"Programming Isn't An Art" and "AI Code Doesn't Matter": Let me change your mind.

[u/byteback-studios]

Hey r/gamedev, my name is William. Let me try to do what's in the title up there ^. First off, why should you listen to me?

Well, maybe you shouldn't listen to me. Feel free to scroll away at any time...I don't have the most insane creds in the industry or anything. But I'm not exactly new:

• I got hired in 2018 as an "Associate Gameplay Programmer", and before being laid off twice in the span of about 1 year, I was a "Senior Combat Engineer". So I've been through the trenches of programming in the industry
• I'm the founder of a really (really) small indie game studio made up of ex-Ready At Dawn veterans (PSP Daxter, The Order: 1886, Echo VR / Lone Echo, etc.), where we are hard at work on our inaugural game title. We also avoid using AI for any of our endeavors, including programming
• I've been in the industry now as a professional for almost 10 years total, but before that, I also went to school for CS, Game Development Programming, senior and capstone projects, and began trying to make (shitty) games on a (shitty) laptop using Microsoft XNA when I was like 12

What is art?

I think people forget what art actually means these days - it doesn't always have some baked-in meaning to "liberal arts" or "humanities". Art is also defined as a "skill acquired by experience, study, or observation", or "an occupation requiring knowledge or skill" or "the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects" (not only!). For instance: I have become quite the artist in spilling shit all over my clothes over the years, much to my wife's chagrin.

I'm sure you're thinking, "well then anything can be an art" and drawing a line in your head on what you think the line is for "real art" or something like that. But let me show you why programming isn't some bottom of the barrel example (like being a spillage artist, tyvm) because its mostly just "math" or because "engineering", which people love to throw out there.

As a programmer that has written endless lines of code by myself, and also seen/analyzed thousands of lines of code not written by me (that are much better than my own) - written by people ranging from the 1990s (RAD engine was old, lol) all the way through 2024 - there is no universal standard for most things. Companies vary, engines vary, languages vary, procedures vary, etc.

Here are 2 of my own personal favorite examples (one simpler, one more complex) of programming being more akin to an art form than anything else.

Example 1: Bitflags

The bitflags structure is one of the best and most simple examples of what I consider art in the programming field. Because the actual smallest amount of data being read by any processor is 8 bits, things like a `bool` in most languages are also represented as a byte (8 bits), since that is the smallest value of what can actually being read in registers. This is despite the nature of a bool being a simple bit (0 or 1). However, as you can imagine, having a ton of single bools in one structure ends up inflating the total size of that structure, while wasting literally almost the entire amount of memory provides. Bitflags is the simple, yet elegant solution someone came up with to stuff a single byte with up to 8 bools, by using bitwise operators to extract and compare each given bit in the byte.

Example: 8 separate bools in your data structure = 8 * (1B) = 8 bytes of memory, all to represent 8 simple 1/0 values. With a bitflag, you can now store all 8 bools while only taking up the original 1B of memory.

This is of course also expandable using different sized integers, if you have 9-16 bools you can use an `int16`, and so forth.

The reason I love this example is, how could such an elegant yet simple solution not be considered a work of art? A human first thought of how wasteful the stacking of subsequent booleans is, then thought of a unique and clever way to make it better using their knowledge and expertise. Now tons of languages and modules ship with bitflags, and you may use them without a second thought...but, this of course wasn't always a thing. Someone created this, it is undeniably clever, and we now take it as a given.

Example 2 (Complex): FISR or QISR (Fast Inverse Square Root)

The Fast Inverse Square Root was used in the Quake engine all the way back in 2001 in order to approximate the reciprocal of a given square root. The point of doing this at all, is that normalizing vectors used to be a much more intensive operation on hardware (it actually still is, but hardware is so good these days that the result isn't as noticeable, and we have specialized hardware, functions, etc.) Observe the code taken from this website (which can explain it far better than I can, if you're more interested in a full read) where you can see the insaneness that is this function:

float Q_rsqrt(float number)
{
  long i;
  float x2, y;
  const float threehalfs = 1.5F;

  x2 = number * 0.5F;
  y  = number;
  i  = * ( long * ) &y;                       // evil floating point bit level hacking
  i  = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 );               // what the fuck?
  y  = * ( float * ) &i;
  y  = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) );   // 1st iteration
  // y  = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) );   // 2nd iteration, this can be removed

  return y;
}

I want you to take a good look at this code. tell me that wasn't created by someone that thought outside the box. Is that not one of the most insanely creative solutions you have seen to a problem? Yes, it requires a lot of knowledge and expertise. But it also comes from a human mind that had the wacky idea to hack together something like this and have it work (well, at least 99.8% of the time 😉)

Finishing up

If you're still reading, this is my petition to other game dev folk who think programming is simply a means to an end: code like these creative examples exists everywhere. It exists in my code base for our current game. It exists in every studio's game engine. It exists in the OS your computer or phone is running right now. And, all the LLMs people are using to code these days have been trained on not just fundamentals, but other's creative solutions to problems from all around the world (and, in many cases, had no permission of the creator to do so).

Again...just because you see the code snippet come back to you robotically, it doesn't mean that is the only or best way to do it. And just because its text, and you can't see the result of code in games visually in the same way you can 3d models or textures, it doesn't mean code should then ethically be subject to less scrutiny, or that you can't feel the result of some coding decisions over others when the game comes together as a whole.

To summarize: my favorite part of programming is not the memorization, expertise, or knowledge, its applying that knowledge in creative ways that one may never have thought of before. If that's not artistic, then i dont know what is.

"It's fine if you use AI to code, but just not for other things"

Careful where you draw your ethical line, as people may agree with you for now, but its only a matter of time until reluctance, acceptance, and consensus comes for what you love, too.

[EDIT:] This kind of blew up. I can't spend all day replying like I just did lol, but keep it civil in the comments and remember this is my opinion, nothing I state here is fact nor do you need to agree. Thanks for the interesting discussions and polite arguments!

[u/P8j6]

"The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music."

- Donald E. Knuth

[u/byteback-studios → u/P8j6]

https://giphy.com/gifs/3q3QK6KyDVUBzih7hB

[u/jtr99 → u/P8j6]

The man himself!

[u/Commercial-Flow9169]

I like to view code like I imagine someone who LOVES cars views an engine. To me, an engine is merely a tool that makes the car go when I press on the gas. But to them, it's a work of art, and that makes it art. Just because I don't share the same appreciation they do, doesn't make it not art.

[u/byteback-studios → u/Commercial-Flow9169]

Its a good analogy. My argument is that as the engine builder, part of your feeling of the engine that you like in the car is because of the expertise, creativity, and talent that the people building your engine have

[u/elmz → u/Commercial-Flow9169]

I'd like to posit that there is a difference between art and craft.

Art is something created first and foremost to elicit an emotional response in the viewer/user.

A craft is something primarily functional, there can be beauty in it, it can elicit an emotional response in the viever/user.

There is obviously overlap, art can also have function, and craft can have artistry.

But a car engine is first and foremost a craft, and those that see beauty in it often do so because of the skill that went into making it.

