Programming is different from art or writing in that nobody gives a fuck about the code, only the results—the benefits it brings them. Programming is an industrial process, not an art form.
Ten years from now "programmer" will describe machines and mechanical processes, not people, in a tradition similar to what happened with "computer" after the 1940s.
> I guess the same can be said about plumbing and HVAC installations.
I feel like both of those have fewer paths to a successful end-product, and minor issues in the final product are way more visible to the users thereof.
We tend to have a pretty high tolerance for minor software "quirks", unlike if the hot water system or the drains start acting up...
Is your point that programmers are generally worse than plumbers and HVAC installers? People except software to be trash and barely usable, but have higher expectations for plumbing and HVAC?
No, my point is that quality is a lot easier to judge objectively in most other technical fields. Programming is somewhat unique among engineering disciplines in that our field has consistently defied objective definitions of quality - on the scale from mechanical engineering to creative writing, we're often a lot further from the engineering end than one might expect
I think most people here are probably missing his reference, because it's quite apt. "Computers" were, for centuries, a whole class of people whose job involved doing calculations for all sorts of processes - astronomical, mathematical tables, and much more. I'm certain many of them had an absolute love in working things out, a preference for elegance, and much more.
But in the end? All that 'really' mattered was their final product, and once it could be automated - we quickly reached a point where most people no longer even know these people existed. I suspect many of the exact arguments made in argument of the longevity of programmers of today were probably also made about the longevity of computers in the past, as it became clear that 'computing machines' would be able to complete much of the same work.
There's a 'joke' in engineering that if people knew how many assumptions went into designing a bridge, they’d never dare cross one. In engineering the abstractions are even more abstract, but quite useful nonetheless.
> Programming isn’t special. It’s just Art, and Art is the most human — and thus, the most universal — thing that there is.
The OP may be fortunate to have worked on stuff that required some kind of artistic thinking, but the vast majority of code produced—as the vast majority of illustrations—is not art but a means to an end, namely providing value to users and stakeholders, and to generate profits.
You didn't read the article. He literally talked about the essence of art being the dutiful practice of the mundane as the only reliable path to brilliance.
Programming as an art form always reminds me of the Einstein quote; "Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas". Both are just art forms you cannot appreciate without some understanding of it. Arguably thats true of all art actually, its just that the more familiar forms, like painting or music, can be understood at a basic level without an understanding, whereas mathematics and programming are essentially alien to the casual observer.
I'd go slightly further and say that painting and music are meant to entertain; a specialised version of art to produce entertainment, or, the art of entertainment.
Programming isn't special, definitely. Programming can be art, writing can be art, painting can be art.
Most programming isn't art, just like most writing, most painting, etc isn't. The programming you do in your day job very probably isn't art. The programming you do for a demoscene program, in my opinion, definitely is.
I think that AI is the best thing that happened to art. It elevated _all_ human art to this mystical realm. All human work became sacred, as it is unique and bears the Secret Fire. Whatever you do as "art", as long as you didn't use AI, it automatically bears the sacral stamp. Can go to a gallery, whatever. All human art is now elite art.
Nah. Programming is utilitarian, not artistic. While programmers can do their best to produce elegant, well-ordered and designed code they are producing a means to an end: the program has a purpose beyond being elegant, well-ordered and designed. If the clankers can produce programs which fulfil the same purpose and can do it reliably while taking less time and resources - a big if - they are the way to go for most programs. Cameras largely replaced painters for the purpose of producing portraits, photographers control the cameras to make them produce the desired outcome. Clankers will largely replace programmers for the purpose of producing code, we may need a new term to indicate the humans who control them.
The bricklayer building my house may have the most incredibly aesthetic application or mortar during the process, but all I care about is the wall staying up.
Are they practising an art? Surely. Is it relevant? Nah.
Right but isn’t this the thesis of the article? That’s just like painting, in fact. Before photography, at least, a lot of painting was functional. Writing is an art form as well as a medium.
Programming is the same. It’s not a special case that is never artistic, is the thesis of the article; we should be prepared to defend the idea that sometimes its our art.
