Programming is Art

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

> 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.

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.

There is a false dichotomy here. There are people who view code as "art", in the sense outlined here, and yet rely on LLMs for some tasks.

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.

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.

>They enjoy writing code, solving development challenges, designing, figuring out the logic, fixing bugs, and understanding the entire system as a whole. They enjoy the process itself. And they’ll never hand that over to AI agents.

Yeah, until they spend several years working on a game, then try vibe coding and AI makes a better one in 4 minutes. Not that I'd know anything about that.

Most solutioning is art, given that you should have more than one way to reach the target state and target state itself is negotiable and non-concrete. When there are multiple options you are forced to analyze between them, sometimes you have a preferred option if the analysis has been done before. Your choices while solutioning will reflect your experience and how you think. In short, it definitely reflects 'you'.

You make similar kind of choices while programming as well. Hence, programming is definitely an art since there are many ways something can be implemented, almost to the level that you can recognize who has written the code by seeing the code itself. Most such programmers don't even have the visibility to higher level goals of the org they are working in, I used to be in this group earlier.

I remember it used to be a 'problem' for a lot of senior developers, who used to ask for consistency in how code is written, like spacing between keywords, indentation, start/end of parenthesis, naming convention, etc. Wondering if they'll settle for more 'Soul' in the code now :). Or maybe, they have permanently shifted to the other groups now - where only the output matters.

Playing go is art. Go was even considered one of the four main arts in ancient China. Along with calligraphy, instrumental music and brush painting[0].

It didn't stop AlphaGo from beating the best human go players, though.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_arts

System design and architecture are the art. Programming is a set of techniques useful in realizing these compositions.

I've never once in my life looked at a piece of code and thought "I am in the presence of god". However, the systems composed by code can often elicit this response.

Programming might be art, but being a career programmer isn't, the same way being paid to paint vases day in, day out for a living following specifications and the whims of your superiors makes you an artist.

A big component of art is self-expression. There is very little of it when you're being paid to write code, except maybe choosing your editor theme and minor stylistic choices of your source code.

It's still too early to say what will the outlook be like in the next ten years, wrt to AI, but one thing I am perfectly sure of is: AI will always produce 'errors' due to the fundamental fact that it's heuristics-based.

Maybe fewer and fewer, but the mistakes will never be totally eliminated. This is why those wanting to learn how to write software shouldn't get discouraged that 'Oh, AI will replace human programmers'.

Lovely to read, but AI will surely remove a lot of software engineering with little creativity.

Programming for money means managing a codebase and that's more akin to biology. You add inhibitors, promoters, etc. depending on the current requirements of the environment.

When excel is good enough to do that, people will use excel and not pay you to manage a monolith or even allow R/D to start from a blank slate with a new take.

What you create on a blank slate with your ideas might be art, but it's usually not evolving, you keep the picture, album etc. frozen in that state.

Anything is art if it touches the feelings. Art is a feeling.

I read your essay "Programming is Art" — interesting thoughts. I run into this constantly as well. But for me, AI itself gives me the initial idea, which I then develop and shape my own way. In my product, I train it to think exactly the way I want it to. It would be great to talk about this.

Programming is more engineering than art.

People tend to naturally develop feelings toward whatever they work with for a prolonged period of time and that applies to programming languages too. Mainstream languages for software development generally prioritize correctness, reliability, performance and other engineering concerns primarily, and then try to make the language ergonomic to the possible degree. In the meanwhile, those engineering judgements acquire aesthetic feelings.

When someone says that a particular language's code snippet is beautiful, they almost always mean that the engineering effort that went into the language's design that made that particular captivating expression or statement possible is credit worthy. Its more like a way to appreciating the engineering effort and not treating it literally as "art".

I would have agreed with the "art" part to a certain degree if at least a few mainstream programming languages are substantially more denotational in their semantics but unfortunately, almost all of them adhere to operational semantics mostly and that is basically "my" issue with treating programming as "art". Even when it is art, it can't be for software development(with imperative languages) in particular. So, to proof assistants, purely functional languages, Lisp dialects, there might be some "art" involved. And this is why the concept of "art" for programming is fundamentally fucked up. NVM.

Art is a system. And programming is a system too. They are different systems.

> If I learned PHP, I could build back-end applications. If I learned HTML and CSS, I could build websites.

