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- Hacker News
- Weaving is art.
Should we replace "programming" and "programmers" with "weaving" and "weavers" in this write-up and refer to history and how it worked out for weavers during the industrial revolution, I think it is clear where all this is going.
I know some people are mad about this and I am as well. However, as someone that is 20+ years in the field, I feel I've seen enough to say things are fundamentally and irreversibly changing.
by p2detar - > I like it when new ideas for the text come to me as I’m writing. The writing process itself — the thinking that goes on in the moment — is important to me, not just the result.
This. Applies to me while writing text, writing code and writing data analyses.
by cgufus - If this were true, there would be a large market for artisan code. There isn't.
That doesn't take anything away from the knowledge work that happens when you develop software, but the code itself is not the art. The solution is the art.
Perhaps like most popular art, it's more about the story behind it.
by jpswade - I used to really enjoy writing code, to the point where I would have thought of it as art and fine contemplation.
25 years of corporate development beat that enjoyment out of me. AI is just the final nail in the coffin. I have no enjoyment left in coding; I firmly believe the current crop of programming languages will go in the same vein as human written assembly language did.
I don't believe the current LLM-based AI will replace most other jobs, but I think it is well suited to completely replace much of programming/IT and morph it into an unrecognizable job role.
by cowanon77 - I'd say this article is a stronger argument that "programming can be a hobby" than "programming is an art". Lots of people do lots of things for enjoyment without a salary, and we tend not to call all of those things an artform.
There's lots of competing definitions of art, but I don't think the article has reasonably linked programming to any of them. Maybe there's a thin & stretched link to the concept of a starving artist.
- Well, my way of thinking about it is basically that I did not spend my life shiting on over-engineered-bloated-Golberg-machine source code written by so-called programmers to finish my life asking agents to generate these same stuff 10x faster.
I love code, you don't, fine. So be it.
- Why are people mixing everything up? Since when code has a soul?
AI can be just a tool. You use it the same way you use a keyboard, a computer, a pencil, etc. I'm pretty sure you can build art with it, much like using any tool. People are making art with ascii. You can do art with anything.
But AI can also be much more than a tool, and why can't it have a soul? What's a soul anyway, except something that humans are making up to convince themselves that they are more than flesh and bones? Mythos will not do the same "art" as Fable or Astra would do. AI in 20 years will very likely produce art indistinguishable and as profound as human art. Obviously, humans at that time will always invent new criteria to say why this "art" is not good enough.
by xeyownt - I am (still) not a proponent for AI, however I hope AI might do to programming what the camera did to painting, and I hope that will be a good thing.
What we understand as painting today is very different then what painting meant pre-camera. Now it is mostly a leisure activity and creative outlet. Where back in the day it was a serious occupation for capturing reality, and therefore creativity was taking second stage.
I hope that coding will go that way and even though I might lose my current occupation. I feel like that might be what is needed to get out of the stagnation of current day software development (compared to early computer history). Take the money out of coding, bring the creativity in, take out the investors and keep the enthusiasts. I think that might be good for the activity that we call programming.
Also "software engineering" involves vastly more then programming or coding, so I doubt software engineering will disappear.
by trashb