I’ve always been dumbfounded by programmers who believed they were being paid by business to “write code”. Maybe get your head out of your asses and sit in a few meetings where the requirements are being generated from. You’d quickly realize no one has ever cared about “the code” that was always an inconvenient time and money wasting means to an end.
And I have much love for good frameworks and design.
I'm fortunate to have started gno.land before AI, yet just late enough to finish it with AI. The GnoVM (gno.land) is also art -- go interpreting go, but in a novel multiuser context, a re-imagining of TBL's WWW in Go and markdown. AI was used for final touch polishing. Couldn't have ended up any better.
AI is not yet there to grok the artistry of code. But it will eventually, and humanity will benefit from it necessarily, not because it is demanded, but because people like us desire it. Push forward.
Here come a thread where those with stock in AI and AI glazers will agree with the title and put forth their claims as if they're obvious and factual, and those against it will do the opposite.
Very stinky topic to be honest and all the posts here are basically the same level of drivel as political discussions.
I am a programmer who likes aesthetics. I think about how aesthetic it is to not have to deal with certain production incidents for certain blocks of code because the typelevel computation tells me it would be a compiler bug if it screwed up. I like the feeling of realizing those 100 LOC could just be 10.
I sometimes tell people of when I came down from Mt. Fuji, there were wispy clouds and grand nature below me, picturesque like a painting. At that time, I likened it to the beauty I felt when I was first learning Haskell. But I say it because I expect it to be a rare kind of sentiment.
The thing with art and music is that they are easy to appreciate, and the appreciation grows deeper with more consideration. I love reading the placards in museums and attempting to understand why the artist did what they did, I like it more than even looking at the piece itself.
Code (and math, for that matter) is almost the same except for one key difference: they are not easy to appreciate without deliberate training, training which is often far to the side of anything most people need/want to deal with.
> The thing with art and music is that they are easy to appreciate
I get what you mean (and agree w.r.t. math/code) but notably, I think appreciation for a lot of things still accumulates if you put in the work.
As an amateur violist, I can attest that I gained a totally new appreciation for most of the pieces I've studied and played in an orchestra in the past.
This not only includes unknown classical music from different eras, but also the obvious (popular) candidates like Beethoven's 6th, Dvořak's 9th and Grieg's "Peer Gynt" suites.
And there's a lot of great music one needs to get into first; for expample: I love Tool songs exactly for that, and there are certainly more obscure artists :)
So, I suspect the thing about maths and code is mainly just caused by the fact that people can go through life just fine without really interacting with them on the level required to develop the smallest bit of "taste" (as opposed to e.g. music).
And to think that all this knowledge comes from a small subset of music, specifically rooted in European classical music. Music worldwide even uses different scales.
Mixed blessing indeed. As a young programmer, many times I complained about being asked to put warts in my perfect architecture, until I realized I'm not being paid to make museum pieces, I'm being paid to solve business problems.
I don't program anymore, but I learned you still can enjoy the beauty of your Mount Fuji when the business needs a pizza stand in the middle of the trail.
I personally feel like the second any art becomes a "job", it ceases its magic for them.
I don't think that artists would feel the same way about their art if they were put in corporate cubicasl with little agency to build art that "sells" because it increases the bottom line.
I think this is why in the video game industry many people burn out. They join for the passion and leave soulless.
A collective of workers in a field can very much decide what they want to get payed for. Craftsmen did exactly that for centuries, and that's in fact what makes them being known for quality and is thus in fact their business moat.
> The thing with art and music is that they are easy to appreciate
> Code (and math, for that matter) is almost the same except for one key difference: they are not easy to appreciate without deliberate training, training which is often far to the side of anything most people need/want to deal with.
I would argue that this exists on a spectrum. There's lots of art and music that's pretty difficult to appreciate without deliberate training, and indeed there are whole categories of music which we would probably call music for musicians.
For example, the album Kind of Blue by Miles Davis is loved by many and is considered by most people to be the best gateway record into the world of jazz, because it's easy to listen to and appreciate. An album like Sketches of Spain, and especially an album like Bitches Brew, are more difficult for the average non-musician listener to get into.
