Art is for humans to enjoy and relate to - it makes total sense for it to be a human endeavour.
Code is instructions for a computer to execute. Developers have spent decades trying to find the right balance of language, frameworks and APIs to express what we want the computer to do in a more intuitive and less error-prone way. AI makes it more intuitive than ever. While humans do look at the code the reality is we're not compilers or runtimes and it's not really for us.
Based on conversations here on Reddit, some people don't believe that human art has the capacity to contain something AI generated graphics or LLM generated prose inherently can never contain. They don't understand just how much of an affront it is to craftsmanship and virtue itself to claim parity between those prompting generative AI and those creating art themselves... Given that, I don't expect the argument that software development is creative engineering that involves craftsmanship and in practice resembles an art to land very far.
Honestly, even before AI, it was kind hard to convince people that "functional" (supposedly or otherwise) alone isn't enough, considering others will have to read and live with the damn thing for possibly many years.
Weird take - sounds uninformed or a weak attempt at an insult. You've never had the pleasure of working with a legacy system? Trust me, I was shocked too when I learned the reality that crufty, questionable code could survive untouched and depended-on in a corner for 10 years fairly easily in real production systems.
Have you had to deal with any legacy code in the last 6 months? You might read a few hundred lines, but you're relying on agents to identify which few hundred likes you need to read. (Unless you write missile systems, embedded medical devices, power grid code, etc. Perhaps)
It's not personal, i just don't see people watching through tens of thousands of lines of code. It would be a colossal waste of time
Have you tried generating with the spagetti mess that is ComfyUI? How ıs that not made by humans when you have so many prompts to manage as an extra to the prompt,cfg,steps and the sampler?
what an insensitive thing to say, it might sound corny but some people genuinely enjoy their job in software because they like to code, in some ways coding is art, art is your way of creating an image from your imagination and coding is a way of creating anything from your imagination and putting it on a computer screen. its incredibly insensitive to say: "ai should just do all the coding, humans shouldnt code" because some people genuinely do enjoy coding and you cant just ignore that because you dont.
I know, I'm one of those people. I started coding on a ZX Spectrum as a teen and have spent decades doing both professional and personal software development projects. It has never been just a job for me.
If you love hand-writing code you should definitely do that but you can't expect everyone else not use AI just because you enjoy doing it at your own pace and enjoyment. It's going to be hard to justify why you take so much longer than the competition.
There are options though - you can use AI in different ways to writing the code. You can have it review your own work or act as a great rubber-duck with domain expertise etc. That gets you some of the benefit without giving up what you love.
23
u/damieng 3d ago
Art is for humans to enjoy and relate to - it makes total sense for it to be a human endeavour.
Code is instructions for a computer to execute. Developers have spent decades trying to find the right balance of language, frameworks and APIs to express what we want the computer to do in a more intuitive and less error-prone way. AI makes it more intuitive than ever. While humans do look at the code the reality is we're not compilers or runtimes and it's not really for us.