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.
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.
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.
Isn't this the case with all art?
There are many commercial artist that are putting some of their creative input to the side to make something that sells. That doesn't stop it from being art.
There are photographers that in their daily lives make school pictures or journalistic picutres while they may be more interested in making artistic pictures.
The same used to be for painters (a lot of the great painters actually) used to mostly make portraits or commission pieces to order, not to their taste.
Same goes for writers, videographers and other arts.
On that at least we agree (ignoring the rubbish about "AI", unless it describes an artificial intelligence with at least peer-level (i. e. human-level) agency, and not a language model). The same goes for the ridiculous, but for chatbot lovers certainly convenient, notion that art stops being art because money (or some other form of compensation) changed hands. That's just a reheated version of the tosh incompetents threw at artists since time immemorial. I remember the last time when it was very en vogue: the pathetic "anti-art" movements of the 90s.
And programming? Processes and their manifestations, depending on definitions of course, can indeed be art. Just like writing and its manifestations (e. g. poems, novels).
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 find it incredible when the concepts in a system fall into place and start lining up and you get these unexpected relationships that "just work". It's beautiful in the same way mathematics is beautiful. It's lovely when something is made of lots of pieces at first and then suddenly collapse and simplify into a single structure.
I also enjoy other bits of programming. I like the flow state, I like the act of creation, I like feeling like I have an impact, I like being paid. So it's not like people fall into one category or another, and it's not like programming is one single thing. There's room within any discipline for creativity and for art.
I think many professional artists probably spend much of their time problem-solving, too --- authors trying to fit plot points together, sculptors working out which materials will work with which ones.
I would argue that problem solving is actually what makes any art art. When making "traditional art" you are constantly solving problems. For example, how do I make this piece of rock look like a greek god, what parts to chip off, what tools to use etc.
Art is not always made for aesthetic value, most traditional art is probably created for profit. That doesn't make it not art.
I think you might have the (in my opinion wrong) notion that there is only one "correct" way to write code. This is not true, so much so that you can identify a programmer by their signature style. Similarly to how you may identify a writer by his writing style.
When you have scoured your deepest understanding for hours - or days - in order to rewrite a function so that it is easier to read, shorter, more correct, and a thoughtful expression of your own insights and understanding; then you will see how programming can be art.
I'm bothered by the exact quote you pulled from the article, although I didn't mention it, because it's reticent of a certain hypocritical hot take among founders and business/marketing types who can be "generous" toward their engineers because they believe that their own artistic contribution to the project is some messianic vision of it that far outweighs the quotidian questions about how it's actually built. I didn't really want to weigh in on what I felt was that tendency in the post, because I do work successfully with a lot of people like that and I often admire the sweat and work they put into their own side of running things... but those kinds of statements do come off as somewhat patronizing if they're not backed up by truly massive amounts of hard work.
Code is beauty
Creativity is king