It’s really important to understand the various perspectives in AI discourse; those who view Programing as Art feel a deep affront and threat on many levels. It’s legitimate.
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 am (still) not a proponent for AI, however I hope AI might do to programming what the camera did to painting, and I hope that will be a good thing.
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.
one doesn't go to a gallery to watch the painting get made. Creative coding can still be enjoyed by appreciating the output.
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).
Maybe not, but the process of creation and the final result will be of interest to other creators. Like any hobby it might seem strange to outsiders but it will be fascinating to those who are part of the scene.
Half assed fun fact: there was this painter I can't recall his name, the one that painted that girl with the head scurf. He might have used camera obscura and traced the picture. To me it feels like our times. There's a new tool that can be used along with the tools we have been using for decades to create something magical.
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.
I think that is quite likely but it is going to be a painful transition. Especially for the people who were only attracted to the profession for the money.
Sure but I assume they can find money in other things also and will probably be attracted to that just as much. For example prompt crafting may be their new home.
If this were true, there would be a large market for artisan code. There isn't.
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.
> If this were true, there would be a large market for artisan code. There isn't.
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.
The best code I've ever seen written were friends who don't code for a living, they code for the love of it, and you can tell they love what they are doing.
Well, my way of thinking about it is basically that I did not spend my life shiting on over-engineered-bloated-Golberg-machine source code written by so-called programmers to finish my life asking agents to generate these same stuff 10x faster.
While this was true 1+ years ago, the agents don't write bad code anymore. They might not write according to your preferences, but you can also have it adjust to your style.
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.
The agents still write bad code unless my colleagues and the people who submit PRs to the repos I am responsible for somehow use agents from last year.
And, no, it is not a question about style or preferences, the code is messy and contains to me as a maintainer obvious bugs.
>still write bad code unless my colleagues and the people who submit PRs
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!
I use them. The top 3 models still write terrible code, regardless of harness. They’ll litter the code with safety checks for scenarios we’ve already guaranteed won’t happen. And they’ll solve problems you didn’t ask them to, and they’ll come up with a working, but convoluted solution. They’ll sometimes write really weird code if you’re using them in an obscure language.
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.
I'm fully convinced that people who think agents write decent code now simply don't read the code. Their bar is "it runs, so it's fine".
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.
In my experience, the people who are enamored with LLMs for programming fall into one of three categories. Shills, people who could never program decently to begin with, and people who don't care about the quality of their work. Everyone I know who actually is a good programmer and cares about doing a good job has found that LLMs make too many mistakes to be trusted, and avoid them if they can.
They don’t hand write it because it would be an embarrassment. At the same time, Claude Code doesn’t really need to be any better than it is while Anthropic has great models no one else has.
Because all the important ones have been true since 2022 and will be true forever, because they have nothing to do with LLM capabilities and instead are focused on LLM nature.
Because they haven't changed yet (despite AI bros claiming that they have every 6 months), and therefore are unlikely to change as we move into the future. It's not impossible, of course. But when the "this new model is totally better" claims keep turning out to be false, that doesn't give confidence that the future is going to be different.
I have some lines of code I’ve written that I quite cherish. I’ve posted about such excerpts many times online. So we both like code quite a bit.
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.
Why are people mixing everything up? Since when code has a soul?
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.
What I find ironic are the "creatives" who declare resolutely that AI cannot create art,... now here is this cool vibe-coded software I've made. It's like saying a chisel cannot create a sculpture. Yeah, OK, but without the chisel the sculpture wouldn't have been made. Who cares. It's a tool. What you do with it is up to you.
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.
If you don't know what a soul is, and you think it's something people just make up, then you are missing out on the experience of being human and you have a bigger problem than not being able to understand what art is.
When you find yourself with a choice between "either this person doesn't understand the experience of being human or I'm not following what they mean" the latter is probably a sound choice.
So whales do not have a soul? Only humans do have one? What about our ancestors? Did the homo erectus have a soul? What about big apes, did they?
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.
Is it this fuzzy blob of ineffable experiences, aesthetics, qualia, self-reference, dualism, spirituality and other things? I don't need to reject all this to notice that its fuzziness makes it impossible to operationalize.
Isn't one of the main attractions to art the skill required to create it? If anyone can create some dodgy AI picture, it ceases to have the same, if any, value.
