Mel's famous chess demo is undeniably a work of art. It was also completely unmaintainable. There's a tension between artistic expression and fulfilling business requirements. One could argue that `deferred` is good because it lowers cognitive complexity and makes fulfilling business requirements easier. Whether or not it qualifies as "artistic" or "beautiful" is entirely incidental.
There's also the unfortunate matter that most software is closed source. All most will ever see is the user interface and the API surface. While I am a believer in art for art's sake, I don't think you can blame programmers for feeling like the bottom of a filing cabinet behind a locked door isn't the best place for artistic expression. Perhaps, one could argue, what's more important is the finished product and the impact it has on the world. (Obviously this doesn't apply to actual creative-coding hobbyist spaces, ex: the demoscene, game jams, etc.)
That said, compassionate coding, good documentation/comments/names, and solid architectural design are all vital in software development. This fundamentally requires more care and attention than automated vibe-coding tends to provide. But these qualities are still possible to achieve in an AI-assisted workflow. It's a question of striking the balance between fulfilling business requirements, not alienating developers, ensuring code quality, and limiting the fallout of giving boatloads of cash and political power to AI corporations.
> Artists understand that AI is bad for art. Why don’t programmers understand that we are artists?
Because the vast majority of programmers are bad artists, they just did programming for money. Only few actually cared about true craftsmanship, readability for every level of programmers while maintaining maximum efficiency, true passionate programming or quality open-source without caring how much money earn. AI makes bad artists the best as they don't care the taste but quantity. Same applies for bad programmers.
Very reductive. I would consider myself a pretty mediocre programmer, but worked with a lot worse. I care about making useful things for other people. I care about quality but less so than utility. If I ever get to the point to not need to worry about money, I will still focus on utility over any artistic notion of the code that produces that utility. Sometimes those things align, sometimes they don’t, but I’m much happier shipping a messy to maintain thing that is useful to lots of people, than something that is algorithmicly elegant.
Programming makes a lot of talented people useful, and the world doesn’t care too much about talent unless it’s a talent at sports or a talent at sticking it to other people.
I don't disagree.. I try to ignore what "the world" cares or doesn't care about, focus on trying to make other people/animal's etc lives easier/better than before I found them. Sometimes succeed, often fail, but goal remains simple and the same. "the world" can be cruel and bitter, but doesn't mean you need to play along. The amount of people that see hoarding wealth (aka greed) as a measure of success (aka good person/life/someone to look up to), is a massive source of the problem IMO as it is nearly always achieved by making other people/animal's etc lives harder/worse. The sooner more and more people look at greed with disdain rather than admiration, the less cruel and bitter "the world" will be IMO. :spock-hand:
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.
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. :)
> 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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
Seeing the core of my Mount Fuji stable and supporting more stands around for years is a satisfaction itself.
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.
I get what Glyph is trying to say here, but I do feel that programming IS different. I'm going to use that word rather than "special".
Many, I'd even go so far as to say most, programmers support and use open source. Open source is thought of in a very different way than I'd say most other traditionally-recognized artists relate to reuse of their work.
Where most composers, performers, painters, novelists (etc) will protect their work with very restrictive licenses, the open source community has much more permissive licenses (though still licenses, many licenses are "feel free to use it" unless you are making money off it).
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.
Programming because a company pays you to do it is not the same as programming for programming's sake. If you think a company hired you to create artful code then you've got your priorities wrong. That's something you do on your own time.
Acting because a company pays you to do it is not the same as acting for acting's sake. If you think a company hired you to create art then you've got your priorities wrong. That's something you do on your own time.
Writing because a company pays you to do it is not the same as writing for writing's sake. If you think a company hired you to create artful prose then you've got your priorities wrong. That's something you do on your own time.
Programming is special. When you create art, music or prose, it's an artifact that is overwhelmingly consumed directly. I enjoy the art by looking at it, listening to it, reading it. I am mostly unaffected by art I've never seen (save for maybe that which seeps into popular culture around me).
Code as an artifact is different in that it can be given agency, ie turned into software. The output of that software can be valuable despite the code being unintelligible to the vast majority of people. Very few people have read e.g. the source code for the TLS encyrption algorithms, yet billions of people's lives depend on it.
It strikes me that the author bemoans the state / lack of software literacy immediately after they take responsibility for obfuscating the descriptive parameters "callback" and "errback" in favor of "deferred" which became "promise" in the name of aesthetics. "callback" might be ugly but at least it says what it does and does what it says.
You say "obfuscating", the author I suspect would say "abstracting", so it's a bit of a matter of perspective. I think the point still stands, because Deferred has become a useful way to think about these collections of callbacks in async systems, so having that concept allows for a literary shorthand, which seems to be an important point of elevating literature.
When something is brought into the world through human intention, it has the possibility of being art. A human must stand next to it and say "This is mine."
The human role in the creation of art is non-negotiable.
Yes and the important aspect imo, is the intention. not if you used a paint brush, a camera, or ai.
i think a lot of the general pushback on ai is the utter lack of intention behind a lot of it's usage. we call it "slop" but it's really a lack of intent. and we can feel it, with ai-isms in written communication, the subtle insanities of ai generated art, and 4000 line functions that could be 40.
That's silly. There's lots of art with no known creator. Assuming the creator will never be known, it's functionally no different from art that has no creator.
We're already at a point where lots of "art" you look at might have had no human involvement; it could have been generated ad hoc by a web search or in response to the way you hesitated over something else in your feed (okay, maybe not already but certainly in the near future).
But we can't just say that anything that moves you is in a superposition of "art" and "not-art" until sufficient evidence emerges that it was created by a human.
Most people don't experience art through the "art historian" or "true art appreciator" lenses of "who made this and why". They just experience the thing for what it is.
2030's equivalent of Banksy could be a hacker who puts artistic images on major websites. It could then come out, years later, that it was all done by some AI agent. It doesn't matter if that's likely or not, it's obviously possible, and your definition can't just ignore it.
> Assuming the creator will never be known, it's functionally no different from art that has no creator.
This is the key point to argue. I say that it IS different. AI is giving us fits because AI generated works create congnitive dissonance. Knowing a human made something at all is what allows us to connect to it as art. We don't need to know anything about them other than that they are a human, they existed.
The crazy part about it is that it is possible for a human to use AI to make art. It's the intention and the human that make it possible. Where it breaks down is when there's no intention.
I can't remember what show it was (maybe Futurama?), but there's a great bit that lampoons this idea. At a modern art exhibit, somebody leaves something like a banana on an empty pedestal. Later, the attendees are marveling at it, talking about what it means, that sort of thing.
In that is example, there is no artistic intent, but also, the "piece" cannot be readily separated from the other "pieces" in the modern art exhibit that were made with artistic intent.
By your definition of art, people can be "duped" by facts about a piece that don't even accompany many pieces that we think of as "obviously art". They can assume they know the answer, or even a bounding box for the answer like "it was made by a person intentionally", and they can turn out to be wrong, and then... what? It just wasn't art, retroactively?
What if a famous haiku turns out to have been a coded message, 100% instrumental in nature, something like the number and position of enemy forces? "Whoops, guess it wasn't art". What if the best picture I took on a vacation turns out to have been take by a software glitch while my camera sat on my luggage?
We only ever think we know who made something. We do get it wrong. There's a lot of fraud in the art world. Is that likely to get worse or better in the next 100 years, do you think? What are future generations to do, just wonder about whether all their favorite art (that looks like art, feels like art, moves them like art) is "maybe art, maybe not"?
Yes, the modern interpretation of art is just the old adage that beauty is in the eye of the beholder or more crudely it’s all head canon. It’s a degenerate form of what was pursued before the modern era which was to identify and produce art that was unambiguously exceptional to anyone who saw it. Some of that is still present but seems stifled by the requirement to go against tradition so you end up with things like exploiting sheer size or complexity for effect.
as of yet, there’s still no such thing as a print created entirely by a machine. Someone made the scan, prepared the print file, chose the paper stock, proofed the prints. Or at least some of those steps, depending on the print.
The point is, there’s no print that is 1:1 equivalent to an original painting. There are artistic choices embedded throughout the process that influence the result and make one print different than another, which people might consider more or less accurate, or faithful, or beautiful, or artistic.
It’s easy to assume an image is just an image, a bunch of pixels with defined numerical values. But the real world has so much more detail than that.
IMO the original painting is art, a faithful copy is also lesser art, but a print is not art, because it takes significantly less skill and creativity to print thousands of it. It isn't worthless nor slop, though.
Basically, art speaks to our sensibilities, so we expect to find a message in there. LLMs can't create, only mix-and-match what exists in their training data set. You could slop a new painting, make a special canvas printer, and exhibit it in a blind test. Some people will think it's art because they find meaning in it, while others will think it's not art because they'll recognize several meanings slopped together in a nonsensical way.
In reality, it was never art, because the creator, a statistical algorithm, never had any message to convey in the first place.
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.
Programming is less like the category "music" and more like the specific genre "sampling", in this case. Much of programming is reusing other peoples "samples", integrating them in new and useful ways.
In music, we have largely accepted that sampling is legitimate (though that did take some fighting to achieve), and that the musicians making music this way are legitimate artists.
Right on. And similarly, you don't need to learn farming to be able to cook good food, just like you didn't need to know assembly language or machine code to be able to write programs before AI.