An even more out-there example for music is Allan Holdsworth. In certain circles, he's a well-known and well-regarded name, considered highly influential. Most people have no idea who he is or what he did. (A bit like that cutaway in Family Guy where they jumped to Benjamin Disraeli and he simply said: "you don't even know who I am!").
Similarly, in art and painting, you often need training to understand why something was especially impressive. Now that we have photography, some old paintings can feel "boring" if you don't know how to appreciate the level of difficulty in producing a near-photorealistic work in the 1700s.
Conversely, some math is very easy to appreciate without training! I had a buddy who I got excited about math simply by explaining the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio, then showing trivial examples of how they appear in nature. My friend got lit up about math that day in a whole new way.
Coding is not really programming. It is certainly a highly adjacent skill, but coding is not the same as programming. To quote Leslie Lamport, coding is to programming as typing is to writing.
I think you're overestimating the "appreciability" of art and music. I would say most people don't have the training to understand or enjoy the majority of the most important critical works in art or music from the last 100 years, if not longer.
>I think you're overestimating the "appreciability" of art and music. I would say most people don't have the training to understand or enjoy the majority of the most important critical works in art or music from the last 100 years, if not longer.
I think you're gonna need to unpack how you define "most important" and "critical" here.
It's quite easy to see most people enjoying a lot of art and music (I personally wouldn't include much 'understand' in my own definition of 'appreciate' here).
---
From another angle: critics have claimed that the Beatles were less important than various less-popular or more-niche musicians of their era since the 60s (from many different angles, even then). Is there a point where sustained higher popularity negates that criticism? Does time overwhelm niche more-highly-trained criticism at some point?
Most people do not understand the skill or craft required in aspects of art and music. They do not appreciate it. They may enjoy it in general but cannot appreciate the technical aspects without the background or education. For example, they may enjoy bold colors without realizing the colors come straight from the tube and the artist did no real work in selecting those colors or they may not appreciate the order and precision of brush strokes to achieve certain mark making shapes.
I totally agree that it takes some deliberate training to appreciate it.
But saying that out loud feels kind of lame to me.
Making something that connects with a ton of people is really hard too.
Beatles, Michael Jackson
But yeah! I really do get what youre saying.
Good point, I think a better way to have said it would be something like: to almost everyone, there's some music or graphic which resonates with them emotionally, and this has been true for thousands of years. There are very few such admirers for code, which has also only existed for a few decades. Perhaps worse is that it is mainly a profession for even most programmers, and not something they automatically see as expression.
There's not much more satisfying than looking a a codebase, and mentally soaring through all its concept and files, peering down, feeling clean and happy the whole way. :)
> Artists understand that AI is bad for art. Why don’t programmers understand that we are artists?
imo, that's happening because 2 cultures formed under extremely opposite incentives - "I do stuff and anyone else also doing it is taking my money away from me" vs "Please someone else do same thing as me, it would be so awesome/easier"
the closest art-relating thing to GPL ideals are fanfics. And opinion about ai-generated fanfics has been much closer to our coders view - "sure a lot of it is bad, maybe there's also too much of it, but... there's also some good stuff, so it's good?"
Is it your contention that artists are in the first camp!?
You don’t know many artists if it is. 21st century art, especially, could hardly be more inclusive. Artists are desperate for people to be able to learn to express themselves. Indeed, widening access to art is the motivation of almost all arts funding and patronage (which is what the anti-copyright people think artists should be content with)
The post is well intentioned, but misses the point.
While you can engage in the act of programming from the angle of craft and while you may have started to code because you really enjoyed how it felt like solving a puzzle, programming is primarily a profession. It is a lot closer to accounting than to painting.
There is still space for coding without AI, stuff like advent of code, etc. While it may sound old fashioned as a lot of people did it to practice code challenge for interviews, some did that simply for the pleasure of coding.
But when your job is working in some system for a corporation, big or small, there's no space there for craft or passion, just the reality that what matters is the sausage, not what went into making it.
You may (and probably should) still care about certain engineering principles; correctness, performance, readability, maintainability, etc. But that's about it, whether you write the code or an LLM does is immaterial.
