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.
> 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.
The fact that you are making this a us vs them situation makes you seem like you are more humble-bragging that you belong on the “actually doing something” side while all the other are on the “they need my expertise and my expertise alone”.
C’mon now man. You’re 46. This is the type of talk that belongs in high school.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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, and a thoughtful expression of your own insights and understanding; then you will see how programming can be art.
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.
It is more than that in the sense that I have a lot of obligations to understanding the code. The reason is that if I don't understand the code, I will not be able to answer questions that are asked to me. And those answers are generally very important for the future of the business.
Code is art in the sense that I need to arrange it such as I can actually make it maintainable, readable, easy to add new features and make it that I can answers questions very easily.
LLMs remove this ability because it doesn't let me the time to absorb the change as such that I can guaranties those 4 requirements. It just concentrate on adding new features without making sure it doesn't break the other 3 requirements.
To guaranties those for 4 points, I need a mental map of the code which llm generally remove. The more we use llms, the less of a mental map you have of the code
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 drons 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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You start off this comment by saying "labels rarely fit well" and end it by labeling most critics of AI as uncreative cowards and hypocrites, implying that the only true artists are the ones using AI like yourself.
My brother in Christ you vibe-code games that are simpler than flash games from the 90s. You are not superior to people who still care to put in the time and effort.
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.
But i think this won’t work for every engineer. Some people just really hate the management side of things.
Playing go is art. Go was even considered one of the four fundamental arts in ancient China. Along with calligraphy, instrumental music and brush painting[0].
It doesn't stop AlphaGo from beating the best human go players, though.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I remember this 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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
There are certainly pieces of code that should be put on display, for example productions from the demoscene[1] and competitions like the underhanded C contest [2].
The code in these cases is usually wizardry understood by a select few, but the stories, optimizations, trickery and even formatting can be told to anyone who loves design.
> I hope that coding will go that way and even though I might lose my current occupation.
What occupation? AI shill? Again some idiotic analogy that is designed to break people's spirits and accept unemployment so three trillionaires who stole all out OSS will rule.
Upvoted by AI bots so everyone thinks this hogwash is the truth. Fucking AI fascists.
The invention of photography had a major impact on painting. In the decades
after the first photograph was produced in 1829, photographic processes improved
and became more widely practiced, depriving painting of much of its historic
purpose to provide an accurate record of the observable world.
Additionally there is a huge historical precedence for capturing images, basically for money either through being a painter in someone's service, patronage or working for commission. These painters would work and follow the directions of the commissioner, even though they may not have agreed with it. This is one of the reasons for the English "rectangular livestock" paintings.
In dutch there is a word "broodschilder" (literally bread painter) witch means painter who paints for a living (commercial) / hack painter. In history these painters often where seen as doing a craft in the same way a carpenter works with requirements and requests for the picture, make it happen. Often the painters where not even not able to sign their work (for example religious commission).
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 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.
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.
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.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 27.5 ms ] threadBut I'm 46 and I was never able to make a living painting, writing or playing music, although I spent years trying my hand at those things while waiting tables and driving cab. Apparently the only creative output people are willing to pay for from me is what I can do with creative code. And that's fine. To me, it's just as expressive and it still lets me incorporate all the narrative and visual ideas I have, if they let me be free with it. I get $300/hr to be free with it, even now when in theory you could ask AI to do it, and I feel well compensated and appreciated.
But that being said, art is a luxury that only makes sense to pay for if you either want it to simply appreciate it, or if you see some advantage for your business by comissioning it or sponsoring it. You write as someone who views building their business as a sort of art, and those are the kinds of people I've been lucky to partner with, who also view their creative employees as artists who provide hard-to-calculate extra value through their perspective and creativity. But that's a genuinely hard sell to investors these days. I mean, my specialty was bespoke websites and apps for 20 years. But I was sought out for that. I never once went and tried to convince someone that bespoke code and art would be better for their bottom line. In fact, I spent most of that time telling people to get a wordpress site or to hire the cheapest offshore freelancers who could build them a minimum viable product.
I'm glad that people who are building their dreams still appreciate the artistry that we engineers and designers put into what we build, but I'm even less sure it's good business for a startup now than I was 20 years ago.
I suppose the one thing you do get if you hire an artist (speaking also as someone who is in charge of hiring them) is some measure of loyalty and the lucky chance at seeing something that no one has done before. That's hard to quantify on a spreadsheet, and it may only reflect slowly over time on your customers' loyalty to you. A google doodle or some other tiny, fertile patch of ground that you're willing to pay $5k a month for to some whacko like me or one of my artists.... that may end up being the heart and soul of an otherwise sterile, interchangeable brand. But we have far fewer saints and patrons than we did in the 90s, and I have to admit, overall the culture has degraded to the point that very few people care anymore about authentic or original art... of any discipline.
The fact that you are making this a us vs them situation makes you seem like you are more humble-bragging that you belong on the “actually doing something” side while all the other are on the “they need my expertise and my expertise alone”.