Go talk to an artist, and they'll tell you art is a form of engineering, and it requires the artist to understand what works, what doesn't, and why, in practical & scientific terms. The corporate world is dogmatic, self-destructive, FOMO-obsessed and then some. It considers _doing work that matters_ to be a special privilege, and that you should be happy and thankful for meaningless work instead. The corporate world is practically anti-capitalist and anti-real.
If anything, that corporate world fulfills the popular perception of art - impractical, pointless gesturing and posing - rather than what real art intends to do, which is to gain a deeper understanding of the real world and show it to others. Art critics tend to hate it when an artist explains how art is made, preferring an explanation of magical genius; but that's their problem, not art's problem.
AI-assisted programming is like working in the manner of Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst. For them, having the idea is the work; they delegate the actual making of the piece entirely to assistants.
Perhaps the extreme end of this is Yoko Ono, who actually released a book of prompts as artwork, things for the audience to do and respond emotionally to. Ex.: "Hide and Seek: Hide until everyone goes home. Hide until everyone forgets you. Hide until everyone dies."
Anyways, whatever you may think of their work or perceived lack thereof, these people are unbelievably rich and the toast of the art world. Just sayin.
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.
I strongly agree that programming is art, but I think there's a difference between other art forms.
A novel is both how it's made and what it is, and so is a piece of music.
Programming produces two different outputs: the code and the program. What users consume, and care about, is the program. The code may or may not be read by other programmers but it's not the main output. (It would be extremely weird to output code in a language that can't ever be run.)
And so I think the beauty or effectiveness of the program matters more than the beauty or elegance of the code. Those are not entirely orthogonal of course, but only loosely coupled.
A programmer should care a lot about the program, and a little less about the code. Vibe programming (where the programmer doesn't care one way or another) to me is a crime; but you can certainly use AI to code, and still care about the finished product, and make it good.
I don't think this is necessarily true. My personal belief is that any functional thing can be turned into art if it is made with deep respect and intimate knowledge of the telos of the object. You make something so well that you see something really beautiful or important in it/with it/through it that you can't help but capture.
Technical communications serve mostly functional purpose but there were technical documents that ascended their pure function. One of the most famous drawings in the European art history is, in fact, a technical document[0].
I also really love looking at arcitectural drawings, there are a lot of architects and drafters whose technical drawing carries so much artistic quality to it (and not merely quality of execution) that I personally call them artists[1].
And before I get mocked about whether code that makes a spreadheet software is art now -- I don't know, I am not a programmer but I think it can be -- surely there is something else to code than just the software it produces? Speed? Efficiency? Balance? Elegant architecture of ideas that says "yes, I know you, the next maintainer of this codebase, will need to extend it one day, and this is why I made it very simple for you"? It might not talk to an accountant who ends up using the spreadsheet but it can talk to another programmer.
What the phrasing really meant was caring about the result, not the program, and it has the same energy as people saying mass-slopped books are as good as regular books because they are entertaining.
In the long run, what matters is the maintainability of the code. And the security, and the performance. All that comes from the code. The most beautiful code with proper layers of abstraction is gonna turn to shit when business needs come into play and there's not enough time to rearchitect the system properly.
Programmers don't need to justify code as art to reject AI. Programming is building and people who care about building do so because they take pride in the craft, because they take joy in mastery, because they are relentlessly curious, because they learn by doing, because they want to manifest the abstract because it's a natural desire to leave a mark, a legacy.
AI is the antithesis. You don't build, you commission. Mastery requires struggle, AI eschews it. Mountains of slop bury your handcrafted work, your culmination of effort, your capacity to inspire others as you yourself were inspired.
The reason you see less rejection of AI in tech circles is because tech is infested by capitalists who see programming as a means of extracting a buck, not as a craft. AI made their stripes more visible.
Some building is done for those reasons, but it's hard to think of examples where building is done at large scale for those reasons.
I have a friend who is in construction management at a firm that exclusively does large projects, usually commercial and sometimes residential towers. I don't think you could come up with a definition for "build" that excludes what he and those he manages are doing. But they do not build those projects because "they take pride in the craft, because they take joy in mastery, because they are relentlessly curious, because they learn by doing, because they want to manifest the abstract because it's a natural desire to leave a mark, a legacy". Some of those things may be true of their work some or all of the time, but they don't do that work because of those things. They do it because somebody considered it to be really useful and worthy of the investment to build that new tower. The reason they are building, the "because" of it all, is the end product. The means with which they build, the craft of it, is only relevant as a means to that desired end.
Software is no different. Some software is built for the craft (and that's great, I personally love doing that), but at large scale, it is the outcome, the end product, that is the goal, that is the thing that matters. If craft is the best way to best achieve the desired outcome then all the better, but a professional will honestly assess whether that is truly the case, and do their work accordingly.
We're in the late stages of capitalism, at a point where everyone is scrambling to extract some wealth, before everything comes crumbling down. No one is even remotely thinking about art of the craft now, or programmer happiness or whatever, and you're branded a loser if you think about that stuff.
I used to think that programming is an art; that you get paid for the code. Too bad it took me decades to realize how wrong I was. AI sucks, it sucks the soul from this profession. But in the end, the code it produces works, so who cares?
> But in the end, the code it produces works, so who cares?
I care, precisely because the code it produces doesn't work. It has the appearance of working, but it is badly written and leads to problems down the line.
Hot Take: AI Isn't Special: When someone learns through reading a bunch of books on a subject (art, programming, music), we don't call it theft and demand they be able to recite the specific source of where they learned something and demand they pay the original authors for their use of it. AI Isn't Special.
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 am so fascinated about this angle -- whether programming is art or not. This is one of the things that got me to HN recently and I love reading these discussiong as a non-programmer.
While I love art, I am not an art historian or critic, so the definition I have for it is highly subjective -- in my opinion one of the functions of art is communication with other people (often through time and space). For art to fulfill its telos, so to speak, the message that it carries must also be read (heard, perceived) by somebody and then, if it's great art, eventually someone would want to respond to it.
The message can be simple, complex, subversive, stupid, clever, it can be an observation about world, a joke, a profound truth, a memory, a question, a snapshot, a curiosity, a trick, and a ton of other things. And sure, the message can be distorted, misunderstood, twisted, forgotten, lost, etc, but if no one "reads" it and no one "talks" to it, it might as well be glossolalia.
So my question for folks who do consider programming art -- do you "read" other people's code like this? Do you exchange ideas through code? Have you ever trolled great coders of the past through your code or tried to prove them wrong?
I hope my question doesn't come off as complete nonsense.
P.s. I know that there are programming manifestos which to me sounds like there is a layer of meaning that the code carries and this meaning goes beyond pure machine instructions or software functionality, but I'd love to read answers of actual programmers.
> So my question for folks who do consider programming art -- do you "read" other people's code like this? Do you exchange ideas through code? Have you ever trolled great coders of the past through your code or tried to prove them wrong?
Yes, 100% yes. I have always said that I reading someones code to me is akin to reading a personal diary or memoir. It exposes so many thing about their frame of mind and world view. I consider it beautiful and the advent of LLMs greatly muddying this signal (it has absolutely not REMOVED IT) has been incredible painful.
That's a really good question! The code to the old software, the first version of Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, IdSoftware's Doom, are available on GitHub, and people have poured over them. Or more modernly, there's large open source projects out there currently. But most source isn't something anyone else would see outside of work because it's all proprietary software. Google's internal systems are a thing of beauty, but no one outside of Google can legally be shown them, so it goes unnoticed by the wider world. The closest thing we get to art appreciation thus is blogs like Raymond Chen's Old New Thing. He's a programmer with Microsoft that talks about what it was like to work on windows.
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.
Completely disagree. Programming is engineering. Almost all software in existence exists to solve problems, and almost all interaction with software are with the end product, rather than the code. For code to be qualify as art, the definition of art has to be diluted to the point of meaninglessness. Is an Ikea cabinet art too?
Even when models are capable of producing convincing illustrations in any style, it's still generally easy to tell what's AI generated most of the time due to lack of unique artist's style, taste, and meaning. There's nothing that makes an AI-generated piece of software worse than a human-written one.
Personally, I also hate my job less because of AI. I get to focus on solving actual problems, architecture, and code quality. Almost all pre-AI code at my company was just layers of hacks upon hacks. With AI, I actually get to write code that's up to my standards because doing things properly is nearly free in terms of time and effort.
I think this is a stretch, many engineering feats are also been considered works of art. Bridges, homes, office buildings, etc. There is no reason not to consider software code, or the software itself, to be works of art.
Indeed, we have seen many instances of software that are well regarded as being works of art. Is the source code for that software somehow not art?
I would never consider any functional piece of software or its source code art. Something like brainfuck language and programs in it can be art-adjacent to me, but they don't fall under functional.
Some buildings are works of art, but there are plenty that are clearly not. I doubt anyone considers a typical big box store or a commieblock art. To me, all functional software is equivalent to a mass-produced building on art scale.
My art is thinking of ways to help my customers. They don't know what is possible or what data they have in their other tools. I don't see that being taken over by ai just yet, because they don't know what to ask.
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.
> Across all creative industries, there is a concerted push to reject this technology. Yet, almost unique among creative fields, many experienced programmers remain convinced that it’s fine to use “AI” for programming.
How many artists claim that you must make your own paints and construct your own paintbrushes for it to be "art?"
A lot of "AI" in programming isn't replacing programmers or replacing making novel ideas; it's automating mundane tasks so that the programmer can pay closer attention to critical details. Otherwise, when a programmer is truly hands-off and just babysitting an AI, is the program really an expression of an original thought or just the equivalent of a custom-made paintbrush and a custom-made paint; for some other endeavor?