> 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?
I’m finding this fascinating personally. The lines people are drawing to try and keep themselves inside some definition they can mark as special.
The banana isn't the art. The art is placing the banana in a gallery and art market context to make a funny and ironic comment about the gallery and art market context.
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.
Where’s the contradiction?? X can be just Y, and X can be much more than Y. No contradiction, just an observation that you can use it one way or another.
Nothing ever is just a tool. Saying that X "can just be a tool" is a fundamental violation of that statement; saying then "X can be much more than just a tool" is a violation in form of a contradiction. It's very easy to parse...
I'd say this article is a stronger argument that "programming can be a hobby" than "programming is an art". Lots of people do lots of things for enjoyment without a salary, and we tend not to call all of those things an artform.
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.
Programming (usually) isn't art, it's design. Design is when you arrange something to serve a particular purpose, not just for aesthetic value. In programming we understand that this purpose is not just to make code that looks nice, but also that functions properly, that is maintainable, that communicates its intent, etc.
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.
100%. Hobby is the word this article was looking for. And I don't think that's less meaningful, or that there's no way people can elevate their hobby to artform. But what the article describes is people with a hobby, not an art.
Not wanting to linger on the definition of art, which is rather vague, but a lot of people will consider their hobby an art form, if there is enough room for mastery.
I mean many Japanese people consider that pouring tea can be an art form.
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.
I used to really enjoy writing code, to the point where I would have thought of it as art and fine contemplation.
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.
What revived me was doing visual coding using Node-RED[1] - remember Yahoo Pipes? Great fun doing stuff "visually" by connecting the rectangles with the lines!
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.
> I like it when new ideas for the text come to me as I’m writing. The writing process itself — the thinking that goes on in the moment — is important to me, not just the result.
This. Applies to me while writing text, writing code and writing data analyses.
Exactly this. You always have to choose what to leave in, what to take out. "Ways to do it" suggest themselves, and you weigh them, "is it the best fit for this project". A lot of what's left out evaporates into the void, but often enough you stumble onto one of these doesn't-fits that's nonetheless a keeper. You know it'll be useful somewhere else, or as the heart of something new.
Sure, you create the product, but it's these other by-the-way ideas that keep one coming back.
It is a true story, though I dont remember exactly where it took place:
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.
Art is "expression of an idea". Programming ISN'T art; the program/game/website could be, but programming is a CRAFT. The people he mentions are not artists, they are craftsmen.
Art is a word, Craft is a word, this line is a sentence, and the whole text is a paragraph.
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.
I feel like your definition of Art is too simplistic and incomplete. At least since Joseph Beuys we know that "anything can be Art", and it's just a matter of how an "expression of an idea" is used to lift something up to the status of being Art. Crafts, as practices, are not excluded from that potential.
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.
I wrote a programming language because I wanted to express the way my brain works and to help people understand the way certain people think about the world. Art or craft?
Most solutioning is art, given that you should have more than one way to reach the target state and target state itself is negotiable and non-concrete. When there are multiple options you are forced to analyze between them, sometimes you have a preferred option if the analysis has been done before. Your choices while solutioning will reflect your experience and how you think. In short, it definitely reflects 'you'.
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.
> Most solutioning is art, given that you should have more than one way to reach the target state and target state itself is negotiable and non-concrete. When there are multiple options you are forced to analyze between them, sometimes you have a preferred option if the analysis has been done before. Your choices while solutioning will reflect your experience and how you think. In short, it definitely reflects 'you'.
This is an very broad definition of 'art'. By this metric, I'm pretty sure me choosing what to have for lunch is art.
I think art's definition would be even broader. Anything that involves your imagination, skill, ideas and analysis (applying yourself to the choices in front of you) would be art. Just googled and verified this, btw.
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.
Playing go is art. Go was even considered one of the four main arts in ancient China. Along with calligraphy, instrumental music and brush painting[0].
It didn't stop AlphaGo from beating the best human go players, though.
System design and architecture are the art. Programming is a set of techniques useful in realizing these compositions.
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.
Just as it's not immediately obvious when looking at a mile of assembly code what particular algorithm is represented, it's similarly difficult to figure out "what's going on" when presented with a pile of C++
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.