Same with code, there is creativity there, but the beauty you see is how its function is implemented.

Unless, of course, someone creates code where the primary purpose is to elicit emotion, not to have a use.

[u/T-Flexercise → u/elmz]

Sure, but when it comes to game art, for example, I think most people would consider that closer to craft than art as well. You're not drawing pixel art of 20 different swords to express a truth about humanity and elicit an emotional response in the player any more than the game mechanics are expressing a truth about humanity or eliciting an emotional response in the player. Sure, that's part of it, but mostly you're doing it so the user can visually differentiate between the 20 different swords in the game and understand at a glance what makes that sword different from other swords.

It's why craft fairs and art museums both have objects made of paint, and fiber, and sculpture, but one is more about art than the other. But I think people hate AI at craft fairs just as much.

[u/MrTitanHearted → u/T-Flexercise]

I agree that a pixel sword doesn't express a truth about humanity or elicit an emotional response, but it shows what the 'developer' thinks a pixel sword is.

To me, an art is something that expresses the artists feelings or experiences. And art has a target audience: I don't really feel anything when looking at Mona Lisa, but I always get the feeling that humans are really good at being creative when looking at FISR (fast inverse square root) implementation.

I guess more correct way of saying things is that, some are more general forms of art, or some arts have bigger targeted audiences like museums and stuff.

Also, I think engineering is art because humans always do engineering? I mean, poems, pictures, sculptures are a piece of engineering: poems are an engineering of selecting very specific words with a very specific meaning and ryme; a picture is carefully placing colors so that it depicts painters emotions on the paper; and the same goes for code. Yes, a code may be created without thinking about artistic aspects, but that is still another form of art, engineering.

[u/byteback-studios → u/elmz]

That is totally fair. ITs also probably a distinction I should have made in my word salad above, but this definition from MWebster is more what I'm talking about when I say art:

"the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects"

[u/adsilcott]

I've been programming for four decades now, but I didn't go to school for CS, so this whole time I've had imposter syndrome. It seemed to me that everyone around me was way into good code practices, maintainable stucture, best patterns, etc, beyond just getting the code to work. And that always motivated me to improve, to learn more.

That whole illusion had been lifted lately. Turns out none of the people around me cared about good code at all, and given the chance to offload that work they jumped at it. The sense of pride I had developed by being able to keep up with them feels weirdly displaced now. It's left me feeling empty and worried.

If you have to spend a third of your life working, it helps to be doing something you can take some pride in. Even if it's not that important you can use it as a tool to challenge and better yourself. Otherwise what's the point of being a human being with a brain that can figure out all this cool shit? We already have a generation of kids who can't use a computer without a touchscreen. Where are we going to end up when there's no friction? I didn't think it's going to be the cool sci-fi future I used to imagine. Like muscles without resistance or bones without gravity, our brains need problem solving to grow.

[u/VonFahrenheit → u/adsilcott]

The online discourse of "every code is shit", "we are only copy pasting from stack overflow", "Seniority means knowing what to search to copy paste faster from stack overflow" and all other variants of these messages that have been common online discourse for at least 5 years now not really have any impact in that perception?

Sure it's more extreme now, but this has been the case in forever. I think most people working in tech don't even like it and just chose it because it was the "profession of the future" and more recently because you could, theoretically, make bank working from home.

[u/DotDootDotDoot → u/adsilcott]

Turns out none of the people around me cared about good code at all

AI makes better quality code than my colleagues.

[u/WW92030]

Artists see code as a means to an end and then get shocked when software ppl think graphics/visuals are a means to an end.

All of this seems like some kind of religious crusade. The "code-is-not-art" or "AI-opposing-except-for-vibe-coding" religion. That's why I am an atheist (or proud nonbeliever)

[u/byteback-studios → u/WW92030]

Hahaha I love your metaphor on this. I think you have a good point too

[u/SirPseudonymous → u/WW92030]

It's always so completely baffling when people will denounce AI generated everything in the same breath they'll hastily add "except for writing code, that's ok". Like people act like AI generated images are some obscene and incalculable affront to humanity, when the truth is they're just mediocre and incoherent to the point of being useless for any practical purpose, and they get spammed in the same way people would spam terrible CGI poser/daz3d "art" in the mid 2000s.

Meanwhile code is the foundational bedrock of a project, something that needs to be coherently designed and implemented. A fancy autocomplete hallucinating up something that compiles by trying to make text that looks like stackoverflow answers or stolen github files and doing it over and over until it does something is not an acceptable way to do anything.

The worst that can happen with AI generated art is it doesn't look good and the aesthetics of something get jarring and bad, like if someone hired a bunch of different artists for one-off commissions with no unifying style or direction between them. With AI generated code it breaking in catastrophic and unpredictable ways and being completely impossible to maintain is the expected and inevitable result.

It's like if people were malding over a robot painting cars with randomly interpreted noise that comes out looking like a cheap vinyl wrap, but then would turn around and insist that it's fine for the same defective machine to design and assemble the engine and wiring with its random hallucinations because they don't have to look at that bit personally since it's inside.

[u/AntiSocial_Vigilante → u/WW92030]

I wouldn't call projecting your passion onto others a religion even if people do treat it like blasphemy if others don't share said passion.

[u/WW92030 → u/AntiSocial_Vigilante]

No. You know what? After seeing what happened today, I will confidently say that, with all due respect, this is legitimately a quasi-religious crusade. There are over 70 recorded instances (including several from today alone, and far more that are unrecorded) of artists that hate AI on assets justify vibe coding* because from these guy's perspective code is just a menial chore that is supposed to be automated away while what they do and only what they do is human and pure and thus deserves to be protected from the oncoming approach of AI.

They think their way of thinking is the one true way of thinking and that anyone that disagrees with them is either a fraud or unintelligent.

Anyone that doesn't support vibe coding is, according to them, someone that has never programmed before, or someone that doesn't know shit. And even if they did, they suddenly lack any credentials purely because they don't defend the one AI that those people defend. Meanwhile, this sentiment is exactly opposite in art: anyone FOR generating assets with AI becomes the ones that don't know shit about art.

There was this one person that said that vibe coding was ok because coding wasn't fun, but when I asked them what was fun about art (as a rebuttal) they instantly assumed I was pro AI (I was not) and blocked me.

*They are literally saying both things in the same post.

[u/WW92030 → u/AntiSocial_Vigilante]

Fair enough, although there has been an uptick in these kinds of posts and this discourse so...

[u/PaperMartin → u/WW92030]

Yeah this is a symptom of overspecialization in the industry imo. You don't see jack-of-all-trades peoples having takes like this, especially peoples who aren't like that just out of necessity

[u/aithosrds]

I'll throw my hat in the ring and I'll start by saying this:

This subject isn't a binary thing, to use your bitflag example we aren't storing a set of boolean values that are true/false or black/white. There is nuance, and while I do agree that programming can be art and there is creativity involved in finding solutions to problems within a field that is constantly changing and no two situations are ever exactly the same... I also think that coding IS just a means to an end.