> However, code that is intentionally aesthetically designed tends to be important, both socially and technologically.
I spend a lot of time making sure that code is understandable; often times spending more time on the aesthetics than it took me for the original version. I've found AI very helpful with this, because a mindless refactor that would take me 30-90 minutes, I can have AI do in about 3 minutes.
> Berger reveals that the reality of this portrait is that a poor old painter needed some work, and some officials probably thought it might be nice to have an official portrait. So they paid some money to the poor old man, and he painted it, and then they had a painting.
Today this would be a photograph. Ironically, photography means that painted portraits are a lot more creative, because now we expect to the painter to take more liberties.
> It does make me a bit sad that we don’t have much of a critical reading tradition in the software community. Literate Programming is often praised, but rarely practiced.
Uhm, this is what code reviews are for! And, to be quite frank, I've found that AI code reviews are some of the best I've gotten, because the AI is able to do very deep dives that would take a human reviewer hours, or even days, to do.
> Programming isn’t special. It’s just Art, and Art is the most human — and thus, the most universal — thing that there is.
And this is where the author lost credibility. Programming is more like the inside of the statue of liberty. The art is the result, not the code inside of it.
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.
Why? Is it because most programmers can get paid from a company and not most drawers or musicians? Is it that programmers don't give enough free code on Github, or that their PRs don't wax and wane about how beautiful they found their specific bugfix to be?
If you see the whimsical in a PR changing some column name in a table in a billing system, or you feel the magic and fantasy of a REST API, or yet, God forbid, the emotional undertones of fixing a NPE because the previous change did not consider that a field was optional, then you may have trouble to perceive the difference.
I, at least, never wrote a stock management system to explore the depth of human emotions.
Hmm. I had an issue once with numpy shape mismatch errors appearing after 18+ hours of computation. Frustrating, because it could be caught at compile time.
Later, I learned some typelevel programming (in Scala), and by encoding a digital (binary) adder and multiplier at the type level, I showed -- at least to myself -- it was possible to compute and check linear algebra shapes at compile time (without a compiler plugin). It was rather magical and funny to think that I just embedded basic digital logic in such a higher-abstraction world.
It was slow for the inputs I cared about, so I added some optimizations, like an if-statement at the type level, for example, so that it bit-shift for multiplying powers of 2 (multiplication for tensor products). The compile time difference being palpable was a testament to how "some 'ideas' are surprisingly close to others" (err, 'ideas' ~ 'numbers' in this case). There is a connection to the p-adic numbers here, courtesy of dyadics, and some connection to the more-natural "last-mile" problem.
I agree that solving logic puzzles is very fun. I even pointed at things such as Advent of Code in my original reply. Computer programming can be very fun and satisfying to do. It is the reason why I became a software developer.
But it is not the same sort activity as writing a short story, or composing a a symphony, or painting a still-life. Those are done with different purposes. Art is something done with the purpose of exploring emotions, aesthetic beauty, question societal norms, etc.
The closest programming gets to that is if you are writing a jingle for advertisement, or drawing a signpost, or writing a technical article.
I disagree. It's not just a logic puzzle. If I haven't communicated that to you, that's also my failure. I've written stories short and long as well. It's a different kind of art.
"Art is something done with the purpose of exploring emotions, aesthetic beauty, question societal norms, etc."
I apologize if my emotions and aesthetics are not communicated, but I can only say that they were there. As for societal norms, I doubt that "embedding digital logic in types" is a "norm" of the programming society.
And though it's an appeal to patterns, I will have to bring up the general repeated failure of humanity to recognize art.
I apologize if I don't have the same sort of emotional response to embedding linear algebra validation at the compilation step as I do when I watched Mononoke Hime, or when I read The Picture of Dorian Grey.
While your tale sounded pretty interesting, it is the same sort of interesting as solving a math puzzle. I enjoy math puzzles.
Yep, and that's fine. I just think that for the people who do treat something as art, that I'd want to respect their opinion and emotions. Photography was not art, and now is.
Whatever moves people, however people wish to express themselves, whatever people find beautiful, all that is "art" to me. There's much which is art to others, perhaps, that I would not understand as art for myself.
I have to disagree, because this would stretch the meaning of the word "art" ao much that it becomes meaningless. Given your definition, anything can be art. Filing my taxes can be art, sweeping the floor can be art, taking out the trash can be art, making a butt print in my office chair can be art.
Art is something done with the express purpose of aesthetic appreciation, eliciting emotional responses and so on.
Nature for example can be beautiful, and certainly can draw out emotional responses from people. But unless we bring religion into the mix, it is not made with any purpose, it simply is.
The closest thing I think of programming as art is obviously videogames, if I consider that game mechanics are added with the undeniable purpose of inspiring in the player emotional response, it can certainly be done with aesthetics in mind, and I can think of a few examples where it is used to question norms.
"making a butt print in my office chair can be art." -- There were literally butt prints displayed at the Whitney a couple months ago. Just because it's in resin, so what? If I have fun making butt prints on my chair, is that worse because I didn't seal the form?
From a previous comment, vis-à-vis compilation vs. code generation:
> High-level programming languages use well-defined, limited syntax to encode program behavior in a deterministic way. Compilers translate these directions into programs that should have identical behavior between compiler runs and between different compilers. (If they don't, that's a compiler bug, or else an artifact of UB.) This means you can structurally and provably rely on the high-level programming layer without worrying about what's underneath: the assembly is abstracted away. You also get the massive benefit of being able to tweak and improve the assembly layer independently of the programming language layer, so long as the contract between language and compiler is not violated.
> If AI is a "layer of abstraction," so is working with a bunch of contractors to make your app. The definition is broadened to the point of absurdity. (Solely: "I don't have to think about code anymore," which only touches on the most superficial aspect of an abstraction.)
If there was a way to get a reproducible, deterministic mapping between natural language and code by way of a LLM, that would be an abstraction. But... that's just called a programming language (specifically a transpiler).
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 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.
> 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.
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 rank-and-file 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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
The whole idea is ignoring why people program or create music, illustration or w/e.
Think through an art career, some kid goes through high school, a fine arts degree or something. You get a job working on movies, video games something flashy. Now AI is going to take that All away.
Programming, maybe you start off making games or hacking,then you go too School and get a job. The job is a whole team or sr swes who don't care, your going through project planning ceremonies, playing politics, working on communication skills so you can survive in the corporate environment. You're just working on connecting some crm to some other API. You had to grind Leetcode problems to get that pointless job. What exactly are programmers protecting by hating ai? The job already sucks, it's already pointless, and the first world has been threatened by being replaced already by cheap 3rd world employees
I instinctively want to agree with this but I feel like there's some pretty jarring logical jumps made to equate programming to the more obvious art forms that people put time into ~because~ they want to artistically express themselves.
What the author really wants to say isn't "programming isn't special" but that "programming is art to the same extent as music or painting because people do both things for money within capitalism" which I just don't think holds up.
Sure, some programming might be art. I've written programs that could qualify. But most isn't, unless you also want to count preparing a balance sheet for a corporation as art. Get over it.
I can absolutely imagine this done in a bunch of different ways, and some of them would look like the scribblings of a child, and another approach could be really elegant. One approach may be built to extend, while the other just gets the job done. One approach may trade speed for readability, or vice versa.
Programming is special in the sense that it is one of those direct experiences of mere language instructions being used to make things work - a form that resembles incantations and sorcery of the old times. Where literal stones can speak and obey our commands.
Of course there are many other indirect instances of language being used as the primary tool to move. But programming happens to be a direct raw unadulterated first hand experience into building things with nothing but raw language primitives.
I'd love to take a principled stance on this because I do consider code an art or at least a craft and I appreciate a program written in a unique and clever way. In retrospect, SO MANY of my personal projects[0][1][2][3] over the years were DSLs that affected how you write something and how pretty or type-safe the code ends up being. They are libraries that can only be appreciated by another programmer, they mean nothing to an end user. It appears that whole genre of library will mean nothing to anybody in a few years. Shoulder of Orion, Tannhauser Gate, etc. etc.
Yet, it's utterly hopeless to try to take the same stance visual artists are nobly holding. Of the programs I use daily, how many have I ever even glanced at the source code? I could count them on my fingers. And I'm in the target audience: a programmer, enthusiastic about the trade, one who has contributed to open source...
Conclusion: within a rounding error of NOBODY cares about the code. Of the weavers who were displaced by the automated looms, or the furniture-makers displaced by mass produced pressboard, some of the most skilled could still ply their trade for the rich who wanted to flex their bespoke handmade goods. Programmers writing code by hand will not even have that luxury market. It makes me depressed but I don't see any way around it.
My hope is that I can use my knowledge, willingness to spend long hours fighting with a computer, and industry experience to at least make better software with agents than the average vibecoder. I sadly don't think I'll get anywhere trying to play John Henry vs. the Steam Drill, trying to beat it with my hand-typed code. Maybe somebody who's 10x the dev I am can do that, and Godspeed to them, but I thought I was pretty decent and I don't have a chance.