Programming might be art, but being a career programmer isn't, the same way being paid to paint vases day in, day out for a living following specifications and the whims of your superiors makes you an artist.
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.
Lovely to read, but AI will surely remove a lot of software engineering with little creativity.
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.
It's still too early to say what will the outlook be like in the next ten years, wrt to AI, but one thing I am perfectly sure of is: AI will always produce 'errors' due to the fundamental fact that it's heuristics-based.
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'.
If a human makes errors and discovers it, the error gets fixed. With AI, it usually fails to fix the error totally on first try, even on nth tries. If on the off chance it does fix it, it generates other problems.
Humans do produce errors. But they produce far fewer than LLMs, and they can also learn. Once a person makes a given mistake and realizes what he did wrong, he will take steps to prevent that mistake in the future. LLMs do not do this and therefore are less trustworthy than humans, even if both are prone to error.
>They enjoy writing code, solving development challenges, designing, figuring out the logic, fixing bugs, and understanding the entire system as a whole. They enjoy the process itself. And they’ll never hand that over to AI agents.
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.
I read your essay "Programming is Art" — interesting thoughts. I run into this constantly as well. But for me, AI itself gives me the initial idea, which I then develop and shape my own way. In my product, I train it to think exactly the way I want it to. It would be great to talk about this.
> I love building startups, and they love writing code. For me, building projects is a way to make money. For them, programming is art.
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.
I don't know. I have a fascination with code structure which is definitely primarily aesthetic, not practical --- which is a compulsion I have to suppress when doing code professionally for practical reasons. (Sometimes you have to deliver.)
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.
> problem solving, which isn't fundamentally artistic
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.
Mathematics also strives for correctness before aesthetics, but is often considered an art. Programming is little different imo.
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 agree about the cost-benefit of LLMs being negative from a logical perspective, art aside.
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.
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.
AI as technology is cool and all, as cool as GCC or Linux or HTTP. The thing I don’t like about AI is that 99% of the time we talk about vendor-locked AI (claude, codex) and 99% of the time we use those. So you need to pay to use the models. You depend on the big corporations. It’s not anymore, I clone this repo and let’s explore freely.
These articles and comments on them always seem to conflate programming with programming at one's job. And it makes sense, for most people that's one and the same. But if we're talking about programming and art, I think that is a major distinction.
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.
Labels rarely fit well. We can't even agree on the definition of "art".
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.
I like and believe in this paradigm, because I'm an artist ... I'm a painter and a musician, fiction writer and coder. Each satisfy something different for me intellectually. I can sink my mind fully into whichever I'm absorbed in. And I'm a perfectionist at each.
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.
Programming can be a medium of expression for working through ideas. However, source code is not art in the same way that the paintbrush is not art.
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.
> So, what have you been doing for the last 10 years and why i see only 2026 in your github?
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.
But the article isn't titled "Programming is art for me", is it?
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.
This sort of clarification to be quite honest makes alot of your prose ring very hollow around there being distinct classes. In the beginning I will say that you very much make it clear you believe parts of your experience were closer to art as a way to frame the rest of the points you think about.
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.
I read your comment first, and thought it was a bit uncharitable to the author. But then looking through their social media presence. No sign of commentary before late 2025.
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).
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.
I can appreciate the sentiments the author has to their own career, but personally it doesn't resonate with me. I'm a firm believer in the idea that systems you intend to be used by others (imo) must be driven by measurable, consistent, and constrained processes that are dictated by goals of the project. Sometimes this involves subjective judgements which are then later corrected as data is collected. If we are overloading the term art to mean anything where there is subjective judgement applied, or similarly where there is any enjoyment of a process, okay sure I can get behind it. But if we mean subjectivity in expression of logic and rule, then no I do not agree that this is the reason we should be more thoughtful of LLM-based codegen tooling (of which there are many more reasons to avoid it in many contexts which do not require going into the subjective aspects).
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> 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.
AI is good for humanity. But part of this goodness is achieved via natural selection... a culling. This person is about to be cut... I'm about to be cut.
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.
imo, designing the solution (architecture, algorithm, data structure) is the art.
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.
I think a discussion about programming being an art is incomplete without bringing into scope live coding, where you write code that produces music in front of an audience; Processing, a programming language for artists; and literate programming, where you intertwine prose and code to form a coherent narrative or story.