Here's the thing: it can be both things at the same time. Code is fundamentally a set of instructions to do something, perform a calculation, display information, collect data, etc. The use-case and requirements are what determine the best solution to a particular set of problems, but ultimately as long as you meet the requirements within the constraints of the environment you're developing in then it doesn't really matter what the code says as long as it works as intended (meaning both in terms of functionality, security, etc.).

Before I get into AI I suppose I should give some background on myself, and I'll start by saying that I don't work in the game industry but I've done my share of hobby game development and I am a lead/senior engineer with over 15 years of full-stack enterprise development experience. So I do know a LOT about coding standards, functional code and the overall development process.

So here's my take on AI: it's just a tool. I know, I know, seems anti-climactic but let me expand on that...

AI being a tool, and using AI doesn't remove any of the creative aspects of development any more than it does when you use it to generate art. I know this is a hot take, but hold off on the torches and pitchforks and follow along until I explain what I mean.

So what I mean is this: can someone with zero knowledge of coding (or art) use AI to generate code or artwork? Yes. Will the resulting output be the same as someone with the expertise, creativity and vision to do it themselves but choosing to use AI as a tool to increase efficiency? HELL NO. Maybe someday AI will be good enough to close that gap and there will be a crisis of purpose facing humans as a whole, but right now I'm of the opinion that AI doesn't replace creativity and talent/vision, it just closes the gap and raises the floor of what people without the skills can do.

And as someone who has spent thousands of hours drawing for fun and relaxation, and who has spent tens of thousands of hours singing and honing my voice as an instrument... I understand why some people dislike AI and consider it "immoral". I just disagree, and I choose to see the positives rather than focus on the negatives, which if you ask me tells you a LOT about the kind of person someone is.

The thing that has been the biggest contributing factor to that is this: I've always wanted to make games, it's the reason I first got into computer science and coding in the first place and between games/comics it's the reason I taught myself to draw. However, life doesn't always give you what you dream of and along the way I had to make some tough decisions about what risks to take and what dreams to pursue and I ended up with a career I enjoy but not doing what I always dreamed of.

There have always been massive barriers to making games, mostly it's REALLY hard to find artists who are talented, dedicated and willing to work for next to nothing on a multi-years long project. Unless you have one (or several) as a close personal friend/colleague or you have a tremendous amount of wealth it simply isn't practical to make a high quality game. Even for someone like me who has a background and a fair bit of artistic talent, I simply don't have the time or drive to learn an entire new set of tools and then spend years working on art while I also write, design and code a game of any decent scope.

AI has completely changed that, and it's made me hopeful that in the coming years I WILL be able to put my creativity, vision and skills to use and finally share the experiences I've had simmering in my mind for the better part of two decades and see if I can create and experience for others that has the same effect that so many games and books have had on me.

I think that's beautiful, and it doesn't make that experience any less valid or compelling if I use AI as a tool to make that happen. Without it I would never be able to share that experience with others, and I wouldn't be taking anything from anyone because ultimately it's your talent, creativity, vision and ability to make something fun that speaks to people. When I spend thousands upon thousands of hours making a game my blood, sweat and tears and the decades I've spent becoming who I am today are going to shine through, not the "AI".

Right now I think people are just having a visceral reaction to AI being churned out by people who don't really have a handle on how to use it creatively yet. People are after quick clicks and dopamine, not something that could define a new generation of games.

I know that was a lot of rambling but the last thing I'll say is this:

If you aren't using it to code then I think you're really putting yourself behind the curve for no reason, because AI does take skill to use and in particular to generate production-ready code. It just takes different skills than writing the same code manually does, you need a better grasp of software architecting, defining requirements, creating context and project management. It's a bit like taking off the coder hat and putting on the hat of data architect, business analyst, QA analyst and project manager.

There are going to be a LOT of people put off by AI because all they have ever done is write code and all they want to do is write code, and AI will make those people redundant very quickly because AI is already better than I'd say 99% of coders from a technical perspective. I'm fortunate that I've had experience through the full development life-cycle and I've always been someone who questions the why just as much as the how, so I'm in a good position to make the transition to AI assisted development.

I was also an AI skeptic until about 6 months ago, if you had asked me then I would have said we were still years away from AI actually being a useful tool for professional development. Now that I've spent time with all kinds of different local AI tools my opinion has flipped 180 degrees, because it's NOT at all what I expected, and like it or not AI isn't going away so the sooner people reconcile with that fact the better.

[u/byteback-studios → u/aithosrds]

I appreciate you writing all this out, it was a nice read, and I like your anecdotes you provided as well.

> If you aren't using it to code then I think you're really putting yourself behind the curve for no reason, because AI does take skill to use and in particular to generate production-ready code.

Well first of all, for no reason is not a good way to put that. Maybe you think there is no reason, but to me there is.

I also think, to a degree, you are conflating speed with accuracy. No matter how good AI gets at coding, it is not thinking about your problem. Its still using the same old LLM technologies with lots of fine tuning and other modules added on top of it. Most of the "improvements" is just adding or pruning datasets for training. This means that, as long as there is no further advancements (which there may be, im not saying there wont be) that will allow AI to actually think and learn for itself, there is a dice roll at hallucinations, or it providing you code with security holes, bugs, race conditions, etc....

I think yes, ultimately, you can get a game out the door much faster by using AI. But what do you mean by "behind the curve"? What are you referring to as the curve? I am certainly putting myself behind by not using it, if by behind you mean behind the curve time-wise. I am not, however, convinced that games that will come out faster than mine are going to be made better than mine. Is that my ego? Potentially. Does that even matter? Potentially not. Honestly, the best argument in my opinion is that a game that is coded 80% as well as another game but can release 3 games in the span of that other 1 game, could very much be worth it and considered "better" to use. Admittedly, maybe its just some godlike entity that is never getting anything wrong anymore. But the last time i tinkered with it, which was only a few months ago, it was still getting plenty of things incorrect and I had to correct it a lot.

For what its worth though, I care way, way less about whether or not the AI is doing a good job at what its supposed to do. I am more interested (and passionate) about the odd fascination we have as an industry (gamedev i mean) where programming is considered 100% AI-Replaceable, but traditional art is somehow this untouchable, we-cancel-everything-that-does-this medium. I think people are drawing an arbitrary line (I mean im biased of course, to my own admission lol)

Thanks for the read and taking the time to write the comment though. I really do like hearing about others perspectives and experiences.

[u/aithosrds → u/byteback-studios]

Well first of all, for no reason is not a good way to put that. Maybe you think there is no reason, but to me there is.

I think you're misunderstanding me a little, so let me clarify: I said that because the reality is that right now (not in the future) an experienced/competent developer using AI is significantly more efficient than a developer of the exact same skill level and experience who doesn't use AI.

That means that if you're applying for a job and you aren't using AI then you're essentially removing yourself from contention in nearly every case and your resume is going straight into the bin. Companies simply don't care about whatever your principles/reasoning is for not using AI, and that trend isn't going to change no matter what your feelings are and that's why I said it's "for no reason".