Hell, it's not even possible to prove any code was written by hand, other than by having uploaded it pre-2024ish. For this reason I really feel bad for those coming up right now, who have the same enthusiasm and fascination for Real Programming that I did, but no way to prove themselves and no motivation to in a world that values that skill less all the time.
programming is not usually art, your own code / programming might be art, and if so, that's great, but literally I can dig a hole in my backyard to run a cable out to the shed, do an amazingly thoughtful job on it and declare it "art", and maybe it is, but then, backhoes are "destroying art" ? I mean what are we doing here? When I have an LLM do code with me, if it's code I'm publishing, I'm telling it what to do, how to do it, the whole architecture is mine. That it came up with some for-loops and unit tests, really who cares? Is my trench out to my shed no longer "art" if I used a backhoe to automate digging out all that dirt? I mean, I am actually a musician. I dropped out of college to be a drummer. Guess where a third of the drumming jobs went in the mid eighties? Drum machines! nobody seemed to have a problem with that. It didn't even kill drumming. Let those of us who are pretty bored with cutting/pasting/typing/backspacing/deleting/googling every stupid API we never need to look at again, have our tools.
Edit: why would anyone flag tfa? There is no anti-flag vote right?
"Artists understand that AI is bad for art." Art is in the eye of the beholder, don't tell me what makes for bad art.
You know what AI is bad for? Menu's. Our butcher just send out a pamphlet with discounts for the week. There is sushi on it that looks like plastic covered in slabs of candle wax, inside is avocado but only at first glance, when you look closer it looks more like a mushy bean. The nori looks covered in sesame seeds, but on closer inspection the seeds form a network, like a fungus. In my head I can just feel the horrible mouthfeel when I look at the image. Weird that I find it so disgusting. It seems that some people do, some don't really see the problem with it.
I also recently say on a banner on a Vietnamese restaurant a shrimp.. But only at first glance, because a shrimp is not a full taurus, like a pink striped donut.
People in this thread not reading the article and expressing their point of "the 10th api you've written for a business is not art" as if the points of mundanity are not addressed in the article is infuriating.
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.
sounds like art people clueless about engineering again
And also we do worry, but not in "replacement" way but just "using AI to create bad code with no proper oversight". It's absolutely enabling clueless to develop crap apps
> 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)
Copyright is not gatekeeping. It is just how artists earn for their work that is intended for a mass (or commercial) audience.
Artists are, in general, extremely keen for there to be more art, more artists and more opportunities for artists. It’s not inconsistent with them wanting those artists to do their own work; indeed that is an essential part of it.
I'm saying artists don't want anyone doing *the same art they do*
GPL ideal gives everyone ability to copy-paste and expand anything, with only obligation to allow everyone to do the same to you. Artists culture is far removed from that
---
even more than that, I see people arguing for MIT(!) to lessen the legal burden on fellow programmers
that's the kind of cultural difference I want to point out
It’s not, particularly. Plenty of credited remixing, artistic references, echoes, parodies, pastiches, collaborations, licenses, rolling memes, all sorts of stuff. There’s quite a lot of CC0 stuff out there too.
The permissions (cultural or otherwise) are different depending on the reuse, but no artist minds a credited remix. People just don’t like theft.
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.
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.
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.
Ten years from now, there will still be both human programmers and people who don't understand why they are needed. (I'd make a case as to why that is, but I'm replying to a comment that just states the opposite without explaining why, so I don't feel the need to.)
Programming by humans will become a handicraft, something people indulge in in their spare time because it's "retro" or interesting or whatever. Like knitting or weaving by hand, or programming in BASIC on a C64. I mean to use the "computer" example again, people still do arithmetic by hand, and even learn tricks to better do it in their head.
But no serious software will be written by humans in ten years. It will not be a profession.
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.
> 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?
Strange. That's like saying no one cares about the technicals of art, just how they feel about looking at an image.
As a consumer of graphics and music, let me "agree" for just a moment. I might not care how the music or image came to me. I just care that I like the final product. Which is why most paintings are trash, because I prefer highly saturated colors.
...I suppose this is somewhat true of many people already.
> 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.
Not necessarily. There are niches in programming that I think could count as art (e.g. live-coding, algoraves) where the programming as performance and the visualized code become part of the artwork. But I think this is not what the OP has in mind.
Maybe programming needs to die first, to be able to be elevated to an artform.
So much of what's going on with a lot of open source community reaction to AI is often just gatekeeping masquerading as morality.
Many of us have spent our adult and teenage lives learning an arcane magic that we took pride and joy and status in. Only to find now it's not so magic anymore. Or not in the way we thought.
I often see parts of my own code as art. Especially when I was younger, I guess.
But I also saw lots of it as: making a living. And there's fluidity between the two.
They're right "programming isn't special" -- it's not the magic you thought it was. It never was. It just appeared magic because others couldn't do it.
You can still have that magic in pockets. But you shouldn't expect to be venerated for it. You never should have.
I've been doing it for 40+ years at this point. I'm happy to let the machines take over a lot of the grunt work so I can get one with making beautiful interesting systems. I can make all things I wanted to make now.
Art is special. Programming... no, get over yourself. You can see it that way. Not everyone else has to. And playing Butlerian Jihad isn't going to dam the flood.
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.
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.
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.
So who do you hire if all you'll see is a wall that is up? The one that seems to care whether it'll stay up after they're gone, or the one who's objective it is to get it up for the price you want to pay?
"You've got to make the back of the fence, that nobody will see, just as good looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know, and that will show that you're dedicated to making something perfect." — Paul Jobs
The person you hire can be an artist of the highest degree, making the prettiest fence on the planet, caring about the project the entire time, and it could fall down in a brisk wind.
Half shaved alcoholic Barry could slap some bricks together with a cigarette hanging out his mouth and it’ll last a century.
Aesthetics and utility are not always as correlated as you might hope.
The actual appearance is less important than the sentiment towards quality, to me anyway; who is it for? I wouldn't buy a house unless I could buy one that I'm happy to live in and that the builder can be happy for me to live in. It's a statement about intent, design, and care. The fact that it actually looks gnarly may not be important, but when nearly all of the houses built in the last 50 years do look like nobody put any thought into it, I start to wonder who's thinking about anything but putting up arbitrary walls to sell without thinking much about what the process yields. Quality feels foreign, there's always this inkling I have that whatever I buy, at any cost, is going to disappear next year or break or have some obvious oversight that got kicked to the side because a deadline came up. It's the focus on horizontal scalability without having attempted to make it better first.
Yes, but that is not what I mean. Walls that are "slapped together" do not often last a century. It's really a misunderstanding of how much effort went into buildings that have, and how much apprenticing time was needed. Modern brickwork that is "slapped together" is even less likely to last.
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.
Idk I feel like it falls over in the same way. Poor understanding of abstraction, poor use of metaphor, an inability to really understand or plan through a thought from being to end.
People are okay with code that does stuff, however bad it may be.
But at some point it becomes impossible to understand and reconcile, which is something humans struggle with as well. Think of fantasy series that will never culminate, because there is no possible culmination.
Mel's famous chess demo is undeniably a work of art. It was also completely unmaintainable. There's a tension between artistic expression and fulfilling business requirements. One could argue that `deferred` is good because it lowers cognitive complexity and makes fulfilling business requirements easier. Whether or not it qualifies as "artistic" or "beautiful" is entirely incidental.
There's also the unfortunate matter that most software is closed source. All most will ever see is the user interface and the API surface. While I am a believer in art for art's sake, I don't think you can blame programmers for feeling like the bottom of a filing cabinet behind a locked door isn't the best place for artistic expression. Perhaps, one could argue, what's more important is the finished product and the impact it has on the world. (Obviously this doesn't apply to actual creative-coding hobbyist spaces, ex: the demoscene, game jams, etc.)
That said, compassionate coding, good documentation/comments/names, and solid architectural design are all vital in software development. This fundamentally requires more care and attention than automated vibe-coding tends to provide. But these qualities are still possible to achieve in an AI-assisted workflow. It's a question of striking the balance between fulfilling business requirements, not alienating developers, ensuring code quality, and limiting the fallout of giving boatloads of cash and political power to AI corporations.
> Artists understand that AI is bad for art. Why don’t programmers understand that we are artists?
Because the vast majority of programmers are bad artists, they just did programming for money. Only few actually cared about true craftsmanship, readability for every level of programmers while maintaining maximum efficiency, true passionate programming or quality open-source without caring how much money earn. AI makes bad artists the best as they don't care the taste but quantity. Same applies for bad programmers.
> they just did programming for money
Very reductive. I would consider myself a pretty mediocre programmer, but worked with a lot worse. I care about making useful things for other people. I care about quality but less so than utility. If I ever get to the point to not need to worry about money, I will still focus on utility over any artistic notion of the code that produces that utility. Sometimes those things align, sometimes they don’t, but I’m much happier shipping a messy to maintain thing that is useful to lots of people, than something that is algorithmicly elegant.
Programming makes a lot of talented people useful, and the world doesn’t care too much about talent unless it’s a talent at sports or a talent at sticking it to other people.
I don't disagree.. I try to ignore what "the world" cares or doesn't care about, focus on trying to make other people/animal's etc lives easier/better than before I found them. Sometimes succeed, often fail, but goal remains simple and the same. "the world" can be cruel and bitter, but doesn't mean you need to play along. The amount of people that see hoarding wealth (aka greed) as a measure of success (aka good person/life/someone to look up to), is a massive source of the problem IMO as it is nearly always achieved by making other people/animal's etc lives harder/worse. The sooner more and more people look at greed with disdain rather than admiration, the less cruel and bitter "the world" will be IMO. :spock-hand:
So talent to you means amount of money you get?
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.
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. :)
> 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.
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 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.
> 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.
A key difference is we are not paid to goto mt.fuji. the opposite infact.
Hence we can't take this lesson to the workplace.
A lot of arts can be done as a job.
And it's always a mixed blessing.
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.
