The diminished art of coding
17 points by nolan
17 points by nolan
Art is opposite with AI naturally
Claude starts comments with a capital letter, I rarely do;
you can prompt an LLM to do this for you. it's really that simple. in fact, if you give it a sample of your code and ask it to follow the patterns, it will do so. it is after all a really good pattern regurgitator.
Hah, I have actually told Claude to use _ as a variable name in one-liner JavaScript functions (my preferred style), and it still messes it up occasionally. But point taken. 🙂
Gladly nobody can tell me what to do on the weekend.
If you’re not knitting, then you’re making clothes on an assembly line…
I think this is the best line, but I read it slightly differently. Plenty of people I know still knit for enjoyment.
The premise here appears to be you can’t make code as art and get paid a job any more. Otherwise why not continue getting artistic joy from coding?
I suppose two reasons: 1) The fact that AI coding tools exist kind of takes the wind out of my sails; it makes hand-coding feel wasteful or even indulgent. 2) Unlike a handmade scarf (say, as a gift for a loved one), I don't think most people care whether an app is vibe-coded or not – they just care if it works.
I think you’re pointing at something real. Maybe that fades over time, maybe it doesn’t - I hope it does for you and me both. My dad still hacks on his old car.
Most users never cared how something was coded, only whether it works and feels good. The appreciation of coding itself was always pretty niche, and I suspect that niche will survive.
The interesting shift to me is that more people can now participate in building things. I’m seeing low/no-tech folks vibe-code apps, enjoy the process, and create things others enjoy too - which feels closer to “craft” again, just with a different audience.
Optimistically, this looks like a bit of a creator resurgence. Maybe that’s naive, but I’m hopeful.
Oh, I think most people can feel the difference between an efficient app and something bloated and laggy, if they have examples of the former. But maybe there are a lot of users who haven't seen enough of the former to know what's possible.
I don't think human coding will ever go away.
Here is my reasoning for it, but be warned; it somehow gets into the predicting-the-future/crystal-ball territory. If that doesn't deter you from reading it anyway: Let's go!
In the not-so-distant future, there will be many companies where none of the employees (coders/programmers/AI-users?) understand the product anymore, because it was vibecoded. Some breaking bug comes up, that the slop-machine can't fix and some human has to dig into the code, understand what's going on and fix the bug. This will open up the market for human coding consultants/freelancers to offer their services. Given, that this will be a niche market, because most people jumped on the AI-bandwagon, it will be well paid.
Not everyone buys into the output quality (or lack thereof) of coding agents. Going with the IKEA analogy brought up in the article: Not everyone wants to have a house full of IKEA furniture. There are still people hiring carpenters to create furniture for them. Granted, there are less carpenters around than before the industrial/IKEA era, but the ones that do still exist have a queue of commissions and are doing quite well for themselves. (At least in the area where I live.)
There are sensitive occupational areas, where you can't leave code quality up to chance. e.g. space travel, military applications, law and medical applications. In those areas letting an AI agent introduce bugs into your codebase can be much more costly, than just hiring humans that will code by hand, come up with appropriate tests, perform simulations and fuzz test the application. Explody rocket bad. In those cases AI might (and probably will, or already is) used for additional quality assurance.
Writing code is a fun sparetime activity. If you are not pushed to perform by some employer or have to use the latest shiny new technology/framework/whatever, it can be quite fulfilling.
Someone has to write the code that future AI systems will be trained on. 🤡
There will be less people who know how to code, but it will still be useful and profitable. I will certainly not stop coding anytime soon.