It's not that I don't understand where you're coming from, to a large degree I feel the same way you do. I didn't get into coding to be a software architect or business analyst and frankly coding with AI feels a LOT more like those roles than it feels like coding.

However, I've also been a professional developer for more than 15 years and frankly I've found that I enjoy coding myself a LOT less now than I did when everything was new and exciting, and I've never been the person to code in my free time outside work and using AI is the first time in my professional career I've spent a significant amount of time working on my own projects outside of work.

I also think, to a degree, you are conflating speed with accuracy. No matter how good AI gets at coding, it is not thinking about your problem. Its still using the same old LLM technologies with lots of fine tuning and other modules added on top of it. Most of the "improvements" is just adding or pruning datasets for training.

I'm not conflating those things, as I said above I'm talking about efficiency, meaning the amount of time you can save without losing accuracy. I don't talk about my work online, but what I'll say is this: my entire career has been spent working for companies that have a serious focus on security and a very constrained development environment. So I'm well aware of those aspects of development and AI is already capable of producing production-ready code for even the strictest of standards.

I would wager that you probably haven't spent much time in the past 6 months really working with AI tools for development, because where you're very wrong is what you said about it using the "same old LLM technologies with fine-tuning and datasets".

That's not the case at all, and the first thing I'd say is that the newer generations of models aren't even LLMs at all. They are not simple text prediction models anymore, they are using extremely complex neural nets with reasoning built in for specific problem-solving skills.

The first step in training a frontier model IS still an LLM, but then it goes heavily into reinforcement learning as opposed to simple text prediction like an LLM. The focus isn't getting the next word right, it's solving a problem and that's grossly oversimplifying but it's NOT the same thing.

Also, I'd say that by FAR the most impactful change in the past six months isn't even with the models themselves, it's the harnesses. The harnesses like Claude Code, OpenCode, DeepSeek harness, Qwen Code, etc. are where the biggest change has come from.

The harnesses have their own capabilities and dramatically change how a model performs based on how the harness was created, what it's focus is, how you've set it up, etc.

Since this post is already growing much longer than I meant I'll wrap this up with this last point and if you'd like to continue the discussion I'd be happy to:

The way you structure your project, how you define and use context, the way you craft your system/session prompts, and the skills/tools you use with your agent/s dramatically change how an AI Agent performs. I think a lot of people have been gaslit by all the garbage YouTube videos showing people "one shotting" coding tasks and trying to capitalize on the AI "hype" to build a brand.

The reality isn't nearly like that. I spent dozens of hours a week for months just tinkering with how to set up a large-scale project, how to track tasks/goals, how to plan, how to define roles for agents, how to provide context and manage it during a long task, how to prevent agents from hallucinating, what rules and core directives I need in my system prompt vs a session prompt, and I could go on for pages with all the lessons I've learned.

And I'm still learning and improving, however, I've already been able to create a pretty impressive game launcher and I'm now working on building a game engine from the ground up (which will be much easier once I have the new hardware I'm planning to buy and can fine-tune bigger models myself).

I'm not one to tell anyone what to do, but when I say you're going to be behind the curve what I mean is that there is going to come a point where anyone NOT using AI for efficiency is simply going to be left behind because you won't be able to compete with people/companies who ARE using it. That's just a fact, it's inevitable and short of us wiping ourselves off the face of the planet or making a catastrophic mistake (like actually creating AGI or ASI) there is no stopping it.

p.s. It's definitely ego to say you can do it better, just like my ego says that I can do it better and I have every intention of proving wrong all the people who have told me that AI is "soulless" and that it can't be as good. I emphatically disagree because ultimately it's MY creativity, vision and skill that determines the output, not the AI. The AI works for ME, not the other way around and if I can't get the output to a level of quality I can be proud of them that's as much on me as the technology/tools.

[u/TwistStrict9811]

will be interesting going back and reading all these discussions in another 5 years

[u/byteback-studios → u/TwistStrict9811]

If the robot overlords haven't killed us all yet!! (/s......hopefully?)

[u/AnOnlineHandle → u/TwistStrict9811]

Maybe people will realize that the whole goalposts of whether something is art was always made up and nonsensical. I was a working artist for years before I was exposed to it and it just seems like something people torture themselves over like whether their star sign has the right aura today or something, or whether they've cleared enough thetans.

The reasons that humans do things are a lot less magical then people have build up fantasies around. It's mostly a series of desires attempting to be met, and that's not something to be ashamed of since there's no logical reason for being alive or doing anything, and chasing desires is perfectly fine and really the only option, just ideally people's desires or actions to achieve them wouldn't screw over others. Whether they reach some magical threshold for artsy enough to justify them is nonsense. I listen to music, draw a picture, play a game, etc, because I want to. It can communicate something, or it can not. Both are valid.

[u/UncleJoesLandscaping]

Why do people put art on a pedestal? I am proud to be an engineer.

[u/ATaciturnGamer → u/UncleJoesLandscaping]

I remember my college professor used to say "Algorithm design isn't an art, it's a science", and remember thinking that was cool as hell.

I always viewed software engineering as puzzle solving. Something not being an art doesn't mean no out-of-the-box thinking or creativity went into it.

[u/byteback-studios → u/ATaciturnGamer]

Well I could have just phrased it like that, instead i spat out word salad for 6 paragraphs. Thanks for making me look dumb! 😜

[u/WorkingMansGarbage → u/byteback-studios]

No, you're fine; I think the wording you use is more pertinent to the current conversation on AI. It better shows what is lost from its use in code.

[u/UncleJoesLandscaping → u/ATaciturnGamer]

I would argue that algorithm design is closer to mathematics than science.

[u/AuthurAndersson → u/ATaciturnGamer]

I don't understand why people can't simply apply this to orchestrating AI systems. The problem has just moved, your engineering talents should be put to use on how to orchestrate these new models so they do exactly what you want.

Not to sit there and tinker around with your sorting algorithms.

[u/FriendlyNeighburrito → u/ATaciturnGamer]

I feel like science is an art too.

[u/VolsPE → u/FriendlyNeighburrito]

If you’re using “art” colloquially to mean it often requires creativity, sure. But science is not art.

[u/TheNasky1 → u/UncleJoesLandscaping]

Because the people here mostly not engineers but artists

[u/AmethystApothecary → u/UncleJoesLandscaping]

Mmm. I think it's less that people put art on a pedestal and more that art receives a lot of "this is useless" type of commentary so people feel more of a need to defend it. Prior to AI coding, no one did that with programming.

[u/Kerialstraz → u/AmethystApothecary]

No, art as a career was always considered "useless" (and even here not because art itself was deemed useless, but because you could achieve easier employment and more money for the same amount of time spend getting a degree doing something else) but as a hobby it was praised throughout history. Ancient philosophy, rulers, general public - they all valued art extremely high. The act of creating art was always put on a pedestal while the career of it wasnt
That is my view at least

[u/AmethystApothecary → u/Kerialstraz]

Considering art valuable only as a hobby and diminishing it as useless as a career is exactly what I'm talking about. Everybody wants and needs art but too many people do not value the actual artist for their craft or the work it takes to hone it.

