From what I have seen over the past thirty years, the vast majority of programmers are generally not interested in "originality". They might even challenge the very notion that software can be "original"; certainly I've seen this perspective in HN comments over the years. These programmers are eager to copy and may even pride themselves on fast they can do it ("implement" a preexisting idea used by someone else)

Even more, culturally, these programmers are generally not fond of other programmers who operate in their own, "original" way. There is a gross amount of peer pressure to conform to "convention" for lack a better term. By and large, they conform; independent thinking is not popular

There are a small number of programmers who elevate programming to an art form. But this is not the majority and these individuals are not representative of programmer behaviour in general

NB. I'm not arguing for or against orginality, utilitarianism, etc. Everything has its proper place. I'm just drawing attention to a frequent difference between programmers and artists

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.

When I was a junior developer I did see programming as an art but I really don’t see it anymore. What is important is the output. And does the output is in accordance to its design and functions as intended.

You can produce great software with any code or programming languages that you can think of. Some tools and practices produce them faster and/or with higher quality and correctness.

You can replicate the same product with almost any programming language now and good software practices now. AI makes the writing process a breeze but doesn’t solve what is art: the design and the vision (why and what). Therefore I think you can’t call the process of production an art. It’s really not that special.

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.

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.

Code can be pretty, but I don't consider it art. Just like I don't consider technical documentation art.

I much prefer being able to talk to my computer and tell it to make a Stream Deck plugin to control the lights in my office and create a weather app (and show the precipitation forecast on the buttons) in 10 minutes, rather than me futzing around for two days to create something similar. Or to create the world's first(?) Telemark ski game from my Strava dumps in 30 minutes.

Admittedly, my book and course sales are down quite a bit (which I would mostly blame on AI). I'm not sure what the future holds, but change and adaptation have been pretty constant in my 25+ year career.

I do have concerns about what the minimal knowledge requirements will be for product development in the future.

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.

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.

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).

Most of it is in fact NOT art but simply done to solve a problem.

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)

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.

The human role in the creation of art is non-negotiable.

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.

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.

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.

It's like an architect designing a building. The drawings are not art by themselves. They need to represent the design in a way that's faithful, precise, easy to understand for anyone with experience, logically structured and easy to update if any requirements change. That is code. If you write bad code your app will be slow and hard to develop further, but it doesn't make the whole thing bad because the code is not the software.

The physical structure is also just another way to represent a building, the one people actually interact with in real life. That is the binary you give to your users. But the art is in the design that came from the mind of the architect, not the drawings or the steel and concrete. It's the thing no machine can replace because it's completely subjective.

UX and graphics is art. API design is art. These are the things that matter and none of them depend on you personally writing the code, or how the code looks at all.

You can treat your code as art and spend months making it look perfect. There's nothing wrong with that, and if you decide to do it then your code will probably end up being better quality too. But you can't pretend it's the only way.

   Art is viewed differently by those who create it, those who talk about it, and those who collect it. For an artist, art is creative and expressive, a way to 'scratch the itch,' so to speak. For those who talk about it, it's a way to show off their knowledge and passion (and maybe make a living doing so). For those who collect it, it's an ego boost and an investment, something to brag about at parties.
   When you consider programming from these three points of view, programmers are definitely capable of seeing themselves as artists. Perhaps those who talk about programming may also see programmers as artists, but does anyone still collect software? There used to be a saying... an adage, if you will... that whoever dies with the most (pirated software) wins. But that's the only context within which I've ever heard of people collecting software.
   I trained as an artist, got a degree from ECCAD, but did most of my art using computers with software such as Deluxe Paint, Sculpt-Animate 4D, Blender, Photoshop, Corel Draw, etc. I also spent many years writing software, both for a living and as a hobby.

At least at professional level, art is developed with a purpose / objective / intended function. For instance, I might visit Africa as someone who has living in Europe all my life but when I go back to Europe, then I decide, well. I should probably put some of what I saw and experienced in Africa in writing or drawings. The above scenerio is quite different from someone who generally draws and writes for leisure.

This is something that happens a lot and happens to apply in all sorts of trades. The situation is often that I engaged or experienced something in real life and would want to express the experience in digital form or some other form.

That said, this conflicts with the general idea of 'art' and other disciplines like 'philosophy' which are generally considered as things that people do for leisure.

Just making some general comment here :-)

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.

It requires the artist to have something worth expressing to be good art. That's why a lot of artists hate AI, because it makes it possible to make lazy unthoughtful zombies of art with no meaning, no detail, no soul. Even when its beautiful and entertaining its still not really art.

I personally think an artist could easily USE AI in an act of interesting art but they need to do enough with it to make it into art.

I don't know what other profession weaves so many levels of abstraction to get to the final product.

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.

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."

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?"

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.

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.

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

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.

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

One is if your work is not creative any more as many people here suggest, does programming qualify as an artistic activity and would you say it qualifies for the tax break?

Two is if an LLM, AI, agent or other machine thing wrote the code for you, since it cannot produce copyrighted work, can you claim that tax break?

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.

The better use of your time is to start thinking about what new opportunities have opened up because of this. With AI coding your only limit is your imagination. Don’t waste it by sitting around and whining.

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.

Those software artists happy to implement happy path. When all data valid, no errors happening, user behave as expected.

Real useful code is ugly and complicated. Complete opposite of artistic.

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.

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.

Very good example about Deferred.

I will argue anything by anyone can be art. Eg a business run by an AI can be art.

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.

we take the total likelihood of those moments of greatness to (->from) “definitely sometimes” to “never”.

And more of us work at the equivalent of fast fashion than designer clothes.

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).

Sometimes we have work to do.

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.

"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.

Programmers are a mixed bag, some hate it, some love it. Even those that hate it see that they're going to be outcompeted if they don't embrace it.

Programming can be art, I truly agree. But we're not being paid to create art, we're being paid to produce a result. If someone else can do it faster or better using AI, they'll get the contract.

We can still create art in our own time.

Slop is slop, no matter the medium.

Claude produces better code than my juniors used to (actually a non-trivial number of alleged 'seniors' too), now their contributions are better because they use claude. How we ensure they understand what they're doing and grow is an open question, but 'slop' it unfortunately is not.

[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.

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.

I don't think there is anything here for me anymore.

Very stinky topic to be honest and all the posts here are basically the same level of drivel as political discussions.

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.

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.

The only difference is that LLMs can code way better than they can write. Probably thanks to software being more and more immediately testable.