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- Hacker News
- It is a true story, though I dont remember exactly where it took place:
Once asked a favorite and very important professor who helped us start teaching, isn't, in their opinion, programming an art, given it has all markings of creative writing. She said, "yes, dear, we actually thought about it at one conference during the 70s, and concluded very much it is in fact art, but then aslo decided it is to be understood as engineering, because art would not sound too serious with the mathematicians."
:D perhaps I changed a word or two, but this was the general message. still wonder which conference this might've been. I hope she forgives me for retelling the story in such a blunt manner, from where she is in the afterlife.
by larodi - Art is "expression of an idea". Programming ISN'T art; the program/game/website could be, but programming is a CRAFT. The people he mentions are not artists, they are craftsmen.by sunkeeh
- It’s a similar type of art like pottery can be.
Edit: I see you changed your comment and now introduced it being a craft, which changes the comment entirely.
- > 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 - Exactly this. You always have to choose what to leave in, what to take out. "Ways to do it" suggest themselves, and you weigh them, "is it the best fit for this project". A lot of what's left out evaporates into the void, but often enough you stumble onto one of these doesn't-fits that's nonetheless a keeper. You know it'll be useful somewhere else, or as the heart of something new. Sure, you create the product, but it's these other by-the-way ideas that keep one coming back.by greenbit
- > They write code simply because they can’t help but write it
Addiction, it's a kind of addiction impossible to fight
I am 60yo and I code everyday for the sake of it. I use AI extensively as it helps me create more apps than before, one every couple of days. I don't sell them, I hoard them like if having more apps makes my universe bigger. My addiction has no sense at all but I don't try to fight it as it produces immense frustration and much greater pleasure, and that extreme change in moods is what makes the addiction stronger, just like a gambler or a fentanyl abuser
That's me, and I don't want to be cured
by Kuyawa - This!
This is exactly why I can't understand the AI mental health stuff about it being demotivating. I find it exciting to build apps in the same way, I don't pump out apps like a machine gun, but I do manage to make high quality apps I can maintain myself, as I've discovered. It just takes effort, which I'm willing to put in with AI. Never understood the hate around that. It's possible to have "soul" or anything that normal, "artisanal" apps have if you put in effort, and AI made it easier, at least for me, to put in effort.
by createful - 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’ve thought of this and even societally outcomes seem pretty bad.
> Replace detailed unique clothes with cookie cutter bland clothes
> Replace a job with craftsmanship and skill to a mind numbing boring job that possesses very little skill
> The machines still do a much worse job than a good tailor, but most of the public don’t care and can’t even judge good quality vs bad.
> We got a lot more clothes and freed a certain class of people to go work on other stuff (this second point is a bit doubtful as in the immediate future they just worked in sweatshops but eventually maybe? )
So yeah kind of a stupid trade in retrospect, I suspect programming will go the same way. We’ll drown in mountains of functional slop, all apps currently will be made by agents. Public will have more software / don’t care and a good human programmer will still clock agents in code quality, which is a subjective aesthetic metric.
by sashank_1509 - I think the metaphor is useful to illustrate what can happen in the industry, but reducing the whole matter of AI to this metaphor falls short.
Programs are not clothes that we dress and undress, specially when running on our cellphones, they are more like organs.
by _rousbound - It’s really important to understand the various perspectives in AI discourse; those who view Programing as Art feel a deep affront and threat on many levels. It’s legitimate.
If you loved the art of writing code, and also enjoyed getting paid a boatload for that activity, you’re losing out in the trade as AI shifts the focus of software from coding to designing.
I do think that we could see a golden age in Programming as Art, similar to how chess is more popular than ever before, even though your phone could defeat Magnus Carlsen. All except a few superstar streamers will likely be doing it for love and not for money. But it’ll be easier to pick up and to learn than ever before, for those interested in doing so.
by theptip - exactlyby zerolunier
- 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.
- 100%. Hobby is the word this article was looking for. And I don't think that's less meaningful, or that there's no way people can elevate their hobby to artform. But what the article describes is people with a hobby, not an art.by dust-jacket
- 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 - There probably will be soon, given the reliability issues associated with vibe software. Whats probably going away is the hand-coded "it technically works" slop we've been cranking out for decades, since companies realized it was cheaper to have bad code.by deaton
- I'm grumbled in other comments here about definitions of art that are so vague that they're just "anything where you think a bit"
But I'd take them every time over a definition of art being "something for which there is a market". Screw that.
by dust-jacket - There is a large market for artisan code. It's called open source.
Good code is pretty much the solution with some boilerplate tacked on.
by vatsachak - > If this were true, there would be a large market for artisan code. There isn't.
Nearly every designer and artist knows that artisan stuff does not bring in the money, but rather commissions for "everyday stuff"; in German there exists the term "Eisdielen-Jobs" [1] ("ice cream parlor jobs") for commissioned, boring, "everyday" design jobs like, as the term implies, creating the design and illustrations for a menu map of an ice cream parlor.
--
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/karriere/illustrator-als-beruf-kreati...
- 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.
- I have some lines of code I’ve written that I quite cherish. I’ve posted about such excerpts many times online. So we both like code quite a bit.
I think you’re letting your pride get the best of you. Writing software should not be about ego. It’s about making something helpful, or something beautiful, or at the very least financially useful. Interacting with software through a natural language interface does not mandate you are creating junk. I won’t tell you how to use the tool. But I am sure if you were sufficiently motivated you’d learn how to make it work for you.
- Why do you assume any point in time criticism of AI code generation is reliable to project even a couple of months into the future?
- While this was true 1+ years ago, the agents don't write bad code anymore. They might not write according to your preferences, but you can also have it adjust to your style.
Also, humans didn't evolve to write or read code, even the best programmers are terrible at it from an objective point of view, if we compare it to what is theoretically possible.
- 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 - > AI can be just a tool. [...] But AI can also be much more than a tool, [...].
Contradictio. Going back to Seven...
> AI can be just a tool.
Nothing, ever, is just a tool.
by spankibalt - > Since when code has a soul?
Before AI I could look at a function and tell you who had written it from inside the (somewhat small) company I worked at.
by LtWorf - > 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?
I’m finding this fascinating personally. The lines people are drawing to try and keep themselves inside some definition they can mark as special.
by IanCal - Isn't one of the main attractions to art the skill required to create it? If anyone can create some dodgy AI picture, it ceases to have the same, if any, value.by cmoski
- >AI in 20 years will very likely produce art indistinguishable and as profound as human art.
If you see art only as more "content" to be mindlessly consumed, maybe.