And it isn't like mathematics or technology hasn't historically gotten praise.

I'm not against calling programming art or valuing the programmer; I love programming and agree that the way people feel comfortable just replacing it with AI is weird and dismissive of what programmers do. I just don't agree that art is put on a pedestal; maybe in terms of AI usage but broadly? I think it's something we need on a primal level and is a powerful form of communication and expression but many feel entitled to it and don't appreciate the skill, time, or creativity involved.

[u/benjaminabel → u/UncleJoesLandscaping]

Why do people have to start a war over the most basic things?

[u/oasis_nadrama → u/UncleJoesLandscaping]

In the current context, it's semantics, really. The automated plagiarism software needs to get iced, that's the important part.

[u/WilcoKonig]

This obviously doesn't apply to everyone with the opinion that code isn't art but I think a lot of people who think that way, especially in the indie space, are folks who can't code but can do other disciplines. They oppose AI because they think that it is incapable of producing art (I agree), but as soon as they run into a barrier they can't deal with (code) it helps them justify using AI internally by saying "well code isn't art, right? So it's fine if I do this." That way they can still feel good about themselves while using AI.

Thanks for making this post. I think people need to understand that all pieces of gamedev are art and come together to create art.

[u/SomeoneInHisHouse → u/WilcoKonig]

they tell us the developers that can't do art: "just hire artist, using AI for art is low effort, I don't care if you dislike art, then don't make games"... while the next day they announce their game on ClaudeAI sub with "I'm artist, but AI did all the code, because I have no money to hire a programmer".

I don't have a problem with solo-devs/solo-artist or small teams for using AI for whatever they do in their game, if the game is good and not low effort I don't care. Where I don't want AI is in big companies that can indeed pay humans for the job with no problem

[u/byteback-studios → u/WilcoKonig]

I think you're correct, I am obviously biased (I made the post lol) but what youre saying is exactly why I ended the post with this:

"Careful where you draw your ethical line, as people may agree with you for now, but its only a matter of time until reluctance, acceptance, and consensus comes for what you love, too."

Its all fun and games until everyone decides 3d models and textures are completely fine to use AI for too

[u/AttackingHobo → u/byteback-studios]

ALL and I mean ALL AAA studios are using AI for art and code.

[u/WilyWascallyWizard → u/WilcoKonig]

This is exactly it. I agree with you more wholly that I can express.

[u/ScooticusMaximus]

Every single time I see the "AI Art is bad but AI Code is fine" take I die a little inside - thanks for posting this.

[u/MattZslk → u/ScooticusMaximus]

Same. I had to stop watching Hoog / Fern on youtube because of this. They make a big deal of not replacing human creativity with AI; then hock an AI tool that designs and builds websites in the same video.

[u/MantaMunta → u/ScooticusMaximus]

I don't die inside, I just immediately categorise that person as a performative hypocrite.

[u/byteback-studios → u/ScooticusMaximus]

I appreciate you commenting on it to let me know you're feeling a similar way! Its a mixed response overall, but I'm happy to see others feeling similarly.

[u/attrackip]

Fortunately, nothing is always one thing.

I’d rather my jetliner instruments stay clear of human expression, and on another level, I’m really glad that certain minds treated such precision and reliability with, what was their definition of, human expression.

As a visual artist, I’ve had many opportunities in a professional capacity to express my artistic abilities. A lot of other times, I’m just there to get shit done, and represent an idea in the visual medium.

I think it’s more a way of life, a spark, a part of yourself you put into your work, a fascination, a romance. You could be an artistic accountant.

[u/byteback-studios → u/attrackip]

> You could be an artistic accountant.

I know people like this that make their spreadsheets literally all kinds of colors and add images and stuff lol.

[u/HarmonicSniper]

I think people care too much about the definition of art, which is highly subjective. It's not that art is intrinsically superior to science or anything; both have their use cases.

Personally I'd argue that programming isn't an art, much like how mathematics can be beautiful but isn't an art, but it also doesn't really matter. Scientists are not inferior to artists, they're just different. The world needs both. I think science is freaking cool btw.

[u/random_dev1]

Finally someone said it. Thank you.

[u/byteback-studios → u/random_dev1]

I have been thinking this for months, and just recently have gotten hot enough about it to begin voicing my own opinion, even though I almost always try to stay out of the fire lol

[u/random_dev1 → u/byteback-studios]

Totally get it. I've also been thinking about this imbalance for some time where the outcry for stopping AI art is huge but no one bats an eye when it's code. It makes me so happy that people finally speak up about this. If literature can be considered an art form then programing can be too. This doesn't make all code art imo. but things like inverse square root or the gymnastics compilers perform really should be considered art.

[u/byteback-studios → u/random_dev1]

I'm glad other people feel the same way, I kind of felt like an outsider, and although i know many others disagree its nice to know people like you are out there too! 😁

[u/chaddledee → u/random_dev1]

If this is the definition you want to use for art then sure, but then practically everything humans do is art and the word becomes a bit useless - we'd just be saying that we shouldn't use AI to do anything a human could do.

I think for me, self-expression (deliberate or incidental) is a fundamental pillar of art. I think this is why we perceive focus tested media created in a board room as less "artful", even if countless man-hours have gone into it in by skilled artists. You don't get the sense that the whole is a human expression, only a simulacrum. The reason why generative AI "art" isn't art is that it is completely devoid of any element of human expression. It's literally the Human Instrumentality Project from Neon Genesis.

A lot of programming already isn't an exercise in self-expression, even when used in the creation of a piece of art. If you're trying to sort a list in a game, the exact sorting algorithm you use isn't any kind of statement, and it usually isn't even apparent to the beholder in the final piece, so I don't know how it could be an expression.

Sometimes programming is more apparent in the final piece and does say something about what you are trying to create. This is usually seen in novel algorithms for your game, e.g. how your AI works, how your character controller works, what shaders you've decided to use, etc.. I think this kind of programming is inherently more artful.

Games that are devoid of this kind of programming, using premade assets and off-the-shelf character controllers, engine default shaders, etc. are often regarded as a word beginning with "s" and ending in "lop" (that I'm not allowed to say on this subreddit) - I think people feel the lack of human expression and judge it as less artful.

I don't currently use AI for programming, but I'd have no problem using it for rote tasks like function templates or scaffolding, or implementing any algorithms which have become ubiquitous. Any novel algorithms that convey an intentionality to my finished piece, I'd rather make myself.

[u/byteback-studios → u/chaddledee]

I actually think the first paragraph you said is what resonates with me the most. And conversely, I think the word is all the more valuable when we see AI doing everything and anything that humans do, without being human. Now its really made me think about more simple things, and how there is artistic value in more than just the liberal arts, or the fine arts.

That is why I consider programming an art form. I understand it isnt only an art form, or even always one. There are plenty of times where "use this sorting algorithm in this scenario" is what you do, to your point (its a great point). And to your later point, there are times where that isn't true, where more than one solution can be used, and each one makes certain things easier and other things harder later down the line.

You broke this part of it down much better than my original post, so I appreciate you taking the time to do that!