I don't know, I learned to like agentic programming. It felt intimidating at first, but now I fully embraced it. Granted I am still anxious what will happen to the developer job market, but for my own projects agentic programming has been a god send.
So I think that it absolutely is. It is a more predictive form of abstraction, being that the underlying framework is an LLM, but nonetheless, it still is layers of abstraction, no different from the compilers that programmers currently use or any form of translation layer.
I think the argument is irrelevant and idiotic for people to die on one side or the other, that AI is inherently bad or inherently good. I think it's only as useful as the base level knowledge that the person has.
Before AI, some programming could be considered be considered art. There are definitely codebases that are more beautiful than others. But now with introduction of AI you can’t consider any code as art as you have no idea who produced it. Yes, it may be looking good, but from that perspective it’s just randomly produced without the thought of being art. And at some point it will be refactored into oblivion by something that doesn’t care.
I respect the honesty of people who openly list LLMs as contributors. Hiding the use of LLMs is unethical, and the product of such I'll definitely won't use, nor suggest to others.
Depending on the use, something that an LLM contributed to could still be art, as long as the human makes sure their intent is preserved. I'd say the likelihood of being art is directly proportional to the involvement of the human. Something vibe coded with minimal effort, even if attractive, is not art, just coincidence.
I wish I could find the quote, I think it was on C2 Wiki, but alas, it was something like:
If you're an artist, programming is your clay, if you're an engineer, programming is your building material.
Point being, which I always connected with, was that programming is a medium for expressing a lot of things. Just like you can use paper and pen to write poetry or a dry technical manual. And everyone gets to decide how they see it and use it.
I don't see it.
Programming CAN be used to generate art, but is not an art by itself.
I cannot imagine lines of code be exhibited in a museum. I can appreciate smart or witty solutions for a problem, but that is not what art is.
I can appreciate a quick solution for a Rubik cube, I can even see the Rubik cube itself in a museum, but I cannot imagine the steps or instructions for that quick solution in a museum (unless that paper has historical significance).
Being a humble programmer I did produce pieces of code that I will be proud forever as well, e.g. this snippet to control the length of $PWD in bash that I still use almost unchanged 25 years later:
# How many characters of the $PWD should be kept
local pwdmaxlen=30
# Indicator that there has been directory truncation:
#trunc_symbol="<"
local trunc_symbol="..."
if [ ${#PWD} -gt $pwdmaxlen ]
then
local pwdoffset=$(( ${#PWD} - $pwdmaxlen ))
newPWD="${trunc_symbol}${PWD:$pwdoffset:$pwdmaxlen}"
else
newPWD=${PWD}
fi
> I cannot imagine lines of code be exhibited in a museum.
Honestly, I can. The author of this article wrote Twisted. I certainly can imagine a museum where computer history is explained along with all the software achievements that made a huge impact on software engineering as a whole, and Twisted would have a place in it.
Writing by itself isn’t art, but poetry and literature are. And, by the same token, I don’t expect most works of literature to be exhibited in a museum — books are easily copied, so there’s little value to just having the book’s text in a museum.
Works like the Black Perl[0] are decidedly artistic in nature. Demos (in the demo scene sense) are an artistic endeavour. Competitions like the Obfuscated C Contest or the Underhanded C Contest are very much judged on aesthetics.
I agree, is the 100th rest api I’ve made for my 5th employer art? I don’t think so. It’s just a way to (maybe) make my employer money.
I’d say the brainfuck language on the other hand is art. Hard to draw a fine line as to which is which.
I can say most if not all the projects I’ve ever made land in the former. I’ve made some clever solutions but nothing approaching something with meaning.
There can be beauty in even the smallest of things. You can tell alot about a person by how they choose to structure even down to the loops and methods.
Is it not a problem of understanding and searching for complex problems to solve, and therefore understand?
If you've written 100 REST APIs, you're probably pretty familiar with them. But Brainfuck is completely alien and something you would have to work to understand. Maybe the distinction is in the effort required for understanding.
Regardless, I think meaning is something one has to self-impose. It does not exist naturally in the universe, so if you don't think it matters, it doesn't matter.