So, what have you been doing for the last 10 years and why i see only 2026 in your github?

> I love building startups, and they love writing code. For me, building projects is a way to make money. For them, programming is art.

At its very high points programming approaches art, but programming is primarily problem solving, which isn't fundamentally artistic because its main goal is correctness and fitness for purpose, not aesthetic value. I'm pretty sure for most of us the choice to use LLMs or not has nothing to do with it being art or not art. If I estimate a cost-benefit analysis, the true cost of using the LLM is much more than it would likely ever provide, so it makes little logical sense to use them except in very limited situations.

By the way, I have to say this is a really strange type of article, an explanation of the supposed opinions and attitudes of non-AI-users written by an AI user, seemingly without any input from the former group. It reads a bit as if it's building a strawman to justify the author's own views.

I never liked the idea that programming is an art. When there's a problem that you're trying to solve there's usually only one or two good ways to solve it and hopefully you know one of those approaches. When you start getting creative is when you start running into long-term problems, especially maintenance.

It's like chess. When you're an amateur you think your moves out, strategize, think that you're a genius for seeing three moves ahead for a few pieces. When you're a professional you view the whole board and know the standard strategy that works best for the situation. After all, chess is a solved game.

When I work with other programmers or on an old code base I want it to be boring and standard. I don't want to have to trace through six files just to figure out what's going on in one simple method call.

AI as technology is cool and all, as cool as GCC or Linux or HTTP. The thing I don’t like about AI is that 99% of the time we talk about vendor-locked AI (claude, codex) and 99% of the time we use those. So you need to pay to use the models. You depend on the big corporations. It’s not anymore, I clone this repo and let’s explore freely.

Labels rarely fit well. We can't even agree on the definition of "art".

I would prefer to say "fascination", because for some people, writing code is their fascination. Is it art if only they would label it so? Because I'm pretty sure that if a "code artist" showed their code to 10 other experienced developers, not only would some of the others not consider it art, but likely some of the others would consider it low quality.

Are code golfers artists? Fetishists? What if they believe theirs is the only way - the true artistry of coding? Would all of our single-responsibility, immutable core/imperative shell hybrid-functional code be discounted as garbage? (Not poking at the code golfers; I think they do it for the challenge, not because they believe that is how code should be written; but it illustrates an extreme.)

For most people, I think it's fair to say they write code because they are trying to make something happen. If their code runs without errors, in the necessary time, and without exhausting the computer's memory, then I believe most would consider that code "good": it does the job.

Are they working with others? Will others need to read it? If so, perhaps the most artistic code is not the best code to write. I know many professionals dislike working with the code artist who makes code that is unreadable to all but the most skilled developers, because it causes friction and leads to misunderstandings and bugs.

Now we have reached the point where general purpose code is so easily and correctly built by our AI tools that there is no practical point to writing it ourselves.

Are the AI-naysayers, the purists, writing their own libraries? Are they building everything from scratch? If not, they are not the true code artists. They have made practical concessions. They just haven't graduated to the realization that code is a commodity.

I suspect the people most against use of AI for building are the people who lack the creativity - the idea sources - and live just to translate requirements into code. They will gradually find fewer opportunities, and this threat is what probably makes them get emotional when looking at AI-built products.

These articles and comments on them always seem to conflate programming with programming at one's job. And it makes sense, for most people that's one and the same. But if we're talking about programming and art, I think that is a major distinction.

To provide an example, I will use an existing comment here from WCSTombs: "programming is primarily problem solving, which isn't fundamentally artistic because its main goal is correctness and fitness for purpose".

I don't consider the programming I do at work to be art or expect to ever approach art. It fits their definition. But I could see some of the programming I do for pleasure to fall within that category. Correctness is nice I guess, but fitness for purpose was never a consideration in my hobby programming, quite the opposite, actually.

I was programming for a long time before I ever starting programming for money, which is why I feel strongly about this distinction, but it may be that in the current day and age, I am just being a boomer about the whole thing.

I like and believe in this paradigm, because I'm an artist ... I'm a painter and a musician, fiction writer and coder. Each satisfy something different for me intellectually. I can sink my mind fully into whichever I'm absorbed in. And I'm a perfectionist at each.