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.
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.
> However, it is not just that, and when it comes to making a living, then the story changes.
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.
I think a key difference is that most programming careers, the artistic outlet (code) is not what is being sold to customers. The customer might feel something if the app works fast, but they won't feel anything about the fun bit packing and struct-of-array design you did for personal enjoyment
Sure but most day to day professional photos are not shot because the subject is so interesting or the composition is so intriguing. They are shot to accompany a flyer, sell a product or to give a grandchild picture to their grandparents, or to get a picture on your drivers license. Even though the photographer uses a lot of techniques and knowledge to frame their shots and get a good picture, artistic values that is often not the function.
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).
I never liked the idea that programming is an art. When there's a problem that you're trying to solve there's usually only one or two good ways to solve it and hopefully you know one of those approaches. When you start getting creative is when you start running into long-term problems, especially maintenance.
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.
I believe there are many top level chess masters that consider chess an art. Same for programmers, to many of the best, it is an art form or at least a craft that they take very seriously. And many would disagree that programming is solved. "Boring and standard" can be a sign of quality, but it also applies to those code bases that don't solve any interesting problems and just drown in boilerplate, kept alive by dozens or hundreds of programmer drones just working to collect their paychecks.
"Russian schoolboy chess" as Bobby Fisher would have called it, and while he detested this style of approach, it is far closer to how chess is played, where the moves come from rigorous analysis and application of engine discovery than by the beauty of the game (which is ofc why there is Fisher-chess because he felt it kept the artistic side)
It’s really important to understand the various perspectives in AI discourse; those who view Programing as Art feel a deep affront and threat on many levels. It’s legitimate.
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 am (still) not a proponent for AI, however I hope AI might do to programming what the camera did to painting, and I hope that will be a good thing.
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.
Nobody will go to an exhibition or a museum to stare at code like we do with paintings. The public for creative programming is really thin.
one doesn't go to a gallery to watch the painting get made. Creative coding can still be enjoyed by appreciating the output.
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).
Maybe not, but the process of creation and the final result will be of interest to other creators. Like any hobby it might seem strange to outsiders but it will be fascinating to those who are part of the scene.
I read code for fun in my free time
No, because it doesn't make sense to experience it in that context. I think of it as more like poetry . For example: https://www.norvig.com/spell-correct.html
> Nobody will go to an exhibition or a museum to stare at code like we do with paintings.
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.
Half assed fun fact: there was this painter I can't recall his name, the one that painted that girl with the head scurf. He might have used camera obscura and traced the picture. To me it feels like our times. There's a new tool that can be used along with the tools we have been using for decades to create something magical.
you are referring to Johannes Vermeer?
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.
I think that is quite likely but it is going to be a painful transition. Especially for the people who were only attracted to the profession for the money.
Sure but I assume they can find money in other things also and will probably be attracted to that just as much. For example prompt crafting may be their new home.
Excellent analogy which I'm annoyed I didn't think of myself.
That is a sharp observation! It is the true North Star of analogies!
> back in the day it was a serious occupation for capturing reality, and therefore creativity was taking second stage
Source please.
Just look at all the painted portraits? Or portrait painting in general?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis
If software becomes dramatically cheaper to produce, that may just give investors even more software to invest in
That is the comforting idea that allows people to believe in the status quo. It is a possibility but not the likely outcome in my opinion.
Yes, Silicon Valley became Wall Street and that basically ruined it completely. Soon as the term brogrammer was coined it was over.
If this were true, there would be a large market for artisan code. There isn't.
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.
> If this were true, there would be a large market for artisan code. There isn't.
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.
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[1] https://www.spiegel.de/karriere/illustrator-als-beruf-kreati...
There is a large market for artisan code. It's called open source.
Good code is pretty much the solution with some boilerplate tacked on.
One of the most important series ever written in the history of computer science is called "The Art of Computer Programming".
The best code I've ever seen written were friends who don't code for a living, they code for the love of it, and you can tell they love what they are doing.
Well, my way of thinking about it is basically that I did not spend my life shiting on over-engineered-bloated-Golberg-machine source code written by so-called programmers to finish my life asking agents to generate these same stuff 10x faster.