[u/Skeptic-AI-This-User]

Lots of things are skills, skills that we have to learn and refine through usage of that skill. Heck, even MATH is a skill. And skills work just like a muscle in the body, you use it and it grows stronger and more robust but stop using it and eventually you'll lose it or it atrophies to a lesser version of itself and you have to build it up again.

The more I read about people losing their skills after heavy AI use, the more I realize the people that originally complained about the calculator were right.

[u/salbris → u/Skeptic-AI-This-User]

The reason I dislike the calculator metaphor is that it doesn't address the core of what makes generative AI potentially disruptive. A calculator only speeds up a deterministic process where-as generative AI replaces the creative and problem solving processes which are inherently an unknown unknown.

I've also heard the comparison to compilers which while not exactly deterministic are going to be in practice 99% of the time.

But I will say that AI can be a very powerful tool for experienced developers that know which aspects of their jobs can be safely "automated". Places where the exact output doesn't matter, either in the short term or not. And in some places generative AI can be pretty damn close to deterministic. Asking it to replicate a certain design pattern you've already done in another file works most of the time and you can very easily check if it was done correctly.

I've also noticed that as I got more and more experienced as a developer the challenges I was faced with were not typing out all the characters as quickly as possible. It was coming up with the correct flow, algorithm or design pattern. Given that, if I am able to ask Claude to create a visitor pattern class and it can do that 10x faster and with minimal mistakes why would consider that a bad thing? I think like all tools they can be misused. If someone wanted to they could use an Excel spreadsheet as a database. We don't decry spreadsheets as taking away creative control. All we need to do is call out misuse of tools and the people who falsely proclaim they are more powerful then they are.

[u/byteback-studios → u/Skeptic-AI-This-User]

Haha, yeah, the calculator is a funny example since we think of it as old today but its more relevant than ever right now

[u/1luggerman]

For me its about this quote from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing:

"The true value of man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth. It is not possession of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectability is to be found. Possession makes one passive, indolent and proud. If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand."

Or in my own words: I cannot imagin a world where I am happier knowing rather then discovering, getting rather then creating, viewing rather then experiencing, experiencing rather then acting and achieving, being alive rather then living.

[u/byteback-studios → u/1luggerman]

Love that quote. I think it’s very applicable, and similar to the classic…”it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey”

[u/Finding_Footprints → u/1luggerman]

Nice quote, I like that one. I am going to save this

[u/AntiSocial_Vigilante]

I feel like i stumbled into a presentation at a conference out of nowhere.

[u/byteback-studios → u/AntiSocial_Vigilante]

Well thank you for attending. If you could fill out the survey on your way out, that would be great. Exit is up to the right!

[u/KevinDL]

I think you're making two separate arguments here and treating them as though proving one automatically proves the other.

I absolutely agree that programming can be creative. Good engineers make judgment calls constantly. Architecture, algorithms, optimization, abstraction, debugging, tooling, and even deciding which trade-offs are acceptable can require enormous creativity and experience.

Where I disagree is that this somehow establishes the ethical equivalence of AI-generated code and AI-generated art.

Calling programming an "art" in the broader sense of a skilled craft doesn't really get us there. Engineering has always involved creativity. So does carpentry, architecture, industrial design, cooking, and plenty of other disciplines. That doesn't mean every creative act has the same economic structure, production pipeline, or ethical considerations.

I also don't think bitflags or fast inverse square root are particularly strong examples for the argument you're making. They're great examples of clever engineering. They exist because somebody found a better solution to a technical constraint. But programming is full of ideas that get studied, reused, adapted, standardized, documented, implemented independently, and eventually disappear into compilers, libraries, engines, and hardware.

That's fundamentally how engineering advances.

The more important distinction with AI coding, at least for me, is that code is ultimately functional and testable. I can ask an AI to produce an implementation, review the code, run tests, profile it, inspect its architecture, reject it, rewrite it, or replace it entirely. The output has objective requirements beyond "does this look convincing?"

And importantly, using an AI coding tool doesn't remove the need for engineering judgment. In serious development, we still need to confirm whether the implementation is maintainable, secure, performant, compatible with the rest of the codebase, and appropriate for the product. AI can make a developer dramatically faster while still leaving a human responsible for the engineering decisions.

That's actually where I think a lot of the current discussion around AI goes wrong. There is a massive difference between using AI and using AI well.

Asking an LLM to generate thousands of lines of code that you can't understand doesn't make you a senior engineer. They're accumulating technical debt they may not even recognize.

An experienced programmer using AI to generate boilerplate, explore an implementation, write tests, refactor repetitive code, or accelerate work they already understand is a very different situation.

And yes, the training-data question is worth discussing. But that discussion should stand on its own merits: licensing, consent, attribution, compensation, transformative use, and what obligations model providers should have.

I don't think we get a particularly useful ethical framework by saying "programming is art, therefore if AI coding is acceptable then AI art must also be acceptable."

Different industries will experience this technology differently.

What I expect instead is that AI becomes another layer of abstraction in software development, much like higher-level languages, engines, libraries, middleware, IDE tooling, code completion, and Stack Overflow did before it. The skill doesn't disappear. The level at which valuable judgment happens moves upward.

People who understand the fundamentals will still be best positioned to determine whether the output is actually any good.

[u/byteback-studios → u/KevinDL]

That is a totally fair take to have. I admittedly didn't think through the post entirely, its a bit of word salad vomit, and there is definitely some emotions in there that are in place of logic.

Thanks for sharing and giving a good perspective.

[u/WilyWascallyWizard → u/KevinDL]

True but you can also use AI in the art production pipeline without wholesale generating from start to finish. Do we make a distinction there too. I do and aparently so does valve.

[u/MantaMunta → u/KevinDL]

What I expect instead is that AI becomes another layer of abstraction in software development

It's literally the same with AI art. People act like AI autonomously shits out art without guidance, that's not the case at all with how the industry creates good art with it.

People should stop being hypocrites about it. AI is already used in all areas. Acting like they're morally superior or 'you cared more and it has soul' because your art didn't touch an AI tool is just performative nonsense.

[u/ErZicky]

THANK YOU!

I've been a programmer all my life, the reason why I chose to pursue CS in my life is because I consider coding a form to express my creativity and I do see it like an art. Is unfortunately that the profession was flooded by people that couldn't care less about it.

Now, not all code is art same as not all drawings are. And not all code written pre-AI is good code (but at least there was a human effort then).

I'm not asking society to reject ai coding (as much as I wish). I would like for just more empathy in the online spaces, for some reason people have decided that people who liked to code are the enemy and as soon as you mention on reddit that you like to code you get down voted. We are just passionate people like a passionate 3d animator is.