But I'm 46 and I was never able to make a living painting, writing or playing music, although I spent years trying my hand at those things while waiting tables and driving cab. Apparently the only creative output people are willing to pay for from me is what I can do with creative code. And that's fine. To me, it's just as expressive and it still lets me incorporate all the narrative and visual ideas I have, if they let me be free with it. I get $300/hr to be free with it, even now when in theory you could ask AI to do it, and I feel well compensated and appreciated.

But that being said, art is a luxury that only makes sense to pay for if you either want it to simply appreciate it, or if you see some advantage for your business by comissioning it or sponsoring it. You write as someone who views building their business as a sort of art, and those are the kinds of people I've been lucky to partner with, who also view their creative employees as artists who provide hard-to-calculate extra value through their perspective and creativity. But that's a genuinely hard sell to investors these days. I mean, my specialty was bespoke websites and apps for 20 years. But I was sought out for that. I never once went and tried to convince someone that bespoke code and art would be better for their bottom line. In fact, I spent most of that time telling people to get a wordpress site or to hire the cheapest offshore freelancers who could build them a minimum viable product.

I'm glad that people who are building their dreams still appreciate the artistry that we engineers and designers put into what we build, but I'm even less sure it's good business for a startup now than I was 20 years ago.

I suppose the one thing you do get if you hire an artist (speaking also as someone who is in charge of hiring them) is some measure of loyalty and the lucky chance at seeing something that no one has done before. That's hard to quantify on a spreadsheet, and it may only reflect slowly over time on your customers' loyalty to you. A google doodle or some other tiny, fertile patch of ground that you're willing to pay $5k a month for to some whacko like me or one of my artists.... that may end up being the heart and soul of an otherwise sterile, interchangeable brand. But we have far fewer saints and patrons than we did in the 90s, and I have to admit, overall the culture has degraded to the point that very few people care anymore about authentic or original art... of any discipline.

Counterpoint: building integrations for SAP is not art.

imo, designing the solution (architecture, algorithm, data structure) is the art.

I can steer agent to write code that I’m comfortable reading and maintaining. If it goes off the rails, I can just tell it to refactor. I can ship and get sales faster than if i were doing 100% coding by myself.

After thinking about it, I realized my initial resistance was mostly because it challenged decades of my technical habits and comfort zones. But if I steer it properly, it can basically handle the whole engineering process better and faster than I can.

In the end, it pushes me more into the managerial side of things. talking to people, aligning the product with what customers actually need, getting more sales, etc. And i'm really happy about that.

This won’t work for every engineer. Some people just really hate the management side of things.

I can appreciate the sentiments the author has to their own career, but personally it doesn't resonate with me. I'm a firm believer in the idea that systems you intend to be used by others (imo) must be driven by measurable, consistent, and constrained processes that are dictated by goals of the project. Sometimes this involves subjective judgements which are then later corrected as data is collected. If we are overloading the term art to mean anything where there is subjective judgement applied, or similarly where there is any enjoyment of a process, okay sure I can get behind it. But if we mean subjectivity in expression of logic and rule, then no I do not agree that this is the reason we should be more thoughtful of LLM-based codegen tooling (of which there are many more reasons to avoid it in many contexts which do not require going into the subjective aspects).

--- > These are true programmers who write code regardless of income

I also - without any hesitation - detest this type of bullshit. Get off your high horse. Programmers are programmers, there is no reason to devolve arguments that divide into classes for the sake of adding emotional weight to one side.

If poetry is art, then writing a structured poem that can tell you _another_ poem must be, too.

I think a discussion about programming being an art is incomplete without bringing into scope live coding, where you write code that produces music in front of an audience; Processing, a programming language for artists; and literate programming, where you intertwine prose and code to form a coherent narrative or story.

Many people here are talking about programming as a tool you use to solve problems and build systems, but that’s just the subset of programming tasks corporations pay you to do. Programming is for many other things and it can be as expressive or constrained as you like.

Programming can be art.

And I totally resonate with the pleasure of crafting code and the artistic aspect of it.

However, it is not just that, and when it comes to making a living, then the story changes.

And for that second part, man is AI a killer tool.

And I'll add,: even for the first part, the story isn't black and white.

If you use AI very carefully and in a collaborative manner, meaning not for the "creative writing" part, but for the "looking over your shoulder part" and "making suggestions" part.

imo, programming can make u 10x richer, more ambitious and it also improves ur intelligence