I love code, you don't, fine. So be it.
While this was true 1+ years ago, the agents don't write bad code anymore. They might not write according to your preferences, but you can also have it adjust to your style.
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.
The agents still write bad code unless my colleagues and the people who submit PRs to the repos I am responsible for somehow use agents from last year.
And, no, it is not a question about style or preferences, the code is messy and contains to me as a maintainer obvious bugs.
>still write bad code unless my colleagues and the people who submit PRs
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!
I use them. The top 3 models still write terrible code, regardless of harness. They’ll litter the code with safety checks for scenarios we’ve already guaranteed won’t happen. And they’ll solve problems you didn’t ask them to, and they’ll come up with a working, but convoluted solution. They’ll sometimes write really weird code if you’re using them in an obscure language.
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.
I'm fully convinced that people who think agents write decent code now simply don't read the code. Their bar is "it runs, so it's fine".
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.
In my experience, the people who are enamored with LLMs for programming fall into one of three categories. Shills, people who could never program decently to begin with, and people who don't care about the quality of their work. Everyone I know who actually is a good programmer and cares about doing a good job has found that LLMs make too many mistakes to be trusted, and avoid them if they can.
So why doesn't Anthropic write a good Claude Code in Rust already? Why don't we get a Codex with the polish level of Sublime text editor?
These companies have many billion dollar investments and yet their main product is a bloated meh.
They don’t hand write it because it would be an embarrassment. At the same time, Claude Code doesn’t really need to be any better than it is while Anthropic has great models no one else has.
Why do you assume any point in time criticism of AI code generation is reliable to project even a couple of months into the future?
Because all the important ones have been true since 2022 and will be true forever, because they have nothing to do with LLM capabilities and instead are focused on LLM nature.
Because they haven't changed yet (despite AI bros claiming that they have every 6 months), and therefore are unlikely to change as we move into the future. It's not impossible, of course. But when the "this new model is totally better" claims keep turning out to be false, that doesn't give confidence that the future is going to be different.
I have some lines of code I’ve written that I quite cherish. I’ve posted about such excerpts many times online. So we both like code quite a bit.
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.
Why are people mixing everything up? Since when code has a soul?
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.
What I find ironic are the "creatives" who declare resolutely that AI cannot create art,... now here is this cool vibe-coded software I've made. It's like saying a chisel cannot create a sculpture. Yeah, OK, but without the chisel the sculpture wouldn't have been made. Who cares. It's a tool. What you do with it is up to you.
> Since when code has a soul?
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.
If you don't know what a soul is, and you think it's something people just make up, then you are missing out on the experience of being human and you have a bigger problem than not being able to understand what art is.
When you find yourself with a choice between "either this person doesn't understand the experience of being human or I'm not following what they mean" the latter is probably a sound choice.
So whales do not have a soul? Only humans do have one? What about our ancestors? Did the homo erectus have a soul? What about big apes, did they?
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.
You have no more authority than the person you're responding to.
This feels very condescending and reminds me of how theists "feel sorry" for atheists because they don't believe in god.
Is it this fuzzy blob of ineffable experiences, aesthetics, qualia, self-reference, dualism, spirituality and other things? I don't need to reject all this to notice that its fuzziness makes it impossible to operationalize.
I think your response demonstrates rather than refutes their point.
It's supposed to be experienced, not 'operationalized.'
You need to operationalize it to decide whether non-human systems can have it.
A lot of serious philosophers don't believe in souls.
So you know what a soul is? Please enlighten
>AI in 20 years will very likely produce art indistinguishable and as profound as human art.
If you see art only as more "content" to be mindlessly consumed, maybe.
Isn't one of the main attractions to art the skill required to create it? If anyone can create some dodgy AI picture, it ceases to have the same, if any, value.
> 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?
I’m finding this fascinating personally. The lines people are drawing to try and keep themselves inside some definition they can mark as special.
> Since when code has a soul?
Before AI I could look at a function and tell you who had written it from inside the (somewhat small) company I worked at.
> AI can be just a tool. [...] But AI can also be much more than a tool, [...].
Contradictio. Going back to Seven...
> AI can be just a tool.
Nothing, ever, is just a tool.
> Nothing, ever, is just a tool.