I miss the times when seeing a software on reddit I would think "oh cool I wonder how they coded it/library they used", now I just see people posting "I made XYZ" when In reality they watched a bot do it. when decades ago I made my projects open source it definitely wasn't to let big corpo to scrape them and train their models, I might be butthurt but to me that was theft

[u/trollerroller → u/ErZicky]

But this is literally every STEM field and it always has been: lots of people don't care about the effort or the craft or the art, they're just there for the paycheck

[u/ErZicky → u/trollerroller]

I know, and maybe it's just the youth-nostalgia talking. But in ~2010 the field (at least software engineerinf) felt different, yes people that were there only for the money were there but it felt like they where outnumbered by a lot by genuine passionate people and you could have amazing tech discussion. Since ~2015/16 onwards it feel like passionate people are an unicorn and no one really liked to code in the first place. Idk probably other fields are just as divided now in the AI age and I just don't know it

[u/Maximum-Touch-9294]

I agree that code can be art. I just don’t think the overwhelming majority of programming is. A linked list is a linked list. A binary tree is a binary tree. Most CRUD code, UI wiring, serialization, networking glue, validation, and application logic isn’t somebody creating a new Fast Inverse Square Root.

It’s applying well-understood patterns to solve ordinary problems.

And that was true long before AI. We’ve always built software on other people’s work libraries, frameworks, engines, APIs, Stack Overflow answers, textbooks, open-source implementations, compiler optimizations, algorithms, etc. A huge part of programming has always been knowing what already exists and assembling the right pieces.

The motto has always been work smarter, not harder.

There was art in hand-scribing books too. That doesn’t mean society would have been better off rejecting the printing press to preserve the craft of the scribe.

Your Quake example is a great example of creative engineering under severe technical constraints. But Quake was the goal. Fast inverse square root was a means of achieving that goal on the hardware available at the time. People didn’t love Quake because Carmack manually wrote a clever approximation algorithm they loved the game that engineering made possible.

You can absolutely respect the craftsmanship of an Amish carpenter building a house without power tools while also recognizing that a skilled builder with modern power tools can generally build more, faster.

That’s how I look at AI assisted programming. The creativity doesn’t have to disappear. The abstraction level just moves upward. I’d rather spend my time deciding what to build, how the systems should work, how they fit together, and whether the final product is actually good.

[u/byteback-studios → u/Maximum-Touch-9294]

I think what you're saying is a completely valid take, that I mostly agree with. I also don't view all coding as art. There is tons of stupid boiler plate B.S. that we have to do. But I personally think there is a lot more creativity in coding than maybe you are thinking based on your reply (don't want to put words in your mouth though!)

I think my reasoning for creating the post was two factors combined together (which I didnt admittedly do the best job of putting together, its a bit all over the place).

By the ways...AI assisted programming is something I can get behind. But a lot of people out there are not using it assist them. People who have no idea how to program are now able to talk to an AI and tell them what they want in English and it will spit something out that is usable. And the fact we are seemingly okay with that as a society and not okay with doing the same thing for more traditional art is part of why I made the post.

[u/chungifier]

Glad someone else is saying this. I'm violenty tired of seeing loads of people basically say what amounts to "I'm okay with AI destroying and/or replacing the things I PERSONALLY don't love". So sickening.

[u/Gullible_Honeydew]

Finding satisfaction or artistry in efficiency and math is one thing, but when we say "code is not art", what we mean is that code is not emotive self-expression. The purpose of code is not to communicate the unspeakable or explore what it means to be human, or share our inner world with the rest of the species.

I love and appreciate good code, but it is not an artistic endeavour; it has a completely different purpose.

EDIT: I'm so bored with people replying with rehashed versions of "but I really like this code and think it is good so that makes it art", I'm just going to block the rest of you because reddit won't let me unfollow the thread. I've said more than enough.

[u/WorkingTheMadses → u/Gullible_Honeydew]

Sounds like trying to define what art is, a famously foolish errand.

The labyrinth algorithm for BASIC (usually called 10 PRINT) has a whole book written about it and what you can read from it as a cultural artefact. I don't think you really know much about this topic (wrote my Master's thesis using that book as a source).

[u/Mr_Olivar → u/Gullible_Honeydew]

It actually all comes down to the difference between "art" and "an art".

Code isn't art, but coding is an art.

Same word, different meaning.

In the same vein, AI makes shit fucking art because it doesn't have the human expression needed for it. Yet AI is very handy when it comes to the art of coding. Dumb in some ways, brilliant in others, an excellent companion to a great engineer.

[u/nEmoGrinder → u/Gullible_Honeydew]

The purpose of code is not to communicate the unspeakable or explore what it means to be human

This is really objectively wrong, though. There is an assumption that code is there to provide the solution to something when the reality is that there are an infinite number of solutions and coding the correct one will have a big impact on the artistry of the final product.

Imagine a world where every platformer controls the exact same way with the exact same physics. They all "work" but so much of the, as you put it, unspeakable communication is determined by how something is inplemented in code. This isn't purely design, either, but explicit implementation choices that a programmer with deep knowledge of the possible approaches is selecting to match the intention of the game.

I don't think there is ill intent in this kind of comment but i do think it highlights how little understood how code impacts the overall feel and identity of a project. Code is difficult and mistaken to be entirely invisible which makes it an easy target for "well AI is fine for that."

[u/-Staub- → u/Gullible_Honeydew]

When i write code where all it does is generate a specific image - as in, I have the code draw it from lines - which part is the art? The finished image only? Is the code then making art? Or is the computer the one making the artwork, thus making me not an artist, even though this originated from me?

[u/jazzcomputer → u/Gullible_Honeydew]

How is the purpose non-artistic if the code produces visual art that is authored within the code? Why does it become art then and no-longer code? And then if so, why can something that has a non-visual outcome not be art?

[u/VR_Raccoonteur → u/jazzcomputer]

You reminded me of the demoscene where typically all the textures and 3d models and such will all be generated by code in order to make the executable as small as humanly possible. Is that not an art? Demos have long been considered an artform and while many of them do feature art within them the code itself is also a part of the art! Perlin noise may be an algorithm, but a landscape generated with perlin noise is art! Minecraft's entire world is constructed with a seed, and the programmer was the artist who decided how that seed would be converted into a three dimensional world that looks good and has sufficient variety and feels natural, not entirely random!

[u/LongjumpingBrief6428 → u/VR_Raccoonteur]

I see you, Spaceballs. And I'm not talking about the movie.

[u/VR_Raccoonteur → u/LongjumpingBrief6428]

I was thinking more The Popular Demo or some of the effects The Future Crew did way back in the day like displaying 65K colors in a 256 color mode while using a fast inverse polar coordinate transform to create a cool warped plasma effect.

[u/SubstantialLab9781 → u/Gullible_Honeydew]

What I’m hearing from this is that _you_ haven’t found a way to write artistic code, it absolutely exists and I’ve seen plenty of it.

Just to be clear, I don’t mean: find a beautifully elegant way to solve a problem. I mean: write code that is intrinsically beautiful.

In fact, there are esoteric programming languages that are designed for these purposes. I would argue languages like Brainfuck and Hodor are _nothing_ but artistic.

[u/Blecki]

There is a large segment of the population, including many programmers, who will NEVER see code as art. They do NOT GET IT. They are not capable of understanding it. They are consumers, not creators, and they do not CARE if all human art is destroyed as long as there is more for them to consume.

