Programming Isn't Special

> Artists understand that AI is bad for art. Why don’t programmers understand that we are artists?

imo, that's happening because 2 cultures formed under extremely opposite incentives - "I do stuff and anyone else also doing it is taking my money away from me" vs "Please someone else do same thing as me, it would be so awesome/easier"

the closest art-relating thing to GPL ideals are fanfics. And opinion about ai-generated fanfics has been much closer to our coders view - "sure a lot of it is bad, maybe there's also too much of it, but... there's also some good stuff, so it's good?"

I think that AI is the best thing that happened to art. It elevated _all_ human art to this mystical realm. All human work became sacred, as it is unique and bears the Secret Fire. Whatever you do as "art", as long as you didn't use AI, it automatically bears the sacral stamp. Can go to a gallery, whatever. All human art is now elite art.

This should not be flagged.

Why was this flagged?

I don't think there is anything here for me anymore.

Here come a thread where those with stock in AI and AI glazers will agree with the title and put forth their claims as if they're obvious and factual, and those against it will do the opposite.

Very stinky topic to be honest and all the posts here are basically the same level of drivel as political discussions.

Programming is different from art or writing in that nobody gives a fuck about the code, only the results—the benefits it brings them. Programming is an industrial process, not an art form.

Ten years from now "programmer" will describe machines and mechanical processes, not people, in a tradition similar to what happened with "computer" after the 1940s.

So much of what's going on with a lot of open source community reaction to AI is often just gatekeeping masquerading as morality.

Many of us have spent our adult and teenage lives learning an arcane magic that we took pride and joy and status in. Only to find now it's not so magic anymore. Or not in the way we thought.

I often see parts of my own code as art. Especially when I was younger, I guess.

But I also saw lots of it as: making a living. And there's fluidity between the two.

They're right "programming isn't special" -- it's not the magic you thought it was. It never was. It just appeared magic because others couldn't do it.

You can still have that magic in pockets. But you shouldn't expect to be venerated for it. You never should have.

I've been doing it for 40+ years at this point. I'm happy to let the machines take over a lot of the grunt work so I can get one with making beautiful interesting systems. I can make all things I wanted to make now.

Art is special. Programming... no, get over yourself. You can see it that way. Not everyone else has to. And playing Butlerian Jihad isn't going to dam the flood.

Nah. Programming is utilitarian, not artistic. While programmers can do their best to produce elegant, well-ordered and designed code they are producing a means to an end: the program has a purpose beyond being elegant, well-ordered and designed. If the clankers can produce programs which fulfil the same purpose and can do it reliably while taking less time and resources - a big if - they are the way to go for most programs. Cameras largely replaced painters for the purpose of producing portraits, photographers control the cameras to make them produce the desired outcome. Clankers will largely replace programmers for the purpose of producing code, we may need a new term to indicate the humans who control them.

I don't know, I learned to like agentic programming. It felt intimidating at first, but now I fully embraced it. Granted I am still anxious what will happen to the developer job market, but for my own projects agentic programming has been a god send.

It is fine to use AI for programming, making music, writing, video... it's fine for all of these uses. Yeah, programming isn't special.

The only difference is that LLMs can code way better than they can write. Probably thanks to software being more and more immediately testable.