Programming is an art. It’s less like fine art or music and closer to architecture or carpentry – combining form and function – but it is an art.
If you don’t believe me, consider code reviews. I’ve definitely done code reviews where I admired the mastery on display, where the elegance of the solution shone out like a brilliant gem, where I felt like Salieri overcome by the symphony in his head as he reads Mozart. Conversely, I’ve mentored juniors where I read their code and immediately saw opportunities to help them mature – this bit is repetitive, this bit could be expressed more succinctly, this bit hits a performance de-optimization, etc.
When I do PR reviews of AI-authored code, I feel none of these things. I can sometimes tell whether it’s authored by Claude or Codex (Claude likes lots of Official-Sounding Comments, Codex is more to-the-point), but my mind tends to wander to the intent behind the PR, to the prompt or the plan. Nitpicking details of the code, like the type of for-loop or the names of functions, feels entirely superfluous. Sometimes the best advice is to just choose a new plan and re-prompt.
For most of my career, I’ve held two contradictory views of coding in my head simultaneously:
- Coding is an art form, but you shouldn’t get too sentimental about your code – most code eventually becomes technical debt that should be expunged
- Code can express the creativity of the author, but the best code is idiomatic, reducing the WTFs per minute
- In short: code is art, but it’s also a means to an end
With the advent of LLM coding agents, I think this contradiction has been firmly resolved in favor of function over form. Or as Les Orchard might put it, the “make-it-go people” have triumphed over the “craft-lovers.”
The craft is still there, of course, but it’s different. When I code with agents, I’m thinking at a much higher level of abstraction: architecture, resilience, systems, monitoring, testing. I used to sweat the small details – Claude starts comments with a capital letter, I rarely do; Claude names variables one way, I prefer another – but I quickly learned to stop caring. It’s simply a waste of time to nitpick, especially since the agent will likely undo your nitpicks on the next refactor.
In some ways I feel like a carpenter whose job is now to write the blueprints for the IKEA factory. Of course there is still artistry in designing the blueprints, but you don’t care if the factory spits out one or two tables with splinters in the legs. The point is to produce enough furniture fast enough that the little imperfections don’t matter. Taste and judgment still count, but they’re at the level of the overseer on the assembly line, not the master carpenter working a chisel.
Finding art elsewhere
For me, coding always occupied an odd place on the artistic spectrum. Some code is firmly art – Jenn Schiffer, for example, has been an artist-in-residence and has had numerous projects devoted to the intersection of art and programming. Whereas other code is purely functional: I’m sure many programmers have spent their entire careers pumping out glue code for enterprise CRMs without ever wondering if what they were making was “art.”
One worry I have for my entire generation of programmers is that many of us have been getting our artistic “fix” from coding: taking craftsmanship seriously, reviewing others’ code with the eye of a literary critic, trying to elevate the profession. Now the profession has been turned into an assembly line, and many of us are eagerly jumping into our new jobs as blueprint-designers without questioning what this will do to our souls. I believe art is necessary for a rich and full human life, so this isn’t an idle concern.
My advice to other coders, or at least the advice I’m taking myself, is that if you’re looking for art in coding: stop looking. If you’ve never taken an interest in poetry, or painting, or dance, or whatever, now would be a good time. In an era where the internet is increasingly full of bots pumping their bland bot ideas into everybody’s brains, seeking out distinctly human forms of expression has become vital.
It might sound corny (or like I’m going through a mid-life crisis), but I’ve done the following lately:
- started painting (Bob Ross is of course an easy stepping stone)
- gone to several ballets / contemporary dance performances
- started reading more fiction (The Sun Magazine is a longtime favorite of mine, but I’m even reading the poetry now)
- picked up my guitar again
You might have also noticed that this blog has gotten a lot more sentimental and experimental lately. I’ve never used LLMs to help with my writing (not even to spellcheck!), but lately I’ve tried to fight my own tendencies to write bland, predictable prose. In a world of machines that “predict the next token,” what’s the best reaction? Be less predictable. At least that’s what I hope I’m doing.
I don’t think coding is dead as an art form, and I do think that the “new” craftsmanship will have its own masters, its own styles, its own expressiveness. Heck, maybe I’ll be surprised and there will be an artist-in-residence somewhere wielding agent orchestrators like a paintbrush! But I kind of doubt it. If you’re not knitting, then you’re making clothes on an assembly line, and if the clothes are disposable, then it’s just fast-fashion. There’s artistry there, perhaps, but the end product is much less interesting artistically because there’s less of the human touch to it.
In my view, we’re firmly in the fast-fashion era of coding: software is vibe-coded, used up, thrown away, vibe-coded again. This is not a fully bad thing, and I’m sure many non-coders especially are giddy at the superpowers they’ve acquired. But as coders, we shouldn’t lose sight of what we’ve lost, and we should seek to make up for it with new sources of artistic sustenance.
Read the Tea Leaves 