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.
I sometimes tell people of when I came down from Mt. Fuji, there were wispy clouds and grand nature below me, picturesque like a painting. At that time, I likened it to the beauty I felt when I was first learning Haskell. But I say it because I expect it to be a rare kind of sentiment.
The thing with art and music is that they are easy to appreciate, and the appreciation grows deeper with more consideration. I love reading the placards in museums and attempting to understand why the artist did what they did, I like it more than even looking at the piece itself.
Code (and math, for that matter) is almost the same except for one key difference: they are not easy to appreciate without deliberate training, training which is often far to the side of anything most people need/want to deal with.
I get what you mean (and agree w.r.t. math/code) but notably, I think appreciation for a lot of things still accumulates if you put in the work.
As an amateur violist, I can attest that I gained a totally new appreciation for most of the pieces I've studied and played in an orchestra in the past.
This not only includes "unknown" classical music from different eras, but also the obvious (popular) candidates like Beethoven's 6th, Dvořak's 9th and Grieg's "Peer Gynt" suites.
And there's a lot of great music one needs to get into first; for expample: I love Tool songs exactly for that, and there are certainly more obscure artists :)
So, I suspect the thing about maths and code is mainly just caused by the fact that people can go through life just fine without really interacting with them on the level required to develop the smallest bit of "taste" (as opposed to e.g. music).
> 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.
Hence we can't take this lesson to the workplace.
And it's always a mixed blessing.
I don't program anymore, but I learned you still can enjoy the beauty of your Mount Fuji when the business needs a pizza stand in the middle of the trail.
Seeing the core of my Mount Fuji stable and supporting more stands around for years is a satisfaction itself.
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.
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.
The human role in the creation of art is non-negotiable.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
And more of us work at the equivalent of fast fashion than designer clothes.
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 of it is in fact NOT art but simply done to solve a problem.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 take the total likelihood of those moments of greatness to (->from) “definitely sometimes” to “never”.
I don't know what other profession weaves so many levels of abstraction to get to the final product.
Very good example about Deferred.
I will argue anything by anyone can be art. Eg a business run by an AI can be art.
This is art.
And I have much love for good frameworks and design.
I'm fortunate to have started gno.land before AI, yet just late enough to finish it with AI. The GnoVM (gno.land) is also art -- go interpreting go, but in a novel multiuser context, a re-imagining of TBL's WWW in Go and markdown. AI was used for final touch polishing. Couldn't have ended up any better.
AI is not yet there to grok the artistry of code. But it will eventually, and humanity will benefit from it necessarily, not because it is demanded, but because people like us desire it. Push forward.
Well written article.
--
p.s. plug: gno.world, find me there.
> 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.
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.
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?
If you've ever been to a makerspace, those places tend to be ground 0 for engineering as art.
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.
While you can engage in the act of programming from the angle of craft and while you may have started to code because you really enjoyed how it felt like solving a puzzle, programming is primarily a profession. It is a lot closer to accounting than to painting.
There is still space for coding without AI, stuff like advent of code, etc. While it may sound old fashioned as a lot of people did it to practice code challenge for interviews, some did that simply for the pleasure of coding.
But when your job is working in some system for a corporation, big or small, there's no space there for craft or passion, just the reality that what matters is the sausage, not what went into making it.
You may (and probably should) still care about certain engineering principles; correctness, performance, readability, maintainability, etc. But that's about it, whether you write the code or an LLM does is immaterial.
I, at least, never wrote a stock management system to explore the depth of human emotions.
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.
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.
"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.
While your tale sounded pretty interesting, it is the same sort of interesting as solving a math puzzle. I enjoy math puzzles.
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.
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.
The role of a developer (and most IT roles), at its core, is to make yourself obsolete, move on, rinse and repeat.
Feature / scope creep may have blindsided some.
I’m happy most programming is going away. I was capable but now I’m even more capable at creating solutions. The art will stay.
That's called an abstraction, which AI is expressly not. If your work involves writing the same code over and over again, you're doing it wrong.
> I’m happy most programming is going away. I was capable but now I’m even more capable at creating solutions.
This describes management.
> The art will stay.
This describes actual engineering.
It works because it re-uses previous work to solve new problems. That is what abstractions are used for.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
I cannot imagine lines of code be exhibited in a museum. I can appreciate smart or witty solutions for a problem, but that is not what art is. I can appreciate a quick solution for a Rubik cube, I can even see the Rubik cube itself in a museum, but I cannot imagine the steps or instructions for that quick solution in a museum (unless that paper has historical significance).
Linus explaining taste in code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78Y17hAo96I
Fast inverse square root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
Being a humble 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 P="$PWD"
[ ${#P} -gt $pwdmaxlen ] && P="$trunc_symbol${P: -$pwdmaxlen}"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.
The art of a craftsman, otherwise known as 'craft'.
I’d say the brainfuck language on the other hand is art. Hard to draw a fine line as to which is which.
I can say most if not all the projects I’ve ever made land in the former. I’ve made some clever solutions but nothing approaching something with meaning.
If you've written 100 REST APIs, you're probably pretty familiar with them. But Brainfuck is completely alien and something you would have to work to understand. Maybe the distinction is in the effort required for understanding.
Regardless, I think meaning is something one has to self-impose. It does not exist naturally in the universe, so if you don't think it matters, it doesn't matter.
I think what I’m trying to say is that there are both ways to create art by coding and ways to just make a product for consumption. And I think using AI for said products doesn’t really reduce the meaning of said work.
I think I gave brainfuck as an example because it seems there was a meaning behind it beyond being profitable. The writer had something to say. Does writing something like brainfuck with AI take away its meaning? I’d personally say yes, but that’s an interpretation.
Honestly, I can. The author of this article wrote Twisted. I certainly can imagine a museum where computer history is explained along with all the software achievements that made a huge impact on software engineering as a whole, and Twisted would have a place in it.
The printed Apollo program code is owned by a museum (https://airandspace.si.edu/) and is on display there sometimes
There may be others elsewhere too, but that one jumped to mind immediately
Unless you are arguing that the rare museum exhibition is the normal case whereas books and recitations are the abnormal ones.
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
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."
I'm not willing to play word games to indulge in a niche demographic's incessant miscategorization of a profession.
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.
[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.
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.
So I am.
"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.
Other industries are using it too. It's quite delusional to assume that just because people hate something they won't use it.
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
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?"
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)
and some of my favorite works have been shutdown for background art
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
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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.
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 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.
But no serious software will be written by humans in ten years. It will not be a profession.
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.
Nobody except the programmers, I guess. Quite a few of us care about the craft
I think art is different from the rest in that it lost utilitarian value. In other words, Art is degenerative by definition.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Are they practising an art? Surely. Is it relevant? Nah.
The National Masonry Academy in the UK literally has a course on "fine art bricklaying".
Bricklaying is absolutely art, and the wall staying up for any period of time is actually a consequence of it.
I think coding is art; nothing I've ever done with coding is anywhere near as artistic as the Ouse Valley Viaduct.
People who think bricklaying cannot be art simply haven't been around enough old brick buildings.
"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
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.
No, not really.
The only difference is that LLMs can code way better than they can write. Probably thanks to software being more and more immediately testable.
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.