought sounded good. In the next post, I also used AI to edit the text, but to a lesser extent. Since then, I haven't used AI at all when writing or editing texts.
From a system-centric POV the art world could be considered a system, and the programming world could be considered a system.
Programming is a craft and can therefor be part of an artistic practice as well as many other practices.
What's Art and what isn't is up to each individual and remains generally undefined.
> So, what have you been doing for the last 10 years and why i see only 2026 in your github?
Self-hosted git services are a thing, ya know?
I spent 10 years making money. I didn't see the point in spending time on open source. I never committed any code to open source until 2026. Because, for me, programming isn't art or a hobby.
I don't quite understand you, sometimes you contradict one of your points of view, sometimes another.
For me, programming is a way to make money and build projects.
> for me, programming isn't art or a hobby
> make money
Do you mean their seal?
And the article clearly stated that I belong to the type of people for whom programming is a way to make money. It went on to say that there is another type of person for whom programming is an art.
I don't understand the take about "programming is a way to make money". Programs cannot pay to you.
I think you should clarify what you're talking about: art, programming, or money. Because these are three different systems.
If you talk about money show me the numbers. If talk about code show me the code. If you talk about art show me the art.
You could have avoided the programmer classification entirely here while staying consistent, but instead seem to be distancing yourself from again, your own framing just because you chose a different path which I don't understand at all.
Of course we will rationalize the culling and justify our identities. Programming can be an art... this is true. But this is not the issue at hand.
AI has showed us that all human endeavor... all art is just algorithmic nonsense easily generated with a neural network. If AI generated stuff is slop, then so is human generated stuff because it is indistinguishable to the real thing.
--- > These are true programmers who write code regardless of income
I also - without any hesitation - detest this type of bullshit. Get off your high horse. Programmers are programmers, there is no reason to devolve arguments that divide into classes for the sake of adding emotional weight to one side.
I can steer agent to write code that I’m comfortable reading and maintaining. If it goes off the rails, I can just tell it to refactor. I can ship and get sales faster than if i were doing 100% coding by myself.
After thinking about it, I realized my initial resistance was mostly because it challenged decades of my technical habits and comfort zones. But if I steer it properly, it can basically handle the whole engineering process better and faster than I can.
In the end, it pushes me more into the managerial side of things. talking to people, aligning the product with what customers actually need, getting more sales, etc. And i'm really happy about that.
This won’t work for every engineer. Some people just really hate the management side of things.
The reason why is because for however much programming is an art, it is even moreso not. I know someone will argue about this but by and large code that looks pretty but doesn't execute or do anything meaningful rarely has much value. The most purely artistic endeavor I can think of that involves code would be something like IOCCC. Which is awesome. But, if the code didn't actually compile or run, it just simply wouldn't be interesting at all. I think there is a strong argument to be made that no matter how artistic or creative you can argue programming is, it will always be fundamentally about mechanical side of things first, then about creative expression. Insofar as code is expression (it is) it is so only secondary to being executable code.
People will continue to "fight back" against the spread of LLM text and diffusion art because we want authentic human expression and those things are simply going too far in literally replacing human expression with automated output. If creativity involving the use of tools is a spectrum, using LLMs to write text and diffusion models to generate "drawings" is almost as far to the no-creative-expression end as "simply stealing something someone else made" as you can get, because it's really similar to that.
But for code, I think ultimately nobody is coming to save programming. There will be plenty of people lamenting the loss of the art, but if it really is possible to make LLMs that can write code better than people can, then it's pretty close to over. At this point, LLMs definitely can not write code better than people can, for similar reasons to why they can't write English prose better than people can, but they are nonetheless superhuman in some ways (which, as a statement on its own, isn't that scary; I mean, strictly speaking, a calculator also is superhuman in some ways.)
Oddly enough though, despite major early success, I'm still not convinced that we have hit the tipping point where human code is guaranteed to be dead soon. Actually, I think people have been vastly over-eager to adopt AI code and many codebases are suffering because they weren't careful enough about how they did it. Not to mention, the mountains of slop that Microsoft blames all of the GitHub downtime for is mostly aspirational and a lot of it is probably going to unceremoniously fall out of maintenance, at which point there isn't really much of a reason to pick it up since if you really wanted slop you could probably spend a few million tokens just doing it yourself with a model that is better than the one the author used anyways. I do prefer GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-6 Astra for producing code that I personally feel is more tasteful, with comments that are less stupid and redundant, but I still personally think the code sucks too much to ship as is. It's hard to square this with how absurdly powerful these tools really are. We are really having to confront the complexity of what it means to be "intelligent" or what makes code "good".
But to me, it doesn't change the likely eventuality, it only impacts the timeframe. And it does suck, because even ignoring the art of programming, it really was a pretty good career for a long time. With this career facing its potential death, I'm sitting here wondering what the hell we'll even do. Guess I hope the AI coding singularity is willing to wait for me to finish paying off my mortgage at least.
It's like chess. When you're an amateur you think your moves out, strategize, think that you're a genius for seeing three moves ahead for a few pieces. When you're a professional you view the whole board and know the standard strategy that works best for the situation. After all, chess is a solved game.
When I work with other programmers or on an old code base I want it to be boring and standard. I don't want to have to trace through six files just to figure out what's going on in one simple method call.