Seeing the core of my Mount Fuji stable and supporting more stands around for years is a satisfaction itself.
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.
I get what Glyph is trying to say here, but I do feel that programming IS different. I'm going to use that word rather than "special".
Many, I'd even go so far as to say most, programmers support and use open source. Open source is thought of in a very different way than I'd say most other traditionally-recognized artists relate to reuse of their work.
Where most composers, performers, painters, novelists (etc) will protect their work with very restrictive licenses, the open source community has much more permissive licenses (though still licenses, many licenses are "feel free to use it" unless you are making money off it).
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.
Programming because a company pays you to do it is not the same as programming for programming's sake. If you think a company hired you to create artful code then you've got your priorities wrong. That's something you do on your own time.
Acting because a company pays you to do it is not the same as acting for acting's sake. If you think a company hired you to create art then you've got your priorities wrong. That's something you do on your own time.
Writing because a company pays you to do it is not the same as writing for writing's sake. If you think a company hired you to create artful prose then you've got your priorities wrong. That's something you do on your own time.
Depends on the company, obviously.
Programming is special. When you create art, music or prose, it's an artifact that is overwhelmingly consumed directly. I enjoy the art by looking at it, listening to it, reading it. I am mostly unaffected by art I've never seen (save for maybe that which seeps into popular culture around me).
Code as an artifact is different in that it can be given agency, ie turned into software. The output of that software can be valuable despite the code being unintelligible to the vast majority of people. Very few people have read e.g. the source code for the TLS encyrption algorithms, yet billions of people's lives depend on it.
It strikes me that the author bemoans the state / lack of software literacy immediately after they take responsibility for obfuscating the descriptive parameters "callback" and "errback" in favor of "deferred" which became "promise" in the name of aesthetics. "callback" might be ugly but at least it says what it does and does what it says.
You say "obfuscating", the author I suspect would say "abstracting", so it's a bit of a matter of perspective. I think the point still stands, because Deferred has become a useful way to think about these collections of callbacks in async systems, so having that concept allows for a literary shorthand, which seems to be an important point of elevating literature.
When something is brought into the world through human intention, it has the possibility of being art. A human must stand next to it and say "This is mine."
The human role in the creation of art is non-negotiable.
Yes and the important aspect imo, is the intention. not if you used a paint brush, a camera, or ai.
i think a lot of the general pushback on ai is the utter lack of intention behind a lot of it's usage. we call it "slop" but it's really a lack of intent. and we can feel it, with ai-isms in written communication, the subtle insanities of ai generated art, and 4000 line functions that could be 40.
but it doesn't have to be this way.
That's silly. There's lots of art with no known creator. Assuming the creator will never be known, it's functionally no different from art that has no creator.
We're already at a point where lots of "art" you look at might have had no human involvement; it could have been generated ad hoc by a web search or in response to the way you hesitated over something else in your feed (okay, maybe not already but certainly in the near future).
But we can't just say that anything that moves you is in a superposition of "art" and "not-art" until sufficient evidence emerges that it was created by a human.
Most people don't experience art through the "art historian" or "true art appreciator" lenses of "who made this and why". They just experience the thing for what it is.
2030's equivalent of Banksy could be a hacker who puts artistic images on major websites. It could then come out, years later, that it was all done by some AI agent. It doesn't matter if that's likely or not, it's obviously possible, and your definition can't just ignore it.
> Assuming the creator will never be known, it's functionally no different from art that has no creator.
This is the key point to argue. I say that it IS different. AI is giving us fits because AI generated works create congnitive dissonance. Knowing a human made something at all is what allows us to connect to it as art. We don't need to know anything about them other than that they are a human, they existed.
The crazy part about it is that it is possible for a human to use AI to make art. It's the intention and the human that make it possible. Where it breaks down is when there's no intention.
I can't remember what show it was (maybe Futurama?), but there's a great bit that lampoons this idea. At a modern art exhibit, somebody leaves something like a banana on an empty pedestal. Later, the attendees are marveling at it, talking about what it means, that sort of thing.
In that is example, there is no artistic intent, but also, the "piece" cannot be readily separated from the other "pieces" in the modern art exhibit that were made with artistic intent.
By your definition of art, people can be "duped" by facts about a piece that don't even accompany many pieces that we think of as "obviously art". They can assume they know the answer, or even a bounding box for the answer like "it was made by a person intentionally", and they can turn out to be wrong, and then... what? It just wasn't art, retroactively?
What if a famous haiku turns out to have been a coded message, 100% instrumental in nature, something like the number and position of enemy forces? "Whoops, guess it wasn't art". What if the best picture I took on a vacation turns out to have been take by a software glitch while my camera sat on my luggage?
We only ever think we know who made something. We do get it wrong. There's a lot of fraud in the art world. Is that likely to get worse or better in the next 100 years, do you think? What are future generations to do, just wonder about whether all their favorite art (that looks like art, feels like art, moves them like art) is "maybe art, maybe not"?
Yes, the modern interpretation of art is just the old adage that beauty is in the eye of the beholder or more crudely it’s all head canon. It’s a degenerate form of what was pursued before the modern era which was to identify and produce art that was unambiguously exceptional to anyone who saw it. Some of that is still present but seems stifled by the requirement to go against tradition so you end up with things like exploiting sheer size or complexity for effect.
Is a print of the Mona Lisa still art? Or is it worthless slop by virtue of having been created by a machine?
For the curious, Jean Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin are a good place to start for answering these questions.
as of yet, there’s still no such thing as a print created entirely by a machine. Someone made the scan, prepared the print file, chose the paper stock, proofed the prints. Or at least some of those steps, depending on the print.
The point is, there’s no print that is 1:1 equivalent to an original painting. There are artistic choices embedded throughout the process that influence the result and make one print different than another, which people might consider more or less accurate, or faithful, or beautiful, or artistic.
It’s easy to assume an image is just an image, a bunch of pixels with defined numerical values. But the real world has so much more detail than that.
C’est ne pas une ~~pipe~~ Mona Lisa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
A print is a faithful copy of the original art. No additional artistic or expressive intent went into the mass production of the print.
There's not one answer.
It’s a print of a piece of art.
IMO the original painting is art, a faithful copy is also lesser art, but a print is not art, because it takes significantly less skill and creativity to print thousands of it. It isn't worthless nor slop, though.
Basically, art speaks to our sensibilities, so we expect to find a message in there. LLMs can't create, only mix-and-match what exists in their training data set. You could slop a new painting, make a special canvas printer, and exhibit it in a blind test. Some people will think it's art because they find meaning in it, while others will think it's not art because they'll recognize several meanings slopped together in a nonsensical way.
In reality, it was never art, because the creator, a statistical algorithm, never had any message to convey in the first place.
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.
Programming is less like the category "music" and more like the specific genre "sampling", in this case. Much of programming is reusing other peoples "samples", integrating them in new and useful ways.
In music, we have largely accepted that sampling is legitimate (though that did take some fighting to achieve), and that the musicians making music this way are legitimate artists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)
Programming can be art in the way that cooking can be art.
Most of it is in fact NOT art but simply done to solve a problem.
Right on. And similarly, you don't need to learn farming to be able to cook good food, just like you didn't need to know assembly language or machine code to be able to write programs before AI.
Go talk to an artist, and they'll tell you art is a form of engineering, and it requires the artist to understand what works, what doesn't, and why, in practical & scientific terms. The corporate world is dogmatic, self-destructive, FOMO-obsessed and then some. It considers _doing work that matters_ to be a special privilege, and that you should be happy and thankful for meaningless work instead. The corporate world is practically anti-capitalist and anti-real.
If anything, that corporate world fulfills the popular perception of art - impractical, pointless gesturing and posing - rather than what real art intends to do, which is to gain a deeper understanding of the real world and show it to others. Art critics tend to hate it when an artist explains how art is made, preferring an explanation of magical genius; but that's their problem, not art's problem.
AI-assisted programming is like working in the manner of Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst. For them, having the idea is the work; they delegate the actual making of the piece entirely to assistants.
Perhaps the extreme end of this is Yoko Ono, who actually released a book of prompts as artwork, things for the audience to do and respond emotionally to. Ex.: "Hide and Seek: Hide until everyone goes home. Hide until everyone forgets you. Hide until everyone dies."
Anyways, whatever you may think of their work or perceived lack thereof, these people are unbelievably rich and the toast of the art world. Just sayin.
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 how you framed this distinction. I think I belong to the first group, and I'm having to reconcile with the loss of these activities I enjoyed.
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.
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I strongly agree that programming is art, but I think there's a difference between other art forms.
A novel is both how it's made and what it is, and so is a piece of music.
Programming produces two different outputs: the code and the program. What users consume, and care about, is the program. The code may or may not be read by other programmers but it's not the main output. (It would be extremely weird to output code in a language that can't ever be run.)
And so I think the beauty or effectiveness of the program matters more than the beauty or elegance of the code. Those are not entirely orthogonal of course, but only loosely coupled.
A programmer should care a lot about the program, and a little less about the code. Vibe programming (where the programmer doesn't care one way or another) to me is a crime; but you can certainly use AI to code, and still care about the finished product, and make it good.
I don't think this is necessarily true. My personal belief is that any functional thing can be turned into art if it is made with deep respect and intimate knowledge of the telos of the object. You make something so well that you see something really beautiful or important in it/with it/through it that you can't help but capture.
Technical communications serve mostly functional purpose but there were technical documents that ascended their pure function. One of the most famous drawings in the European art history is, in fact, a technical document[0].