Are you going to expand on this or should we stand in awe?
A banana and duct tape can be just a snack and a tool for fixing a leak.
Or .. art.
https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/art/featu...
The banana isn't the art. The art is placing the banana in a gallery and art market context to make a funny and ironic comment about the gallery and art market context.
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.
Yes that was the point of the comment.
Where’s the contradiction?? X can be just Y, and X can be much more than Y. No contradiction, just an observation that you can use it one way or another.
Nothing ever is just a tool. Saying that X "can just be a tool" is a fundamental violation of that statement; saying then "X can be much more than just a tool" is a violation in form of a contradiction. It's very easy to parse...
I'd say this article is a stronger argument that "programming can be a hobby" than "programming is an art". Lots of people do lots of things for enjoyment without a salary, and we tend not to call all of those things an artform.
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.
Programming (usually) isn't art, it's design. Design is when you arrange something to serve a particular purpose, not just for aesthetic value. In programming we understand that this purpose is not just to make code that looks nice, but also that functions properly, that is maintainable, that communicates its intent, etc.
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.
100%. Hobby is the word this article was looking for. And I don't think that's less meaningful, or that there's no way people can elevate their hobby to artform. But what the article describes is people with a hobby, not an art.
Not wanting to linger on the definition of art, which is rather vague, but a lot of people will consider their hobby an art form, if there is enough room for mastery.
I mean many Japanese people consider that pouring tea can be an art form.
Weaving is art.
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.
I used to really enjoy writing code, to the point where I would have thought of it as art and fine contemplation.
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.
What revived me was doing visual coding using Node-RED[1] - remember Yahoo Pipes? Great fun doing stuff "visually" by connecting the rectangles with the lines!
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.
[1] https://nodered.org/
If AI replaces programming it will indirectly replace a lot of other jobs as well, just by good ol' automation
That doesn't really follow. Not every job can be automated with code. And those that can, largely already have been.
> I like it when new ideas for the text come to me as I’m writing. The writing process itself — the thinking that goes on in the moment — is important to me, not just the result.
This. Applies to me while writing text, writing code and writing data analyses.
Exactly this. You always have to choose what to leave in, what to take out. "Ways to do it" suggest themselves, and you weigh them, "is it the best fit for this project". A lot of what's left out evaporates into the void, but often enough you stumble onto one of these doesn't-fits that's nonetheless a keeper. You know it'll be useful somewhere else, or as the heart of something new. Sure, you create the product, but it's these other by-the-way ideas that keep one coming back.
It is a true story, though I dont remember exactly where it took place:
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.
Art is "expression of an idea". Programming ISN'T art; the program/game/website could be, but programming is a CRAFT. The people he mentions are not artists, they are craftsmen.
Art is a word, Craft is a word, this line is a sentence, and the whole text is a paragraph.
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)
[2] https://p-dpa.net/work/code-poems/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
I feel like your definition of Art is too simplistic and incomplete. At least since Joseph Beuys we know that "anything can be Art", and it's just a matter of how an "expression of an idea" is used to lift something up to the status of being Art. Crafts, as practices, are not excluded from that potential.
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...
It’s a similar type of art like pottery can be.
Edit: I see you changed your comment and now introduced it being a craft, which changes the comment entirely.
I wrote a programming language because I wanted to express the way my brain works and to help people understand the way certain people think about the world. Art or craft?
Most solutioning is art, given that you should have more than one way to reach the target state and target state itself is negotiable and non-concrete. When there are multiple options you are forced to analyze between them, sometimes you have a preferred option if the analysis has been done before. Your choices while solutioning will reflect your experience and how you think. In short, it definitely reflects 'you'.
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.
> Most solutioning is art, given that you should have more than one way to reach the target state and target state itself is negotiable and non-concrete. When there are multiple options you are forced to analyze between them, sometimes you have a preferred option if the analysis has been done before. Your choices while solutioning will reflect your experience and how you think. In short, it definitely reflects 'you'.
This is an very broad definition of 'art'. By this metric, I'm pretty sure me choosing what to have for lunch is art.
I think art's definition would be even broader. Anything that involves your imagination, skill, ideas and analysis (applying yourself to the choices in front of you) would be art. Just googled and verified this, btw.
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.