I agree that meaning is something one has to self-impose, but there is also meaning in the creation of art. I don’t find that same meaning in work that accomplishes the goal of making an employer money in the same way I’d incorporate meaning into a short story I’d write.
I think what I’m trying to say is that there are both ways to create art by coding and ways to just make a product for consumption. And I think using AI for said products doesn’t really reduce the meaning of said work.
I think I gave brainfuck as an example because it seems there was a meaning behind it beyond being profitable. The writer had something to say. Does writing something like brainfuck with AI take away its meaning? I’d personally say yes, but that’s an interpretation.
There are different kind of arts. There is the art of a craftsmen and there is beautiful art. The former is rarely exhibited in museums unless is also has an historic value. It's the kind of excellence with that you do your work and it can be in fact in every kind of work you do.
Are there simply two cultures among programmers? Along similar lines as the two cultures of mathematics? One motivated by the process itself, by esthetics, by abstractions, ideas. The other by solving problems. And then obviously these two cultures react very differently to AI.
I think AI has a third culture of supporters: one motivated by looking like an expert while making do with the skills of a novice
Never before we had something like this: a tool that knows more than you do, obeys like a slave, and doesn't mind if you take the credit. It's the dream of students that copied the homework/answers of others.
I like solving problems but getting working code was a dopamine hit. Now, just knowing I could use AI to generate code, solve a problem, somehow took away that hit I used to get from writing working code. All I have left now, is solving business problems.
The first culture is motivated by solving problems as well, namely how to make the program maintainable and easy to understand. Having the code be an ideal representation of what the program does, having it well-typed, modular and high-cohesion/loosely-coupled and all that stuff, is all in service of that purpose. A program that is hard to understand, hard to reason about, hard to extend and change, is a problem, a problem that is disliked by that culture because it continuously affects them in their programming work when extending or changing the program.
With agentic coding, one can argue that this problem doesn’t affect the software developer any more. But one can also argue that it’s just as much a problem for the AI as it is for the human programmer.
It’s not that the first culture isn’t enjoying solving problems, it’s that it’s enjoying solving a different type of problems than the second culture does, which for example doesn’t seem to care the program should be easy to reliably reason about, or maybe doesn’t realize that the shape of the code is important for that.
I believe so. I mean, I care a lot about the end result and whether it solves the problem. But I'm motivated more by how one does the work, the quality and aesthetics of (say) the code I write, and so forth.
Most people I work with are more in the 2nd camp. But I've known people in both.
in this metaphor you still have the problem that a lot of self-proclaimed cooks don't know their spices, think everything must be deep-fried and constantly use too much/too little salt to produce a dish that is edible but not good (nor healthy, for that matter)
To many, it is just another tool in the toolbox to solve a problem, to get from A to B. I find coding rewarding, in the same way I find puzzles rewarding. But if I had any advise, it would be not to let it define you as a person.
I think you can agree or disagree with this post; I expect most to disagree now, though I agree.
But either way, look at how readable this post is, and consider whether AI-powered writing gets even slightly close to that ability to provoke agreement or disagreement.
> Programming is the art of abstraction, of understanding how to compose smaller ideas into bigger ones, of how to understand the automation of a larger system by understanding the rules that automate smaller ones and understanding how to combine them.
I personally see AI as part of that same chain, allowing us to build more meta-systems and compose increasingly larger ideas. If programming stayed where it was, there would be a limited progression. I used to love code. The mechanical beauty of tracing the data flow through a system, finding just the right parameters or constructors to make something elegant, arranging things until they just felt right. Obsess over the length of my comments relative to the code underneath. Silly things like that.
But there is an entirely different kind of art in working with these LLMs. How you arrange tools, compose the systems, establish constraints, and coax these things into doing what you actually intend. We are LLM cowboys trying to lasso these bulls before they break everything.
We are abstracting the process of abstraction itself. It’s part of the creative destructive process. Is it bad? I don’t know. But things change man, and that’s okay.
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[ 0.43 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadTen years from now "programmer" will describe machines and mechanical processes, not people, in a tradition similar to what happened with "computer" after the 1940s.
Nobody except the programmers, I guess. Quite a few of us care about the craft
I feel like both of those have fewer paths to a successful end-product, and minor issues in the final product are way more visible to the users thereof.