I also really love looking at arcitectural drawings, there are a lot of architects and drafters whose technical drawing carries so much artistic quality to it (and not merely quality of execution) that I personally call them artists[1].
And before I get mocked about whether code that makes a spreadheet software is art now -- I don't know, I am not a programmer but I think it can be -- surely there is something else to code than just the software it produces? Speed? Efficiency? Balance? Elegant architecture of ideas that says "yes, I know you, the next maintainer of this codebase, will need to extend it one day, and this is why I made it very simple for you"? It might not talk to an accountant who ends up using the spreadsheet but it can talk to another programmer.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Mahony_Griffin
> A programmer should care a lot about the program, and a little less about the code
This gives me vibes of like saying to artists "you should care about the painting but less about the brushes and paints"
The tools you choose and the lines you scribe all contribute to the whole. It all matters to some extent
Also, newsflash: the code is the program
What the phrasing really meant was caring about the result, not the program, and it has the same energy as people saying mass-slopped books are as good as regular books because they are entertaining.
In the long run, what matters is the maintainability of the code. And the security, and the performance. All that comes from the code. The most beautiful code with proper layers of abstraction is gonna turn to shit when business needs come into play and there's not enough time to rearchitect the system properly.
Programming can be an Art, but it's mostly a Craft.
And more of us work at the equivalent of fast fashion than designer clothes.
Programmers don't need to justify code as art to reject AI. Programming is building and people who care about building do so because they take pride in the craft, because they take joy in mastery, because they are relentlessly curious, because they learn by doing, because they want to manifest the abstract because it's a natural desire to leave a mark, a legacy.
AI is the antithesis. You don't build, you commission. Mastery requires struggle, AI eschews it. Mountains of slop bury your handcrafted work, your culmination of effort, your capacity to inspire others as you yourself were inspired.
The reason you see less rejection of AI in tech circles is because tech is infested by capitalists who see programming as a means of extracting a buck, not as a craft. AI made their stripes more visible.
Some building is done for those reasons, but it's hard to think of examples where building is done at large scale for those reasons.
I have a friend who is in construction management at a firm that exclusively does large projects, usually commercial and sometimes residential towers. I don't think you could come up with a definition for "build" that excludes what he and those he manages are doing. But they do not build those projects because "they take pride in the craft, because they take joy in mastery, because they are relentlessly curious, because they learn by doing, because they want to manifest the abstract because it's a natural desire to leave a mark, a legacy". Some of those things may be true of their work some or all of the time, but they don't do that work because of those things. They do it because somebody considered it to be really useful and worthy of the investment to build that new tower. The reason they are building, the "because" of it all, is the end product. The means with which they build, the craft of it, is only relevant as a means to that desired end.
Software is no different. Some software is built for the craft (and that's great, I personally love doing that), but at large scale, it is the outcome, the end product, that is the goal, that is the thing that matters. If craft is the best way to best achieve the desired outcome then all the better, but a professional will honestly assess whether that is truly the case, and do their work accordingly.
I believe there are software developers out there that might take a stronger position against AI but they literally fear for their employment.
We're in the late stages of capitalism, at a point where everyone is scrambling to extract some wealth, before everything comes crumbling down. No one is even remotely thinking about art of the craft now, or programmer happiness or whatever, and you're branded a loser if you think about that stuff.
I used to think that programming is an art; that you get paid for the code. Too bad it took me decades to realize how wrong I was. AI sucks, it sucks the soul from this profession. But in the end, the code it produces works, so who cares?
> But in the end, the code it produces works, so who cares?
I care, precisely because the code it produces doesn't work. It has the appearance of working, but it is badly written and leads to problems down the line.
Hot Take: AI Isn't Special: When someone learns through reading a bunch of books on a subject (art, programming, music), we don't call it theft and demand they be able to recite the specific source of where they learned something and demand they pay the original authors for their use of it. AI Isn't Special.
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 am so fascinated about this angle -- whether programming is art or not. This is one of the things that got me to HN recently and I love reading these discussiong as a non-programmer.
While I love art, I am not an art historian or critic, so the definition I have for it is highly subjective -- in my opinion one of the functions of art is communication with other people (often through time and space). For art to fulfill its telos, so to speak, the message that it carries must also be read (heard, perceived) by somebody and then, if it's great art, eventually someone would want to respond to it.
The message can be simple, complex, subversive, stupid, clever, it can be an observation about world, a joke, a profound truth, a memory, a question, a snapshot, a curiosity, a trick, and a ton of other things. And sure, the message can be distorted, misunderstood, twisted, forgotten, lost, etc, but if no one "reads" it and no one "talks" to it, it might as well be glossolalia.
So my question for folks who do consider programming art -- do you "read" other people's code like this? Do you exchange ideas through code? Have you ever trolled great coders of the past through your code or tried to prove them wrong?
I hope my question doesn't come off as complete nonsense.
P.s. I know that there are programming manifestos which to me sounds like there is a layer of meaning that the code carries and this meaning goes beyond pure machine instructions or software functionality, but I'd love to read answers of actual programmers.
> So my question for folks who do consider programming art -- do you "read" other people's code like this? Do you exchange ideas through code? Have you ever trolled great coders of the past through your code or tried to prove them wrong?
Yes, 100% yes. I have always said that I reading someones code to me is akin to reading a personal diary or memoir. It exposes so many thing about their frame of mind and world view. I consider it beautiful and the advent of LLMs greatly muddying this signal (it has absolutely not REMOVED IT) has been incredible painful.
That's a really good question! The code to the old software, the first version of Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, IdSoftware's Doom, are available on GitHub, and people have poured over them. Or more modernly, there's large open source projects out there currently. But most source isn't something anyone else would see outside of work because it's all proprietary software. Google's internal systems are a thing of beauty, but no one outside of Google can legally be shown them, so it goes unnoticed by the wider world. The closest thing we get to art appreciation thus is blogs like Raymond Chen's Old New Thing. He's a programmer with Microsoft that talks about what it was like to work on windows.
Programming is special, as it's basically translation on steroids.
I don't know what other profession weaves so many levels of abstraction to get to the final product.
Well, "translator" was one of the first jobs to be lost to AI.
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.
Completely disagree. Programming is engineering. Almost all software in existence exists to solve problems, and almost all interaction with software are with the end product, rather than the code. For code to be qualify as art, the definition of art has to be diluted to the point of meaninglessness. Is an Ikea cabinet art too?
Even when models are capable of producing convincing illustrations in any style, it's still generally easy to tell what's AI generated most of the time due to lack of unique artist's style, taste, and meaning. There's nothing that makes an AI-generated piece of software worse than a human-written one.
Personally, I also hate my job less because of AI. I get to focus on solving actual problems, architecture, and code quality. Almost all pre-AI code at my company was just layers of hacks upon hacks. With AI, I actually get to write code that's up to my standards because doing things properly is nearly free in terms of time and effort.
I think this is a stretch, many engineering feats are also been considered works of art. Bridges, homes, office buildings, etc. There is no reason not to consider software code, or the software itself, to be works of art.
Indeed, we have seen many instances of software that are well regarded as being works of art. Is the source code for that software somehow not art?
The 90s demoscene was a fascinating confluence of engineering, art, and informal competition.
If you've ever been to a makerspace, those places tend to be ground 0 for engineering as art.
I would never consider any functional piece of software or its source code art. Something like brainfuck language and programs in it can be art-adjacent to me, but they don't fall under functional.
Some buildings are works of art, but there are plenty that are clearly not. I doubt anyone considers a typical big box store or a commieblock art. To me, all functional software is equivalent to a mass-produced building on art scale.
My art is thinking of ways to help my customers. They don't know what is possible or what data they have in their other tools. I don't see that being taken over by ai just yet, because they don't know what to ask.
Not sure if the author is reading HN, but there is a typo:
> we take the total likelihood of those moments of greatness to (->from) “definitely sometimes” to “never”.
He is not, but I have passed on your comment to him and am passing back his thanks to you.
I would define Art as something that has meaning and intentionality across multiple disciplines.
Very good example about Deferred.
I will argue anything by anyone can be art. Eg a business run by an AI can be art.
I agree, and I've considered my code to be art for a long while. Take for example my coffeescript parser: https://github.com/jaekwon/JoeScript/blob/master/src/joescri...
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.
A few points:
> Across all creative industries, there is a concerted push to reject this technology. Yet, almost unique among creative fields, many experienced programmers remain convinced that it’s fine to use “AI” for programming.
How many artists claim that you must make your own paints and construct your own paintbrushes for it to be "art?"
A lot of "AI" in programming isn't replacing programmers or replacing making novel ideas; it's automating mundane tasks so that the programmer can pay closer attention to critical details. Otherwise, when a programmer is truly hands-off and just babysitting an AI, is the program really an expression of an original thought or just the equivalent of a custom-made paintbrush and a custom-made paint; for some other endeavor?
> However, code that is intentionally aesthetically designed tends to be important, both socially and technologically.
I spend a lot of time making sure that code is understandable; often times spending more time on the aesthetics than it took me for the original version. I've found AI very helpful with this, because a mindless refactor that would take me 30-90 minutes, I can have AI do in about 3 minutes.
> Berger reveals that the reality of this portrait is that a poor old painter needed some work, and some officials probably thought it might be nice to have an official portrait. So they paid some money to the poor old man, and he painted it, and then they had a painting.
Today this would be a photograph. Ironically, photography means that painted portraits are a lot more creative, because now we expect to the painter to take more liberties.
