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Comment by dev0p | Hacker News Reader

> Code as Art

Code is code.

Code can be art, code can also be simply a tool to reach a goal.

If you want to create art, do it with your own two hands and your brain.

If you want to just Do The Thing, codegen it. No one cares. In before "Except your users having to use your vibeslop" FYI your Hand-Crafted Artisanal Code will still have bugs, so it's a moot point.

Heck, the very first thing the author does is links to another one of his own blog post where the above points are explicitly stated and explained, then restates at the end of the paragraph that there are no valid arguments for this one. So why keep beating this dead horse? Especially as the opener of the article.

This kind of mindset baffles me.

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Art was always recognizable as effort and discipline.

We talk a lot about the consumer side of this. Consumers will get tired of the creative output of AI. That it lacks soul. I agree.

But there is also the artist’s side. A craft that you dedicate decades to that’s now indistinguishable from someone who typed a couple sentences. This is a demoralizing place to be.

agree. 1) business does not care. Users do not care. they see the result. 2) you can still reason with AI about best practices and nth level of abstraction for an interface that will never be extended more than once.

do what you will. CNCs did not remove need for artisans.

> business does not care. Users do not care. they see the result.

Sure, but with LLMs you get a bad result with more bugs and greater fragility. People will care about that even if they don't care per se about the craft.

> CNCs did not remove need for artisans

is spiritually untrue. as cnc grew, machinists shrunk in headcount and wage.

it's like claming that online shopping hasn't killed malls. malls do still exist, but when is the last time you've been to one? was it busy?

> as cnc grew, machinists shrunk in headcount and wage.

Headcount, yes, wages, no.

However, you're assuming that cnc operators can't be artisans. Why?

If we allow anyone with a craft to be considered an artisans if they have a high enough skill level - and we should - I'd counter that the overall number of artisans has likely increased even if less of them now have the title of machinist.

Code can be efficient, code can be readable, code be maintainable... or none of those.

Art? While me and my colleagues had their own little style differences, I wouldn't call it art.

I don't even think code can be art. It can be used to produce art, but it's not art itself. And the production of code can be, at most, a craft, which the output is not really art, like painting/a painting.

Demoscene

what the person you replied to wrote still applies:

> It can be used to produce art, but it's not art itself.

one can argue that the actual art in the Demoscene is the things the code makes visible/audible, not the code itself.

it's like saying an empty piece of paper and a pen are art instead of the drawing which was made by using those things as tools.

there is an angle of a modern art installation featuring just a pen and an empty piece of paper, but that feels like an exception confirming the rule.

Hard disagree. The demoscene is entirely comprised of code that produces art, with insane tricks which are themselves art. Which sort of blurs the entire concept, as you can stretch this reasoning to kind of encompass anything, as per the pen and paper example you provided.

For example, is .kkrieger demo? Is it art? Is the game itself art or just the textures, 3d models and locations and enemies and everything else that it produces? Though only the code generates everything, like in demoscenes, so is the code art?

Kind of subjective really.

The thing about .kkreiger is that most of the size savings they got at the last minute were from extremely aggressive "dead code" elimination [1]. So, uhh, is the art really the code that was gutted by tools? Or is the art everything around the artifact?

[1]: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...

seems as the question is, if one considers the process of creating an artwork art itself. i guess people finding ingenious ways to create art with code can be considered some form of performance art. it still feels a bit far-fetched to me, but that's just a personal feeling, and as you've said, it's subjective anyways. interesting to think about.

i'd immediately agree for code which looks like art by looking at it, so in cases where the code really is the art. i can also imagine that there's code which looks like art and "generates" it as well, so that seems like code as an artwork.

for cases where code was written/engineered well to create an artwork with the least amount of lines, i'd consider the generated artwork to be art, and the code the result of a competitive coding challenge. again, subjective.

when comparing it to other forms of art i'm not that sure. i've mentioned performance art, which feels a bit like the exception breaking the rule. there's conceptual art as well. is the act of painting art itself? is a photographer finding the optimal place to stand to take a picture art? almost starts to sound like an artwork vs. artform discussion.

There are many ways to depict a moonrise over a lake.