We tend to have a pretty high tolerance for minor software "quirks", unlike if the hot water system or the drains start acting up...
Is your point that programmers are generally worse than plumbers and HVAC installers? People except software to be trash and barely usable, but have higher expectations for plumbing and HVAC?
But in the end? All that 'really' mattered was their final product, and once it could be automated - we quickly reached a point where most people no longer even know these people existed. I suspect many of the exact arguments made in argument of the longevity of programmers of today were probably also made about the longevity of computers in the past, as it became clear that 'computing machines' would be able to complete much of the same work.
I don't know what other profession weaves so many levels of abstraction to get to the final product.
The OP may be fortunate to have worked on stuff that required some kind of artistic thinking, but the vast majority of code produced—as the vast majority of illustrations—is not art but a means to an end, namely providing value to users and stakeholders, and to generate profits.
Most programming isn't art, just like most writing, most painting, etc isn't. The programming you do in your day job very probably isn't art. The programming you do for a demoscene program, in my opinion, definitely is.
Are they practising an art? Surely. Is it relevant? Nah.
The National Masonry Academy in the UK literally has a course on "fine art bricklaying".
Bricklaying is absolutely art, and the wall staying up for any period of time is actually a consequence of it.
I think coding is art; nothing I've ever done with coding is anywhere near as artistic as the Ouse Valley Viaduct.
People who think bricklaying cannot be art simply haven't been around enough old brick buildings.
Programming is the same. It’s not a special case that is never artistic, is the thesis of the article; we should be prepared to defend the idea that sometimes its our art.
This is art.
And I have much love for good frameworks and design.
I'm fortunate to have started gno.land before AI, yet just late enough to finish it with AI. The GnoVM (gno.land) is also art -- go interpreting go, but in a novel multiuser context, a re-imagining of TBL's WWW in Go and markdown. AI was used for final touch polishing. Couldn't have ended up any better.
AI is not yet there to grok the artistry of code. But it will eventually, and humanity will benefit from it necessarily, not because it is demanded, but because people like us desire it. Push forward.
Well written article.
--
p.s. plug: gno.world, find me there.
Very stinky topic to be honest and all the posts here are basically the same level of drivel as political discussions.
I sometimes tell people of when I came down from Mt. Fuji, there were wispy clouds and grand nature below me, picturesque like a painting. At that time, I likened it to the beauty I felt when I was first learning Haskell. But I say it because I expect it to be a rare kind of sentiment.
The thing with art and music is that they are easy to appreciate, and the appreciation grows deeper with more consideration. I love reading the placards in museums and attempting to understand why the artist did what they did, I like it more than even looking at the piece itself.
Code (and math, for that matter) is almost the same except for one key difference: they are not easy to appreciate without deliberate training, training which is often far to the side of anything most people need/want to deal with.
I get what you mean (and agree w.r.t. math/code) but notably, I think appreciation for a lot of things still accumulates if you put in the work.
As an amateur violist, I can attest that I gained a totally new appreciation for most of the pieces I've studied and played in an orchestra in the past.
This not only includes unknown classical music from different eras, but also the obvious (popular) candidates like Beethoven's 6th, Dvořak's 9th and Grieg's "Peer Gynt" suites.
And there's a lot of great music one needs to get into first; for expample: I love Tool songs exactly for that, and there are certainly more obscure artists :)
So, I suspect the thing about maths and code is mainly just caused by the fact that people can go through life just fine without really interacting with them on the level required to develop the smallest bit of "taste" (as opposed to e.g. music).
Hence we can't take this lesson to the workplace.
And it's always a mixed blessing.
I don't program anymore, but I learned you still can enjoy the beauty of your Mount Fuji when the business needs a pizza stand in the middle of the trail.
I don't think that artists would feel the same way about their art if they were put in corporate cubicasl with little agency to build art that "sells" because it increases the bottom line.
I think this is why in the video game industry many people burn out. They join for the passion and leave soulless.
> Code (and math, for that matter) is almost the same except for one key difference: they are not easy to appreciate without deliberate training, training which is often far to the side of anything most people need/want to deal with.
