A few years ago, "writing code" meant sitting down and writing code with your own hands, kicking in a concentrated thinking process, being in a "fl...
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Having "taste" in coding has long been considered an antipattern. It shouldn't matter if you prefer tabs or spaces, just make sure that your
.editorconfigand linters are set up correctly so that the commited code complies with the project's / framework's / language's coding standards.With the current quality I'd rather see an IKEA analogy: vibe coding is like cheep chipboard furniture good enough for many, but it breaks after moving for a second time, and you surely wouldn't build pub tables out of it.
Hah, I didn't think about tabs vs. spaces when meaning "taste", I rather meant neat solutions that strive for perfection, not just "quick and dirty" :)
Good call, IKEA analogy also holds great here, this is how generated code feels if to think.
I really resonate with the Bugatti analogy. I’m currently building Commerza, an e-commerce engine, and I made the deliberate choice to write it in raw PHP without any frameworks.
I actually hit a 'Code Red' recently when an AI refactor butchered my logic and deleted half my work. It forced me to spend 9 hours manually reconstructing the system line-by-line. What I realized is that while the AI could generate the 'mass-market' boilerplate, it couldn't replicate the 'intentionality' of the security architecture I’d designed (like the specific SQL row-locking). Building by hand isn't efficient, but it’s the only way I've found to truly own the integrity of the system.
True, after these years with AI we finally see its limits, it's not a silver bullet, just another clever tool. Yes, it helps building faster, but without a proper control, reviewing every its move it produces mostly slop, entangled code with unfinished functionality and workarounds just to make the thing work and please the master.
I think about it similarly to how writing very low level code has been in the last few years. A lot of the time if you did it, it was essentially an art. It has been a long time since there has been a necessity to write ultra close to the metal (leaving that vague as it depends on the situation what that means).
And .... Occasionally hand-coding machine code etc did have a purpose. And it was still sort of art, but it was for purpose beyond that.
I think that's what it will ultimately be like to "program" a computer. We're moving up the stack, and diving in to the metal will either be art or occasionally actually needed.
Btw I wouldn't say we're there yet at all. Still tons of scenarios where writing your own code is appropriate. However, I think we're trending in that direction.
Yeah, I see this similarity, we're indeed moving up the stack, first writing assembly, then shifting to higher and higher level abstractions (with occasional fallbacks to lower levels when needed), and now AI-delegated coding is another level of abstraction on top. And art-definition window is probably moving or stretching with it, like an Overton window.
The car analogy is great but not for the art of the craft. The analogy I see is selling an image and inflating operating costs.
The image is a product without AI is doomed to fail, like you don't have status if you don't have a luxury car.
You don't want to know what it costs to maintain a super car, the same goes with showing the AI usage bill to someone that just wants a marketing website.
While I read the post because of the title, code for me was and is never about art. Code is the tool that runs the product.
For this analogy I go to bikes, to stay in the mobility sector.
You can buy a bike for around 1000 but over the years you add better quality parts, and you can end up with a bike that when sold will get you 5000.
It is better to buy the right frame than spending a lot for a bike upfront that is obsolete in a few years.
Yeah, I agree that most software is a tool, chosen well, upgraded over time. The piece I'm pointing at is a bit narrower - the neat architectural decisions, a problem solved in an elegant way, so you can just sit and look at the code, admiring it. Those already existed, I'm just suggesting they'll read differently once generated code is the default backdrop. Your bike analogy actually captures the mechanical side of code really well, mine is about the narrower cases where craft can be seen through.
I'm not the person that sits to look at code. At some point it is going to change, that is what I was trying to explain with the bike parts that wear off. Even the best solution can become a bottleneck.
I see this point, yeah, in software things change, often quite fast, though some things can stay for years, decades. Even the stuff that gets replaced can be worth admiring while it's there, a handmade engine eventually gets scrapped too. Looking at some code sometimes you think "that's insanely clever design!" or "that thing is really O(1)?", these are state-of-art solutions existed long before AI. I'm just suggesting that now, with so much generated code around, the manual-writing process starts to feel more like a hobby, or in some cases art - depends on the code, of course :)
If you ask an LLM to write your tests, they will always pass, because LLMs are tuned to make you happy. If you must use a bullsh*t generator to write your code, at least hand-craft your tests so you can count on truthful results.
Yep, those are the "yes" machines to whatever you throw into them, the goal is indeed to make you happy even if it takes a bunch of workarounds :)
I don't know if it's "art", for me "artisanal" is more the word that comes to mind - a craft, rather than an industrial process ...
Yeah, maybe this is the right word after all...
Thanks for such a thought-provoking post! The car analogy is spot on, but I think art also depends on the driver’s perspective.
A Bugatti is a masterpiece, but a reliable old pickup that gets the job done every day is a work of art too. It’s about that personal connection—when a machine becomes an extension of yourself.
As a newcomer to the industry, I see beauty in any simple script that solves a real-world problem. To me, that’s already art. I actually think 'garage masters' are sometimes more impressive than automated assembly lines. Give them a set of wrenches and a camshaft locking tool, and they’ll strip and rebuild an engine in a few hours. It’s not a Bugatti, but it’s definitely a craft.
Maybe I’m not experienced enough yet to appreciate high-level abstractions, but I believe we perceive craft through our own internal assembly. The real art is in the purpose it serves.
I cannot disagree, sometimes even ad-hoc solutions could be a piece of art if they're spot on! Even from this comment section with just a few people we can see that art definition is rather personal. Though I hope we'll appreciate manually written code now even more when AI is here to automate most of the code writing for us :)
Given that us coders will now have the cultural cachet of being artists, it seems inevitable that we'll be paid like artists as well. Which is to say, very poorly.
I love this perspective!