> It does make me a bit sad that we don’t have much of a critical reading tradition in the software community. Literate Programming is often praised, but rarely practiced.
Uhm, this is what code reviews are for! And, to be quite frank, I've found that AI code reviews are some of the best I've gotten, because the AI is able to do very deep dives that would take a human reviewer hours, or even days, to do.
> Programming isn’t special. It’s just Art, and Art is the most human — and thus, the most universal — thing that there is.
And this is where the author lost credibility. Programming is more like the inside of the statue of liberty. The art is the result, not the code inside of it.
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.
Why? Is it because most programmers can get paid from a company and not most drawers or musicians? Is it that programmers don't give enough free code on Github, or that their PRs don't wax and wane about how beautiful they found their specific bugfix to be?
If you see the whimsical in a PR changing some column name in a table in a billing system, or you feel the magic and fantasy of a REST API, or yet, God forbid, the emotional undertones of fixing a NPE because the previous change did not consider that a field was optional, then you may have trouble to perceive the difference.
I, at least, never wrote a stock management system to explore the depth of human emotions.
Hmm. I had an issue once with numpy shape mismatch errors appearing after 18+ hours of computation. Frustrating, because it could be caught at compile time.
Later, I learned some typelevel programming (in Scala), and by encoding a digital (binary) adder and multiplier at the type level, I showed -- at least to myself -- it was possible to compute and check linear algebra shapes at compile time (without a compiler plugin). It was rather magical and funny to think that I just embedded basic digital logic in such a higher-abstraction world.
It was slow for the inputs I cared about, so I added some optimizations, like an if-statement at the type level, for example, so that it bit-shift for multiplying powers of 2 (multiplication for tensor products). The compile time difference being palpable was a testament to how "some 'ideas' are surprisingly close to others" (err, 'ideas' ~ 'numbers' in this case). There is a connection to the p-adic numbers here, courtesy of dyadics, and some connection to the more-natural "last-mile" problem.
It's not REST, maybe. But I felt it was magical.
I agree that solving logic puzzles is very fun. I even pointed at things such as Advent of Code in my original reply. Computer programming can be very fun and satisfying to do. It is the reason why I became a software developer.
But it is not the same sort activity as writing a short story, or composing a a symphony, or painting a still-life. Those are done with different purposes. Art is something done with the purpose of exploring emotions, aesthetic beauty, question societal norms, etc.
The closest programming gets to that is if you are writing a jingle for advertisement, or drawing a signpost, or writing a technical article.
I disagree. It's not just a logic puzzle. If I haven't communicated that to you, that's also my failure. I've written stories short and long as well. It's a different kind of art.
"Art is something done with the purpose of exploring emotions, aesthetic beauty, question societal norms, etc." I apologize if my emotions and aesthetics are not communicated, but I can only say that they were there. As for societal norms, I doubt that "embedding digital logic in types" is a "norm" of the programming society.
And though it's an appeal to patterns, I will have to bring up the general repeated failure of humanity to recognize art.
I apologize if I don't have the same sort of emotional response to embedding linear algebra validation at the compilation step as I do when I watched Mononoke Hime, or when I read The Picture of Dorian Grey.
While your tale sounded pretty interesting, it is the same sort of interesting as solving a math puzzle. I enjoy math puzzles.
Yep, and that's fine. I just think that for the people who do treat something as art, that I'd want to respect their opinion and emotions. Photography was not art, and now is.
Whatever moves people, however people wish to express themselves, whatever people find beautiful, all that is "art" to me. There's much which is art to others, perhaps, that I would not understand as art for myself.
I have to disagree, because this would stretch the meaning of the word "art" ao much that it becomes meaningless. Given your definition, anything can be art. Filing my taxes can be art, sweeping the floor can be art, taking out the trash can be art, making a butt print in my office chair can be art.
Art is something done with the express purpose of aesthetic appreciation, eliciting emotional responses and so on.
Nature for example can be beautiful, and certainly can draw out emotional responses from people. But unless we bring religion into the mix, it is not made with any purpose, it simply is.
The closest thing I think of programming as art is obviously videogames, if I consider that game mechanics are added with the undeniable purpose of inspiring in the player emotional response, it can certainly be done with aesthetics in mind, and I can think of a few examples where it is used to question norms.
"making a butt print in my office chair can be art." -- There were literally butt prints displayed at the Whitney a couple months ago. Just because it's in resin, so what? If I have fun making butt prints on my chair, is that worse because I didn't seal the form?
You have missed out on _why, perhaps? I am old enough to remember him, and Camping, and the chaotic, brilliant nature of his work.
We’re in automation. The point of programming is not to do the same thing again.
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.
> The point of programming is not to do the same thing again.
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.
Why isn’t AI a complex form of abstraction?
It works because it re-uses previous work to solve new problems. That is what abstractions are used for.
From a previous comment, vis-à-vis compilation vs. code generation:
> High-level programming languages use well-defined, limited syntax to encode program behavior in a deterministic way. Compilers translate these directions into programs that should have identical behavior between compiler runs and between different compilers. (If they don't, that's a compiler bug, or else an artifact of UB.) This means you can structurally and provably rely on the high-level programming layer without worrying about what's underneath: the assembly is abstracted away. You also get the massive benefit of being able to tweak and improve the assembly layer independently of the programming language layer, so long as the contract between language and compiler is not violated.
> If AI is a "layer of abstraction," so is working with a bunch of contractors to make your app. The definition is broadened to the point of absurdity. (Solely: "I don't have to think about code anymore," which only touches on the most superficial aspect of an abstraction.)
If there was a way to get a reproducible, deterministic mapping between natural language and code by way of a LLM, that would be an abstraction. But... that's just called a programming language (specifically a transpiler).
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 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.
> 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.
Everyone in the comments snitching on themselves for not reading.
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).
Here are a couple counter-points that come to mind:
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 rank-and-file 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:
Not to rain on your fine snippet but you can use negative offsets to index from the end of the string:
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.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl
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.
> There are different kind of arts. There is the art of a craftsmen and there is beautiful art.
The art of a craftsman, otherwise known as 'craft'.
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.
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.
I believe it's a spectrum, just like there is a whole spectrum between the Mona Lisa and a generic flyer for your local bowling alley.
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.
> 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.
You don't have to imagine 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
Neither poetry nor literature is displayed in a museum (or at least that's not their normal home). But no one argues that they aren't art.
You've never been to the Bodleian, have you?
I included the phrase “not their normal home” explicitly to cover cases like the Bodleian.
Unless you are arguing that the rare museum exhibition is the normal case whereas books and recitations are the abnormal ones.
Said this in a thread already but bears repeating at the top level:
Coding is not Programming
Coding is certainly a highly adjacent skill to programming, but coding is not the same as programming.
To quote Leslie Lamport: "coding is to programming as typing is to writing."
> Coding vs Programming
I'm not willing to play word games to indulge in a niche demographic's incessant miscategorization of a profession.
There's a poetry to your comment! Happy Friday sir.
The whole idea is ignoring why people program or create music, illustration or w/e.
Think through an art career, some kid goes through high school, a fine arts degree or something. You get a job working on movies, video games something flashy. Now AI is going to take that All away.
Programming, maybe you start off making games or hacking,then you go too School and get a job. The job is a whole team or sr swes who don't care, your going through project planning ceremonies, playing politics, working on communication skills so you can survive in the corporate environment. You're just working on connecting some crm to some other API. You had to grind Leetcode problems to get that pointless job. What exactly are programmers protecting by hating ai? The job already sucks, it's already pointless, and the first world has been threatened by being replaced already by cheap 3rd world employees
I instinctively want to agree with this but I feel like there's some pretty jarring logical jumps made to equate programming to the more obvious art forms that people put time into ~because~ they want to artistically express themselves.
What the author really wants to say isn't "programming isn't special" but that "programming is art to the same extent as music or painting because people do both things for money within capitalism" which I just don't think holds up.
This is so tediously shallow.
Sure, some programming might be art. I've written programs that could qualify. But most isn't, unless you also want to count preparing a balance sheet for a corporation as art. Get over it.
I can absolutely imagine this done in a bunch of different ways, and some of them would look like the scribblings of a child, and another approach could be really elegant. One approach may be built to extend, while the other just gets the job done. One approach may trade speed for readability, or vice versa.
If I were a chef some of my stuff is definitely art, basically spaghetti.
Programming is special in the sense that it is one of those direct experiences of mere language instructions being used to make things work - a form that resembles incantations and sorcery of the old times. Where literal stones can speak and obey our commands.
Of course there are many other indirect instances of language being used as the primary tool to move. But programming happens to be a direct raw unadulterated first hand experience into building things with nothing but raw language primitives.
Where code is ideas willed into existence.
I'd love to take a principled stance on this because I do consider code an art or at least a craft and I appreciate a program written in a unique and clever way. In retrospect, SO MANY of my personal projects[0][1][2][3] over the years were DSLs that affected how you write something and how pretty or type-safe the code ends up being. They are libraries that can only be appreciated by another programmer, they mean nothing to an end user. It appears that whole genre of library will mean nothing to anybody in a few years. Shoulder of Orion, Tannhauser Gate, etc. etc.
[0] https://github.com/rspeele/infix.el
[1] https://github.com/rspeele/LicenseToCIL
[2] https://github.com/fsprojects/Rezoom.SQL
[3] https://rspeele.github.io/FParsec-Pipes/Intro.html
Yet, it's utterly hopeless to try to take the same stance visual artists are nobly holding. Of the programs I use daily, how many have I ever even glanced at the source code? I could count them on my fingers. And I'm in the target audience: a programmer, enthusiastic about the trade, one who has contributed to open source...
