The diminished art of coding

Summary

Programming is an art. It’s less like fine art or music and closer to architecture or carpentry – combining form and function – but it is an art. If you don’t believe me, consider code reviews. I’ve definitely done code reviews where I admired the mastery on display, where the elegance of the solution shone out like a brilliant gem, where I felt like Salieri overcome by the symphony in his head as he reads Mozart. Conversely, I’ve mentored juniors where I read their code and immediately saw opportunities to help them mature – this bit is repetitive, this bit could be expressed more succinctly, this bit hits a performance de-optimization, etc. When I do PR reviews of AI-authored code, I feel none of these things. I can sometimes tell whether it’s authored by Claude or Codex (Claude likes lots of Official-Sounding , Codex is more to-the-point), but my mind tends to wander to the intent behind the PR, to the prompt or the plan. Nitpicking details of the code, like the type of for-loop or the names of functions, feels entirely superfluous. Sometimes the best advice is to just choose a new plan and re-prompt. For most of my career, I’ve held two contradictory views of coding in my head simultaneously: Coding is an art form, but you shouldn’t get too sentimental about your code – most code eventually becomes technical debt that should be expunged Code can express the creativity of the author, but the best code is idiomatic, reducing the WTFs per minute In short: code is art, but it’s also a means to an end With the advent of LLM coding agents, I think this contradiction has been firmly resolved in favor of function over form. Or as Les Orchard might put it, the “make-it-go people” have triumphed over the “craft-lovers.” The craft is still there, of course, but it’s different. When I code with agents, I’m thinking at a much higher level of abstraction: architecture, resilience, systems, monitoring, testing. I used to sweat the small details – Claude starts comments with a ...