If AI makes code more stylistically uniform, it might actually make those deeper choices more visible
Yeah! Thus showing a mirror of the deeper 'you' to yourself. Interesting thought!
There is a false dichotomy here. There are people who view code as "art", in the sense outlined here, and yet rely on LLMs for some tasks.
Playing go is art. Go was even considered one of the four main arts in ancient China. Along with calligraphy, instrumental music and brush painting[0].
It didn't stop AlphaGo from beating the best human go players, though.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_arts
It won't stop people from enjoying playing Go, though
There is one thing that upsets many people though...
if err != nil { return nil, err }
System design and architecture are the art. Programming is a set of techniques useful in realizing these compositions.
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.
Thinking "I am in the presence of Satan" is quite common, though.
Just so you know, I logged in for the first time in months just to give you an upvote.
Just as it's not immediately obvious when looking at a mile of assembly code what particular algorithm is represented, it's similarly difficult to figure out "what's going on" when presented with a pile of C++
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.
Programming might be art, but being a career programmer isn't, the same way being paid to paint vases day in, day out for a living following specifications and the whims of your superiors makes you an artist.
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.
Lovely to read, but AI will surely remove a lot of software engineering with little creativity.
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.
It's still too early to say what will the outlook be like in the next ten years, wrt to AI, but one thing I am perfectly sure of is: AI will always produce 'errors' due to the fundamental fact that it's heuristics-based.
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'.
There's a class of programming/configuration tasks where I specifically use AI because it makes less errors than I do.
Yes but it will make other kinds of errors you wouldn't make.
I fail to see why this is a good argument against AI replacing humans, given that humans also produce errors.
If a human makes errors and discovers it, the error gets fixed. With AI, it usually fails to fix the error totally on first try, even on nth tries. If on the off chance it does fix it, it generates other problems.
Humans do produce errors. But they produce far fewer than LLMs, and they can also learn. Once a person makes a given mistake and realizes what he did wrong, he will take steps to prevent that mistake in the future. LLMs do not do this and therefore are less trustworthy than humans, even if both are prone to error.
So humans never make errors?
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 lack manners. That's even worse.
Tool use.
Anything is art if it touches the feelings. Art is a feeling.
At one extreme an artist may have only one art object in them to bring to this world.
>They enjoy writing code, solving development challenges, designing, figuring out the logic, fixing bugs, and understanding the entire system as a whole. They enjoy the process itself. And they’ll never hand that over to AI agents.
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.
I read your essay "Programming is Art" — interesting thoughts. I run into this constantly as well. But for me, AI itself gives me the initial idea, which I then develop and shape my own way. In my product, I train it to think exactly the way I want it to. It would be great to talk about this.
> I love building startups, and they love writing code. For me, building projects is a way to make money. For them, programming is art.
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.
I don't know. I have a fascination with code structure which is definitely primarily aesthetic, not practical --- which is a compulsion I have to suppress when doing code professionally for practical reasons. (Sometimes you have to deliver.)
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.
> problem solving, which isn't fundamentally artistic
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_stylometry
Mathematics also strives for correctness before aesthetics, but is often considered an art. Programming is little different imo.
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 agree about the cost-benefit of LLMs being negative from a logical perspective, art aside.
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.
Programming is art
Code is beauty
Creativity is king
Programming is more engineering than art.
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.
AI as technology is cool and all, as cool as GCC or Linux or HTTP. The thing I don’t like about AI is that 99% of the time we talk about vendor-locked AI (claude, codex) and 99% of the time we use those. So you need to pay to use the models. You depend on the big corporations. It’s not anymore, I clone this repo and let’s explore freely.
These articles and comments on them always seem to conflate programming with programming at one's job. And it makes sense, for most people that's one and the same. But if we're talking about programming and art, I think that is a major distinction.
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.
Labels rarely fit well. We can't even agree on the definition of "art".
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.
I like and believe in this paradigm, because I'm an artist ... I'm a painter and a musician, fiction writer and coder. Each satisfy something different for me intellectually. I can sink my mind fully into whichever I'm absorbed in. And I'm a perfectionist at each.
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.
Programming can be a medium of expression for working through ideas. However, source code is not art in the same way that the paintbrush is not art.
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.
Counterpoint: building integrations for SAP is not art.
