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.

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 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.

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.

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.