I would argue that this exists on a spectrum. There's lots of art and music that's pretty difficult to appreciate without deliberate training, and indeed there are whole categories of music which we would probably call music for musicians.
For example, the album Kind of Blue by Miles Davis is loved by many and is considered by most people to be the best gateway record into the world of jazz, because it's easy to listen to and appreciate. An album like Sketches of Spain, and especially an album like Bitches Brew, are more difficult for the average non-musician listener to get into.
An even more out-there example for music is Allan Holdsworth. In certain circles, he's a well-known and well-regarded name, considered highly influential. Most people have no idea who he is or what he did. (A bit like that cutaway in Family Guy where they jumped to Benjamin Disraeli and he simply said: "you don't even know who I am!").
Similarly, in art and painting, you often need training to understand why something was especially impressive. Now that we have photography, some old paintings can feel "boring" if you don't know how to appreciate the level of difficulty in producing a near-photorealistic work in the 1700s.
Conversely, some math is very easy to appreciate without training! I had a buddy who I got excited about math simply by explaining the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio, then showing trivial examples of how they appear in nature. My friend got lit up about math that day in a whole new way.
Coding is not really programming. It is certainly a highly adjacent skill, but coding is not the same as programming. To quote Leslie Lamport, coding is to programming as typing is to writing.
I think you're gonna need to unpack how you define "most important" and "critical" here.
It's quite easy to see most people enjoying a lot of art and music (I personally wouldn't include much 'understand' in my own definition of 'appreciate' here).
---
From another angle: critics have claimed that the Beatles were less important than various less-popular or more-niche musicians of their era since the 60s (from many different angles, even then). Is there a point where sustained higher popularity negates that criticism? Does time overwhelm niche more-highly-trained criticism at some point?
So I am.
imo, that's happening because 2 cultures formed under extremely opposite incentives - "I do stuff and anyone else also doing it is taking my money away from me" vs "Please someone else do same thing as me, it would be so awesome/easier"
the closest art-relating thing to GPL ideals are fanfics. And opinion about ai-generated fanfics has been much closer to our coders view - "sure a lot of it is bad, maybe there's also too much of it, but... there's also some good stuff, so it's good?"
creation of new competing products is seen as a catastrophe by sellers, but as more competition by buyers
and our concern as a community basically has been "but do we have enough anti-monopoly protections in place?"
You don’t know many artists if it is. 21st century art, especially, could hardly be more inclusive. Artists are desperate for people to be able to learn to express themselves. Indeed, widening access to art is the motivation of almost all arts funding and patronage (which is what the anti-copyright people think artists should be content with)
While you can engage in the act of programming from the angle of craft and while you may have started to code because you really enjoyed how it felt like solving a puzzle, programming is primarily a profession. It is a lot closer to accounting than to painting.
There is still space for coding without AI, stuff like advent of code, etc. While it may sound old fashioned as a lot of people did it to practice code challenge for interviews, some did that simply for the pleasure of coding.
But when your job is working in some system for a corporation, big or small, there's no space there for craft or passion, just the reality that what matters is the sausage, not what went into making it.
You may (and probably should) still care about certain engineering principles; correctness, performance, readability, maintainability, etc. But that's about it, whether you write the code or an LLM does is immaterial.
Other industries are using it too. It's quite delusional to assume that just because people hate something they won't use it.
The role of a developer (and most IT roles), at its core, is to make yourself obsolete, move on, rinse and repeat.
Feature / scope creep may have blindsided some.
I’m happy most programming is going away. I was capable but now I’m even more capable at creating solutions. The art will stay.
That's called an abstraction, which AI is expressly not. If your work involves writing the same code over and over again, you're doing it wrong.
> I’m happy most programming is going away. I was capable but now I’m even more capable at creating solutions.
This describes management.
> The art will stay.
This describes actual engineering.
It works because it re-uses previous work to solve new problems. That is what abstractions are used for.
I think the argument is irrelevant and idiotic for people to die on one side or the other, that AI is inherently bad or inherently good. I think it's only as useful as the base level knowledge that the person has.