Conclusion: within a rounding error of NOBODY cares about the code. Of the weavers who were displaced by the automated looms, or the furniture-makers displaced by mass produced pressboard, some of the most skilled could still ply their trade for the rich who wanted to flex their bespoke handmade goods. Programmers writing code by hand will not even have that luxury market. It makes me depressed but I don't see any way around it.
My hope is that I can use my knowledge, willingness to spend long hours fighting with a computer, and industry experience to at least make better software with agents than the average vibecoder. I sadly don't think I'll get anywhere trying to play John Henry vs. the Steam Drill, trying to beat it with my hand-typed code. Maybe somebody who's 10x the dev I am can do that, and Godspeed to them, but I thought I was pretty decent and I don't have a chance.
Hell, it's not even possible to prove any code was written by hand, other than by having uploaded it pre-2024ish. For this reason I really feel bad for those coming up right now, who have the same enthusiasm and fascination for Real Programming that I did, but no way to prove themselves and no motivation to in a world that values that skill less all the time.
Apparently, neither is coherent writing.
If you’re going to call this “incoherent”, which IMO it is not, you should expect to be asked by someone to explain why.
So I am.
Why is this flagged? I find it a fair essay. Why do philistines get to spoil all the fun around here?
programming is not usually art, your own code / programming might be art, and if so, that's great, but literally I can dig a hole in my backyard to run a cable out to the shed, do an amazingly thoughtful job on it and declare it "art", and maybe it is, but then, backhoes are "destroying art" ? I mean what are we doing here? When I have an LLM do code with me, if it's code I'm publishing, I'm telling it what to do, how to do it, the whole architecture is mine. That it came up with some for-loops and unit tests, really who cares? Is my trench out to my shed no longer "art" if I used a backhoe to automate digging out all that dirt? I mean, I am actually a musician. I dropped out of college to be a drummer. Guess where a third of the drumming jobs went in the mid eighties? Drum machines! nobody seemed to have a problem with that. It didn't even kill drumming. Let those of us who are pretty bored with cutting/pasting/typing/backspacing/deleting/googling every stupid API we never need to look at again, have our tools.
Edit: why would anyone flag tfa? There is no anti-flag vote right?
"Artists understand that AI is bad for art." Art is in the eye of the beholder, don't tell me what makes for bad art.
You know what AI is bad for? Menu's. Our butcher just send out a pamphlet with discounts for the week. There is sushi on it that looks like plastic covered in slabs of candle wax, inside is avocado but only at first glance, when you look closer it looks more like a mushy bean. The nori looks covered in sesame seeds, but on closer inspection the seeds form a network, like a fungus. In my head I can just feel the horrible mouthfeel when I look at the image. Weird that I find it so disgusting. It seems that some people do, some don't really see the problem with it.
I also recently say on a banner on a Vietnamese restaurant a shrimp.. But only at first glance, because a shrimp is not a full taurus, like a pink striped donut.
This is slop. It’s just human written.
> what it’s doing to our industry, but we are using it anyway
Other industries are using it too. It's quite delusional to assume that just because people hate something they won't use it.
People in this thread not reading the article and expressing their point of "the 10th api you've written for a business is not art" as if the points of mundanity are not addressed in the article is infuriating.
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.
sounds like art people clueless about engineering again
And also we do worry, but not in "replacement" way but just "using AI to create bad code with no proper oversight". It's absolutely enabling clueless to develop crap apps
> 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)
I've seen enough tracing scandals
and some of my favorite works have been shutdown for background art
Copyright is not gatekeeping. It is just how artists earn for their work that is intended for a mass (or commercial) audience.
Artists are, in general, extremely keen for there to be more art, more artists and more opportunities for artists. It’s not inconsistent with them wanting those artists to do their own work; indeed that is an essential part of it.
I'm not arguing about "there being more art"
I'm saying artists don't want anyone doing *the same art they do*
GPL ideal gives everyone ability to copy-paste and expand anything, with only obligation to allow everyone to do the same to you. Artists culture is far removed from that
---
even more than that, I see people arguing for MIT(!) to lessen the legal burden on fellow programmers
that's the kind of cultural difference I want to point out
> Artists culture is far removed from that
It’s not, particularly. Plenty of credited remixing, artistic references, echoes, parodies, pastiches, collaborations, licenses, rolling memes, all sorts of stuff. There’s quite a lot of CC0 stuff out there too.
The permissions (cultural or otherwise) are different depending on the reuse, but no artist minds a credited remix. People just don’t like theft.
basically artists are sellers, while programmers are buyers
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?"
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.
This should not be flagged.
Why was this flagged?
I don't think there is anything here for me anymore.
Users flagged it. We've turned the flags off now.
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.
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.
Ten years from now, there will still be both human programmers and people who don't understand why they are needed. (I'd make a case as to why that is, but I'm replying to a comment that just states the opposite without explaining why, so I don't feel the need to.)
Programming by humans will become a handicraft, something people indulge in in their spare time because it's "retro" or interesting or whatever. Like knitting or weaving by hand, or programming in BASIC on a C64. I mean to use the "computer" example again, people still do arithmetic by hand, and even learn tricks to better do it in their head.
But no serious software will be written by humans in ten years. It will not be a profession.
And I will again also state stuff without any supporting argument: In 10 years programming will be done entirely by specially trained ferrets.
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.
> Programming is different from art or writing in that nobody gives a fuck about the code, only the results
Nobody except the programmers, I guess. Quite a few of us care about the craft
I guess the same can be said about plumbing and HVAC installations.
I think art is different from the rest in that it lost utilitarian value. In other words, Art is degenerative by definition.
> 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...
I’m confused.
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?
Strange. That's like saying no one cares about the technicals of art, just how they feel about looking at an image.
As a consumer of graphics and music, let me "agree" for just a moment. I might not care how the music or image came to me. I just care that I like the final product. Which is why most paintings are trash, because I prefer highly saturated colors.
...I suppose this is somewhat true of many people already.
> 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.
Not necessarily. There are niches in programming that I think could count as art (e.g. live-coding, algoraves) where the programming as performance and the visualized code become part of the artwork. But I think this is not what the OP has in mind.
Maybe programming needs to die first, to be able to be elevated to an artform.
So much of what's going on with a lot of open source community reaction to AI is often just gatekeeping masquerading as morality.
Many of us have spent our adult and teenage lives learning an arcane magic that we took pride and joy and status in. Only to find now it's not so magic anymore. Or not in the way we thought.
I often see parts of my own code as art. Especially when I was younger, I guess.
But I also saw lots of it as: making a living. And there's fluidity between the two.
They're right "programming isn't special" -- it's not the magic you thought it was. It never was. It just appeared magic because others couldn't do it.
You can still have that magic in pockets. But you shouldn't expect to be venerated for it. You never should have.
I've been doing it for 40+ years at this point. I'm happy to let the machines take over a lot of the grunt work so I can get one with making beautiful interesting systems. I can make all things I wanted to make now.
Art is special. Programming... no, get over yourself. You can see it that way. Not everyone else has to. And playing Butlerian Jihad isn't going to dam the flood.
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.
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.
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.
You're not British, right?
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.
Some bricklaying may be art. Not all bricklaying is art.
So who do you hire if all you'll see is a wall that is up? The one that seems to care whether it'll stay up after they're gone, or the one who's objective it is to get it up for the price you want to pay?
"You've got to make the back of the fence, that nobody will see, just as good looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know, and that will show that you're dedicated to making something perfect." — Paul Jobs
The person you hire can be an artist of the highest degree, making the prettiest fence on the planet, caring about the project the entire time, and it could fall down in a brisk wind.
Half shaved alcoholic Barry could slap some bricks together with a cigarette hanging out his mouth and it’ll last a century.
Aesthetics and utility are not always as correlated as you might hope.
The actual appearance is less important than the sentiment towards quality, to me anyway; who is it for? I wouldn't buy a house unless I could buy one that I'm happy to live in and that the builder can be happy for me to live in. It's a statement about intent, design, and care. The fact that it actually looks gnarly may not be important, but when nearly all of the houses built in the last 50 years do look like nobody put any thought into it, I start to wonder who's thinking about anything but putting up arbitrary walls to sell without thinking much about what the process yields. Quality feels foreign, there's always this inkling I have that whatever I buy, at any cost, is going to disappear next year or break or have some obvious oversight that got kicked to the side because a deadline came up. It's the focus on horizontal scalability without having attempted to make it better first.
> Half shaved alcoholic Barry could slap some bricks together with a cigarette hanging out his mouth and it’ll last a century.
No, not really.
Drinking "a few" beers used to be very common at construction sites. It's not anymore. (Germany)
Yes, but that is not what I mean. Walls that are "slapped together" do not often last a century. It's really a misunderstanding of how much effort went into buildings that have, and how much apprenticing time was needed. Modern brickwork that is "slapped together" is even less likely to last.
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.
It is fine to use AI for programming, making music, writing, video... it's fine for all of these uses. Yeah, programming isn't special.
The only difference is that LLMs can code way better than they can write. Probably thanks to software being more and more immediately testable.
Idk I feel like it falls over in the same way. Poor understanding of abstraction, poor use of metaphor, an inability to really understand or plan through a thought from being to end.
People are okay with code that does stuff, however bad it may be.
But at some point it becomes impossible to understand and reconcile, which is something humans struggle with as well. Think of fantasy series that will never culminate, because there is no possible culmination.