    13/z23/-~/lxyt9/+99**s9/y#*+*y*y2*1-*3*

Like writing a poem attempting to express something under arbitrary constraints is unnecessary and difficult, yet has an appeal.

https://c50.fingswotidun.com/show/?code=13%2Fz23%2F-~%2Flxyt...

Duchamp's Fountain.

Anything can be art.

I agree with your thinking as well. Then, could you possibly critique my thoughts too? It seems like you and I think similarly, and I’m curious whether my logic is consistent.

[1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/casual/the-hardest-part-of-usi...

I skimmed through your article, and I'll address the bolded points

> being able to understand code by reading it is different from being able to do that same modeling yourself starting from a blank screen

That is simply Domain Knowledge. In a specific context, be it a Framework or an App or a Platform or Infrastructure or whatever else, you have to understand it. Of course, if you start from zero and you build it from scratch yourself, you have pretty much the best DK you can have.

That is usually not the case though. If you have external collaborators of any kind, your DK is always challenged. I find myself often dumped into Domains from which I have to gather Knowledge to understand. And, for me personally, having to read code written by an AI, especially now that they've gotten smart enough to not make glaringly stupid errors, is MUCH better than having to read Hand Crafted Code that has been handslopped (yes, I'm going to coin that term now) to meet Deadlines. Shortcuts, hacks, you name it. Terrible codebase sins, accumulated as years, even DECADES of "we'll fix it later".

Of course it's a pain. It always has been. Back in the GPT 4 / Claude 4 days, AI generated code was atrocious, but that is not the case anymore.

The rest of the article, especially these bolded points:

> The weight shifts from the ability to produce directly to the ability to evaluate output and set direction.

> So in the AI era, productivity is increasingly limited by the speed of judgment rather than the speed of writing.

> A manager who steps away from the front line may, over time, lose the ability to perform the work they are managing.

> does being able to evaluate code mean the same thing as owning the mental model of that program?

Are SPOT ON. You can vibeslop anything at the speed of light. But if you don't have the knowledge, taste, and expertise to not lose track of your DK so that it doesn't become an unmanageable mess, it's going to bite you in the proverbial ass.

But, again, that has always been true!

How is the code that was vibeslopped by ChatGPT in 1 minute different from the Junior Dev who spent a week handslopping a new type of wheel? The only difference is quality and speed.

And you need expertise to be able to recognize when something is wrong, and keep your DK updated at scale.

I felt a sense of kinship because your thoughts are so similar to mine. These days on HN, people say AI coding is so bad, but it has its advantages too. If you look at just the code blocks, it really writes better than most people (of course, global consistency is weaker). Hearing your story, I was surprised that what drew me to your comment was how similar our thinking is.

I also think ‘domain knowledge’ is incredibly important. Whether you write code or not matters, and coding as a hobby is good, but now every company forces you to write code with AI, so you can’t avoid using it, and I find myself thinking about how to maintain my own instincts.

I feel good seeing thoughts similar to mine. I upvoted you, and have a great day.

There have certainly been growing pains, and the term "vibecoding" was forged in a long gone era (almost two years ago!!!!) where AI generated code was actually bad.

I can safely say, especially with how close to actual perfection Claude Opus 5.5 is, that it's no longer the case.

Also people generally hate change. The ethical concerns around AI are also understandable and I agree with the vast majority of them, but the vast majority of the "AI BAD" crowd are simply irrationally angry at it and completely unwilling to engage with it in any kind of good faith.

They'll come around. I'm starting to see some change in the gaming community, which was 200% against any form of AI just a little while ago, and now that they're using it to reverse engineer, decompile, mod and mesh together old games there is a lot of people starting to say "Yeah AI is bad, but...".

There is some CRAZY stuff being being worked on which are objectively good for society as a whole which would have you sound insane just last year, and it's only going to get crazier with each new model.

> There have certainly been growing pains, and the term "vibecoding" was forged in a long gone era (almost two years ago!!!!) where AI generated code was actually bad.

That era is also today. And AI bros were lying to us two years ago, telling us how good the AI was at programming then. "But AI is actually good now" is a take with zero credibility any more, because it's been delivered inaccurately so much.

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