C’mon now man. You’re 46. This is the type of talk that belongs in high school.
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.
On that at least we agree (ignoring the rubbish about "AI", unless it describes an artificial intelligence, and not a chat bot).
Programming and its manifestations can indeed be art. Just like writing and its manifestations (e. g. poems, novels).
At its very high points programming approaches art, but programming is primarily problem solving, which isn't fundamentally artistic because its main goal is correctness and fitness for purpose, not aesthetic value. I'm pretty sure for most of us the choice to use LLMs or not has nothing to do with it being art or not art. If I estimate a cost-benefit analysis, the true cost of using the LLM is much more than it would likely ever provide, so it makes little logical sense to use them except in very limited situations.
By the way, I have to say this is a really strange type of article, an explanation of the supposed opinions and attitudes of non-AI-users written by an AI user, seemingly without any input from the former group. It reads a bit as if it's building a strawman to justify the author's own views.
Code is beauty
Creativity is king
I would argue that problem solving is actually what makes any art art. When making "traditional art" you are constantly solving problems. For example, how do I make this piece of rock look like a greek god, what parts to chip off, what tools to use etc.
Art is not always made for aesthetic value, most traditional art is probably created for profit. That doesn't make it not art.
I think you might have the (in my opinion wrong) notion that there is only one "correct" way to write code. This is not true, so much so that you can identify a programmer by their signature style. Similarly to how you may identify a writer by his writing style.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_stylometry
I'm bothered by the exact quote you pulled from the article, although I didn't mention it, because it's reticent of a certain hypocritical hot take among founders and business/marketing types who can be "generous" toward their engineers because they believe that their own artistic contribution to the project is some messianic vision of it that far outweighs the quotidian questions about how it's actually built. I didn't really want to weigh in on what I felt was that tendency in the post, because I do work successfully with a lot of people like that and I often admire the sweat and work they put into their own side of running things... but those kinds of statements do come off as somewhat patronizing if they're not backed up by truly massive amounts of hard work.
When you have scoured your deepest understanding for hours - or days - in order to rewrite a function so that it is easier to read, shorter, and a thoughtful expression of your own insights and understanding; then you will see how programming can be art.
I find it incredible when the concepts in a system fall into place and start lining up and you get these unexpected relationships that "just work". It's beautiful in the same way mathematics is beautiful. It's lovely when something is made of lots of pieces at first and then suddenly collapse and simplify into a single structure.
I also enjoy other bits of programming. I like the flow state, I like the act of creation, I like feeling like I have an impact, I like being paid. So it's not like people fall into one category or another, and it's not like programming is one single thing. There's room within any discipline for creativity and for art.
I think many professional artists probably spend much of their time problem-solving, too --- authors trying to fit plot points together, sculptors working out which materials will work with which ones.
It is more than that in the sense that I have a lot of obligations to understanding the code. The reason is that if I don't understand the code, I will not be able to answer questions that are asked to me. And those answers are generally very important for the future of the business.
Code is art in the sense that I need to arrange it such as I can actually make it maintainable, readable, easy to add new features and make it that I can answers questions very easily.
LLMs remove this ability because it doesn't let me the time to absorb the change as such that I can guaranties those 4 requirements. It just concentrate on adding new features without making sure it doesn't break the other 3 requirements.
To guaranties those for 4 points, I need a mental map of the code which llm generally remove. The more we use llms, the less of a mental map you have of the code
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.
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.
Since always, it is often just not recognized. Perhaps the same way how a newspaper article has soul and a fingerprint of the author, though you may not recognize it while reading.
> You can do art with anything.
Sure and anything you do can be art.
I’m finding this fascinating personally. The lines people are drawing to try and keep themselves inside some definition they can mark as special.
Before AI I could look at a function and tell you who had written it from inside the (somewhat small) company I worked at.
If you see art only as more "content" to be mindlessly consumed, maybe.
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.
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.
I've never once in my life looked at a piece of code and thought "I am in the presence of god". However, the systems composed by code can often elicit this response.
For anything much more complicated than undergraduate level academic exercises, the right design media isn't the code itself, it's the modules and their interfaces and how they are interconnected. This sort of thing is much more effectively captured in diagrams than in linear constructs like code.
To put a finer point on it, the design of any non-trivial system is much more effectively communicated as diagrams. You wouldn't try to convey how such a system works to the new hire, by wading through hex dumps of the executables, or even assembly listings. I've been on projects and had 300K (bytes not sloc!) of C++ source dumped on me, though, and something like that is immune to all but the simplest tweaks until you suffer the pain of distilling a set of accurate diagrams of what's going on.
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.
My brother in Christ you vibe-code games that are simpler than flash games from the 90s. You are not superior to people who still care to put in the time and effort.
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.
But i think this won’t work for every engineer. Some people just really hate the management side of things.
It doesn't stop AlphaGo from beating the best human go players, though.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_arts
if err != nil { return nil, err }
This. Applies to me while writing text, writing code and writing data analyses.