Depending on the use, something that an LLM contributed to could still be art, as long as the human makes sure their intent is preserved. I'd say the likelihood of being art is directly proportional to the involvement of the human. Something vibe coded with minimal effort, even if attractive, is not art, just coincidence.
If you're an artist, programming is your clay, if you're an engineer, programming is your building material.
Point being, which I always connected with, was that programming is a medium for expressing a lot of things. Just like you can use paper and pen to write poetry or a dry technical manual. And everyone gets to decide how they see it and use it.
I cannot imagine lines of code be exhibited in a museum. I can appreciate smart or witty solutions for a problem, but that is not what art is. I can appreciate a quick solution for a Rubik cube, I can even see the Rubik cube itself in a museum, but I cannot imagine the steps or instructions for that quick solution in a museum (unless that paper has historical significance).
Linus explaining taste in code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78Y17hAo96I
Fast inverse square root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
Being a humble programmer I did produce pieces of code that I will be proud forever as well, e.g. this snippet to control the length of $PWD in bash that I still use almost unchanged 25 years later:
Honestly, I can. The author of this article wrote Twisted. I certainly can imagine a museum where computer history is explained along with all the software achievements that made a huge impact on software engineering as a whole, and Twisted would have a place in it.
The printed Apollo program code is owned by a museum (https://airandspace.si.edu/) and is on display there sometimes
There may be others elsewhere too, but that one jumped to mind immediately
Works like the Black Perl[0] are decidedly artistic in nature. Demos (in the demo scene sense) are an artistic endeavour. Competitions like the Obfuscated C Contest or the Underhanded C Contest are very much judged on aesthetics.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl
I’d say the brainfuck language on the other hand is art. Hard to draw a fine line as to which is which.
I can say most if not all the projects I’ve ever made land in the former. I’ve made some clever solutions but nothing approaching something with meaning.
If you've written 100 REST APIs, you're probably pretty familiar with them. But Brainfuck is completely alien and something you would have to work to understand. Maybe the distinction is in the effort required for understanding.
Regardless, I think meaning is something one has to self-impose. It does not exist naturally in the universe, so if you don't think it matters, it doesn't matter.
I think what I’m trying to say is that there are both ways to create art by coding and ways to just make a product for consumption. And I think using AI for said products doesn’t really reduce the meaning of said work.
I think I gave brainfuck as an example because it seems there was a meaning behind it beyond being profitable. The writer had something to say. Does writing something like brainfuck with AI take away its meaning? I’d personally say yes, but that’s an interpretation.
The art of a craftsman, otherwise known as 'craft'.
Unless you are arguing that the rare museum exhibition is the normal case whereas books and recitations are the abnormal ones.
Never before we had something like this: a tool that knows more than you do, obeys like a slave, and doesn't mind if you take the credit. It's the dream of students that copied the homework/answers of others.
With agentic coding, one can argue that this problem doesn’t affect the software developer any more. But one can also argue that it’s just as much a problem for the AI as it is for the human programmer.
It’s not that the first culture isn’t enjoying solving problems, it’s that it’s enjoying solving a different type of problems than the second culture does, which for example doesn’t seem to care the program should be easy to reliably reason about, or maybe doesn’t realize that the shape of the code is important for that.
Most people I work with are more in the 2nd camp. But I've known people in both.
Most of it is in fact NOT art but simply done to solve a problem.
But either way, look at how readable this post is, and consider whether AI-powered writing gets even slightly close to that ability to provoke agreement or disagreement.
I personally see AI as part of that same chain, allowing us to build more meta-systems and compose increasingly larger ideas. If programming stayed where it was, there would be a limited progression. I used to love code. The mechanical beauty of tracing the data flow through a system, finding just the right parameters or constructors to make something elegant, arranging things until they just felt right. Obsess over the length of my comments relative to the code underneath. Silly things like that.
But there is an entirely different kind of art in working with these LLMs. How you arrange tools, compose the systems, establish constraints, and coax these things into doing what you actually intend. We are LLM cowboys trying to lasso these bulls before they break everything.
We are abstracting the process of abstraction itself. It’s part of the creative destructive process. Is it bad? I don’t know. But things change man, and that’s okay.