Does my code these days reflect me?
I need to do a brief philosophical detour before circling back to the question.
Logos
What is logos? We translate from greek weakly as "word" or "reason," but as philosopher Christos Yannaras defines it, "logos is the mode by which everything that is becomes manifest, becomes known" (Yannaras, quoted in Mitralexis, Ever-Moving Repose, 79; cf. Yannaras, Person and Eros, 159–72).
Logos is inherently relational. The logos of a thing "speaks" to an observer, disclosing that thing's identity and substance.
What makes beings "logical" in this original sense is that they are not silent, neutral objects—they are "effected words" that signify personal creative activity (Yannaras, Elements of Faith, 40–41).
Consider Van Gogh. You can memorize every biographical fact, yet you only know his personal otherness by standing before his paintings. Through canvas and oil paint, his unique creative logos is revealed.
The same with music: we discern the otherness of Mozart by participating in the logos of his work—this is how we distinguish it from Bach. Τhis "empirical recognition of the otherness of the artist's creative logos is a cognitive event that is valid and true," as Mitralexis summarizes (Ever-Moving Repose, 35).
This isn't mere observation. It's participatory knowledge. A dialogue between person and thing. "Only the creation's logos can 'signify' the reality of the subject, its otherness" (Mitralexis, Ever-Moving Repose, 35).
Coding with AI
Before AI agents, claude code and chatGPT code was the logos of the software engineer.
The way you architected a codebase, the names you chose for variables, the elegance of your logic, these disclosed your personal creative activity. Another engineer could read your code and participate in your technical energy, distinguishing your "word" from another developer's, just as we distinguish Van Gogh from Monet.
Now, code increasingly loses its logos. It becomes the output of Claude Code, of Gemini or Codex. The engineer describes an intent; the machine produces code.
The code is no longer an "effected word" signifying personal creative activity. It becomes a neutral object, optimized for function.
This is equivalent to a poet telling ChatGPT about a poem, or a painter describing to Gemini's banana what they want to paint. The output may be competent, even evoke awe, but whose logos does it carry?
When we read AI-generated code, we are not participating in the creative energy of the engineer. We observe the statistical residue of all the engineers. The dialogue has collapsed. The resistance of the material has been smoothed away. Of course this is not all bad.
The code works and it often works quite well.
But it carries no personal logos. The human presence is not there. I'm not there.
How do we get the relationship back?
A reflection on logos, craft, and the changing relationship between humans and the things they make.
References:
- Yannaras, Christos. Person and Eros. Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007.
- Yannaras, Christos. Elements of Faith: An Introduction to Orthodox Theology. T&T Clark, 1991.
- Mitralexis, Sotiris. Ever-Moving Repose: A Contemporary Reading of Maximus the Confessor's Theory of Time. Cascade Books, 2017.
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