Earlier quoted context omitted.
> back in the day it was a serious occupation for capturing reality, and therefore creativity was taking second stage Source please.
Just look at all the painted portraits? Or portrait painting in general?
Programming is Art
151–160 of 212 posts
Re: Programming is Art
#152AI is good for humanity. But part of this goodness is achieved via natural selection... a culling. This person is about to be cut... I'm about to be cut.
Of course we will rationalize the culling and justify our identities. Programming can be an art... this is true. But this is not the issue at hand.
AI has showed us that all human endeavor... all art is just algorithmic nonsense easily generated with a neural network. If AI generated stuff is slop, then so is human generated stuff because it is indistinguishable to the real thing.
Re: Programming is Art
#153Well, my way of thinking about it is basically that I did not spend my life shiting on over-engineered-bloated-Golberg-machine source code written by so-called programmers to finish my life asking agents to generate these same stuff 10x faster. I love code, you don't, fine. So be it.
Why do you assume any point in time criticism of AI code generation is reliable to project even a couple of months into the future?
Because they haven't changed yet (despite AI bros claiming that they have every 6 months), and therefore are unlikely to change as we move into the future. It's not impossible, of course. But when the "this new model is totally better" claims keep turning out to be false, that doesn't give confidence that the future is going to be different.
Re: Programming is Art
#154I am (still) not a proponent for AI, however I hope AI might do to programming what the camera did to painting, and I hope that will be a good thing. What we understand as painting today is very different then what painting meant pre-camera. Now it is mostly a leisure activity and creative outlet. Where back in the day it was a serious occupation for capturing reality, and therefore creativity was taking second stage…
Nobody will go to an exhibition or a museum to stare at code like we do with paintings. The public for creative programming is really thin.
I read code for fun in my free time
Re: Programming is Art
#155If this were true, there would be a large market for artisan code. There isn't. That doesn't take anything away from the knowledge work that happens when you develop software, but the code itself is not the art. The solution is the art. Perhaps like most popular art, it's more about the story behind it.
There is a large market for artisan code. It's called open source.
Good code is pretty much the solution with some boilerplate tacked on.
Re: Programming is Art
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
While this was true 1+ years ago, the agents don't write bad code anymore. They might not write according to your preferences, but you can also have it adjust to your style. Also, humans didn't evolve to write or read code, even the best programmers are terrible at it from an objective point of view, if we compare it to what is theoretically possible.
I'm fully convinced that people who think agents write decent code now simply don't read the code. Their bar is "it runs, so it's fine". Just as they produce writing that isn't structured well for humans, they do the same with code. Sure, if you're willing for that code to be write-only and for agents to be the sole interface through which you interact with it, that works fine, but it is not better than what a profes…
In my experience, the people who are enamored with LLMs for programming fall into one of three categories. Shills, people who could never program decently to begin with, and people who don't care about the quality of their work. Everyone I know who actually is a good programmer and cares about doing a good job has found that LLMs make too many mistakes to be trusted, and avoid them if they can.
Re: Programming is Art
#157It's still too early to say what will the outlook be like in the next ten years, wrt to AI, but one thing I am perfectly sure of is: AI will always produce 'errors' due to the fundamental fact that it's heuristics-based. Maybe fewer and fewer, but the mistakes will never be totally eliminated. This is why those wanting to learn how to write software shouldn't get discouraged that 'Oh, AI will replace human programmer…
I fail to see why this is a good argument against AI replacing humans, given that humans also produce errors.
Humans do produce errors. But they produce far fewer than LLMs, and they can also learn. Once a person makes a given mistake and realizes what he did wrong, he will take steps to prevent that mistake in the future. LLMs do not do this and therefore are less trustworthy than humans, even if both are prone to error.
Re: Programming is Art
#158One of the most important series ever written in the history of computer science is called "The Art of Computer Programming".
Re: Programming is Art
#159The best code I've ever seen written were friends who don't code for a living, they code for the love of it, and you can tell they love what they are doing.
Re: Programming is Art
#160If this were true, there would be a large market for artisan code. There isn't. That doesn't take anything away from the knowledge work that happens when you develop software, but the code itself is not the art. The solution is the art. Perhaps like most popular art, it's more about the story behind it.
There is a large market for artisan code. It's called open source. Good code is pretty much the solution with some boilerplate tacked on.
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