> If I learned PHP, I could build back-end applications. If I learned HTML and CSS, I could build websites.
So, what have you been doing for the last 10 years and why i see only 2026 in your github?
Looking at the wayback machine, the site was first published in January 2026 with no blog. Then in Feb, the site was updated with a blog archive, including posts from 2025, before the site's blog functionality was active.
The blog post ends:
>I don’t use AI when writing. It produces soulless, bland text. AI slop that no one wants to read
But if you look back through earlier essays you see stuff like this:
>Technology evolves. Complacency endures. Building something means taking responsibility for its survival. It’s respect for time that can never be regained
Which has all of the hallmarks of a Claude generated essay (or just a human failing the Turing test).
I've been suspicious of this for about a year now.
This blog is written under a pseudonym. Therefore, there is no history for this blog before 2025. Social media accounts and GitHub are also set up under this brand.
> Which has all of the hallmarks of a Claude generated essay (or just a human failing the Turing test).
This was my first blog post, and I used AI to edit it. I wrote 10 drafts before I ended up with the version I published on my blog. And I don't like this post. I wrote it myself. AI only suggested phrasing that I thought sounded good. In the next post, I also used AI to edit the text, but to a lesser extent. Since then, I haven't used AI at all when writing or editing texts.
From a system-centric POV the art world could be considered a system, and the programming world could be considered a system.
Programming is a craft and can therefor be part of an artistic practice as well as many other practices.
What's Art and what isn't is up to each individual and remains generally undefined.
> So, what have you been doing for the last 10 years and why i see only 2026 in your github?
Self-hosted git services are a thing, ya know?
I spent 10 years making money. I didn't see the point in spending time on open source. I never committed any code to open source until 2026. Because, for me, programming isn't art or a hobby.
I don't quite understand you, sometimes you contradict one of your points of view, sometimes another.
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.
I remember this 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 :)
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.
Because most code is a stinking pile of shit.
But at least I can easily imagine a world where people indeed do this. :-)
Indeed yesterday I drew some pictures (on my computer) that visualize what actually happens in some rather mathematical algorithms.
The immediate rebuttal to that might be that "AI could just do it" but that's not entirely true - the sort of art that you (typically) see in a gallery isn't "an accurate representation of the world as viewed" just as a lot of "code as art" isn't "a problem solved with code". The camera captures (mostly accurate) images, and AI is usually writing "code that does a thing".
The expressiveness (can) come from a place that's deeply human, and can yield a product that is tangibly diifferent from what an efficient coding process would normally produce.
A few of us played a game when I was in batch at the Recurse Center - we called it Monstrosity. The game was to build a string in the absolutely least efficient way possible - using the largest stack, the most network hops, the most obfuscatory and difficult methods to create a character (bit-shifting algorithms to make ASCII, anyone?). It was beautiful, and it was the kind of thing that AI would never think to do (at least, not without significant cajoling and even then you'd be missing the point).
The code in these cases is usually wizardry understood by a select few, but the stories, optimizations, trickery and even formatting can be told to anyone who loves design.
[1] https://demozoo.org/ [2] https://www.ioccc.org/
https://www.artsy.net/feature/the-algorithm-auction
Replace the "photography" in this instance with a clay pigeon and the "painting" with a real pigeon.
What occupation? AI shill? Again some idiotic analogy that is designed to break people's spirits and accept unemployment so three trillionaires who stole all out OSS will rule.
Upvoted by AI bots so everyone thinks this hogwash is the truth. Fucking AI fascists.
Source please.
Additionally there is a huge historical precedence for capturing images, basically for money either through being a painter in someone's service, patronage or working for commission. These painters would work and follow the directions of the commissioner, even though they may not have agreed with it. This is one of the reasons for the English "rectangular livestock" paintings.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/rectangular-cows/
In dutch there is a word "broodschilder" (literally bread painter) witch means painter who paints for a living (commercial) / hack painter. In history these painters often where seen as doing a craft in the same way a carpenter works with requirements and requests for the picture, make it happen. Often the painters where not even not able to sign their work (for example religious commission).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_painter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_patronage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_(art)
25 years of corporate development beat that enjoyment out of me. AI is just the final nail in the coffin. I have no enjoyment left in coding; I firmly believe the current crop of programming languages will go in the same vein as human written assembly language did.
I don't believe the current LLM-based AI will replace most other jobs, but I think it is well suited to completely replace much of programming/IT and morph it into an unrecognizable job role.
That brings me joy after 30+ years of typing at the keyboard.
In the end though, it's the problem solving that makes this job fun. Minor dopamine hits when a minor thing gets fixed (or some weird bug resolves itself into a 8 bits/1 byte solution!). That's all gone when working with LLMs - it's perfect code each time ... until ... you have to understand what went wrong ... more LLMs, more Tokens, more cash burnt. But no problems understood nor solved, just prompt adjusting and virtual monkeys at virtual keyboards.
Oh, well - here's to the bright future of electric creativity out of the tube.
[1] https://nodered.org/
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.