For sure it wouldn't be a Sagrada Familia, but maybe in ballpark of a single stroke bathroom stall dick doodle.
Perhaps it's just bad art.
Art is a system. And programming is a system too. They are different systems.
> 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?
> Art is a system. And programming is a system too. They are different systems.
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?
> So, what have you been doing for the last 10 years and why i see only 2026 in your github?
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.
And this answer of yours seems even more suspicious to me.
I don't quite understand you, sometimes you contradict one of your points of view, sometimes another.
So where's the contradiction? For many people, programming is art. They enjoy writing code. I'm just not one of those people.
For me, programming is a way to make money and build projects.
Topic title: Programming is Art
> for me, programming isn't art or a hobby
> make money
Do you mean their seal?
But the article isn't titled "Programming is art for me", is it?
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.
Yes, but you have sentences started with "I ..." about 47 times. So i decided that you wrote about yourself.
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.
This sort of clarification to be quite honest makes alot of your prose ring very hollow around there being distinct classes. In the beginning I will say that you very much make it clear you believe parts of your experience were closer to art as a way to frame the rest of the points you think about.
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.
I read your comment first, and thought it was a bit uncharitable to the author. But then looking through their social media presence. No sign of commentary before late 2025.
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).
> No sign of commentary before late 2025.
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.
This author made this post to counter his other point of view on "Why do developers write continuation code by hand?"
I've been suspicious of this for about a year now.
I can appreciate the sentiments the author has to their own career, but personally it doesn't resonate with me. I'm a firm believer in the idea that systems you intend to be used by others (imo) must be driven by measurable, consistent, and constrained processes that are dictated by goals of the project. Sometimes this involves subjective judgements which are then later corrected as data is collected. If we are overloading the term art to mean anything where there is subjective judgement applied, or similarly where there is any enjoyment of a process, okay sure I can get behind it. But if we mean subjectivity in expression of logic and rule, then no I do not agree that this is the reason we should be more thoughtful of LLM-based codegen tooling (of which there are many more reasons to avoid it in many contexts which do not require going into the subjective aspects).
--- > 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.
AI is good for humanity. But part of this goodness is achieved via natural selection... a culling. This person is about to be cut... I'm about to be cut.
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.
imo, designing the solution (architecture, algorithm, data structure) is the art.
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.
If poetry is art, then writing a structured poem that can tell you _another_ poem must be, too.
I think a discussion about programming being an art is incomplete without bringing into scope live coding, where you write code that produces music in front of an audience; Processing, a programming language for artists; and literate programming, where you intertwine prose and code to form a coherent narrative or story.
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 can be art.
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.
> However, it is not just that, and when it comes to making a living, then the story changes.
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.
I think a key difference is that most programming careers, the artistic outlet (code) is not what is being sold to customers. The customer might feel something if the app works fast, but they won't feel anything about the fun bit packing and struct-of-array design you did for personal enjoyment
Sure but most day to day professional photos are not shot because the subject is so interesting or the composition is so intriguing. They are shot to accompany a flyer, sell a product or to give a grandchild picture to their grandparents, or to get a picture on your drivers license. Even though the photographer uses a lot of techniques and knowledge to frame their shots and get a good picture, artistic values that is often not the function.
> Programming can be art.
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).
imo, programming can make u 10x richer, more ambitious and it also improves ur intelligence
I never liked the idea that programming is an art. When there's a problem that you're trying to solve there's usually only one or two good ways to solve it and hopefully you know one of those approaches. When you start getting creative is when you start running into long-term problems, especially maintenance.
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.
I believe there are many top level chess masters that consider chess an art. Same for programmers, to many of the best, it is an art form or at least a craft that they take very seriously. And many would disagree that programming is solved. "Boring and standard" can be a sign of quality, but it also applies to those code bases that don't solve any interesting problems and just drown in boilerplate, kept alive by dozens or hundreds of programmer drones just working to collect their paychecks.
"Russian schoolboy chess" as Bobby Fisher would have called it, and while he detested this style of approach, it is far closer to how chess is played, where the moves come from rigorous analysis and application of engine discovery than by the beauty of the game (which is ofc why there is Fisher-chess because he felt it kept the artistic side)
Boring and standard more often than not results in me having to trace through six files.