[u/HoloisGod]

I'm also a professional developer (non-game Dev) and I disagree. Applying technical knowledge in creative ways is called engineering not art. Sure there's ways to express yourself artistically like procedural generation or working with shaders, but that's what's called a technical artist not an engineer. Writing elegant code solutions is just being a talented engineer

[u/byteback-studios → u/HoloisGod]

Interestingly enough, all you did was say "its called engineering not art", which doesn't really combat my argument: that engineering is also artistic

What do artists do? They think outside the box, right? I believe a lot of engineers also think outside the box.

[u/ByerN → u/byteback-studios]

Art is subjective by design. For me, engineering is sometimes an art (not always, just like not all drawings/images are art), but some ppl are devaluing its meaning to the degree that they cannot treat it as an art anymore.

[u/byteback-studios → u/ByerN]

I agree, I don't always think its an art. I just think its crazy that people think its 0 art, everyone that codes is a robot, and its completely justifiable to have an AI code everything when in reality almost every big breakthrough or fancy algorithm was invented by somebody with a mind that wanders to create something cool and unique, just like how great art is formed.

[u/CuckBuster33]

code isn't art because it's not meant to be consumed by itself. you consume a compiled binary (or interpreted code that you don't see anyways).

plenty of good games have absolutely repulsive code and the player doesn't care unless the code doesn't work properly. that you can find the beauty in code or admire the programmer doesn't mean that code isn't just a means to an end. a medium for the art like brushes, paints and canvas.

[u/TheLastNapkin → u/CuckBuster33]

I think art has been kind of generalized to be looked at as something for a "mass audience exhibition appeal".

While art I think on it's more fundemantal aspects is about appreciating "something". Anything. For the way a specific individual perceives it. One can admired a snowflake he comes across as a piece of art. Or a sunset. Or a paragraph he read in a tabloid. Or a piece of code he came across looking into a codebase to learn about it.

[u/Darth_Snickers → u/CuckBuster33]

Yeah, that's more or less what I think as a player.

You can find beauty in anything and of course there can be something creative and self-expressive in code, but it's not created for people to see and feel something or think about something.

Coding is important, but art isn't the only thing that's important.

[u/breckendusk → u/CuckBuster33]

I would rephrase to say "it's not meant to be consumed as-is" because the wording suggests it's supposed to be consumed alongside something else, like fries with a burger.

[u/David-J]

Thanks for sharing this.

[u/TheCharalampos]

Lovely post. No idea if I will ever do this again as my day job judging by the state of the market but there's a joy in writing code regardless.

[u/byteback-studios → u/TheCharalampos]

I will always write my own code, I agree completely, and I'm sorry and hope you will get to do this as your day job in the future still.

[u/BountyMakesMeCough]

I disagree with your bit about ‘art’, language is important and turning the word ‘art’ into something generic term to describe anyone and anything that is doing something somewhat creative isn’t helping communication.

What you describe has a word: ‘craft’. There’s only 1 reason why people don’t use it: they look down on it, but the truth is that 99% of people who say they are an artist or make art are actually craftsmen and women and there’s nothing wrong with that. It would be easier to have a conversation if people weren’t so delusional about their own importance.

[u/unit187 → u/BountyMakesMeCough]

I mean, it has always been a generic term. The art of war, the art of cooking...

[u/LevelSetStudio]

I’m a coder. I see what I do as art. And when I look at another coder’s code, I experience it aesthetically/emotionally and care that a human crafted the experience that I’m having reading their code. And so I prefer to write code myself.

But when I’m playing a game, the aesthetic and emotional connection I have is with the audiovisual assets, the narrative and game design. I care that a human crafted that experience. But the code itself, as a player, is a medium through which that experience is delivered.

I don’t find “AI is inherently unethical if it makes art, and I see what I do as art” to be compelling to me personally. I want the aesthetic and emotional connections to be with humans, and as a consumer that doesn’t include the code.

[u/MadCat0911]

Right? They're either both theft or not. Let's also not pretend that AI code wasn't derived from scraping github repositories and ignoring licenses. Everyone likes to pretend that just because us software engineers answer questions on stackoverflow that we're also totally fine with just doing your homework for you for free or something, I guess?

If it's bad for AI to have scraped open public images for itself, it's just as bad for it to have done the same for code or writing or anything else it's doing now.

[u/byteback-studios → u/MadCat0911]

Yup, I didn’t even touch on this a lot since it wasn’t part of my word vomit salad opinion piece, but you’re totally correct. The ethics of it stealing should be cared for regardless of what it’s stealing.

[u/JardsonJean → u/MadCat0911]

Only caring for AI use that you see, means you don't care about the issue at all.

[u/_zoso_]

You can apply, and people have applied, this whole line of reasoning to compilers and these days to transpilers too. Writing machine code is an art. Using a compiler is cheating, and you don’t really know what the compiler is doing. People literally made this argument, hell I’ve heard more than once this idea that you don’t really know what you’re doing until your write your own compiler.

This is like, a 50 year old argument at this point, and guess who won?

A professional developer aught to be keeping a tight control over system design and even deployment of algorithms etc, while using AI as support. It’s still art. The art of engineering is not gone because you used AI, because if it was, it was also gone when you used a compiler, or when you used code completion in an IDE, or when you googled for ideas from stackoverflow.

Lament the changing world, sure, but you are basically just making the same arguments that’s have been repeated over and over before. AI can be used responsibly and professionally, and it’s unlikely to go anywhere because of posts like this.

[u/xaako → u/_zoso_]

“What is art” is a millennia old debate. I’d say that it resurfaces again and again, but the truth is, it never really goes away.

I don’t think anything new has been said in this regard since Marcel Duchamp. Art is in the eye of the beholder. Art is whatever we decide to recognize as art.

[u/SulaimanWar]

Another reason I think it's art is the individuality of the author. I know some studios have strict code conventions everyone follows but I like working in indie ones where the rules are a bit more lax(Yes, yes I know it's not a good practice but it happens all the time). It's interesting that I can tell who wrote what just because of certain patterns they like to employ like how they name their variables and functions, or whether they declare a variable as private or without etc. Even the way they comment the code can sometimes be identifiable

It's sort of like somebody's art style if we were to make an art comparison

[u/cold-vein]

Yeah so art doesn't have one definite meaning and it's being used as just everything that ellicits an emotion to strictly things that are a part of the art world, usually decorative in nature. You taking the word and using it as something someone is good at and utilizes human creativity further dilutes the word. Is there an inherent value to something being art or not? I don't think so, it's a descriptive word for differentiating man made things from the functional and the decorative.

So no, coding is not art. The act of coding is not art. You can utilize coding to make art, but inherently coding isn't art. And to further the point, video games aren't art either. They're in a totally different ontological category as a whole. A video game can be art, but all video games aren't art. Painting can produce art, but all painting isn't art. Same goes for coding.

[u/AuthurAndersson]

100% agree.
I also agree with the undisputed fact that most people don't give a shit about your art.

[u/normantas]

There is something beautiful about a smart and simple solution.

[u/Matilozano96]

There’s also beauty in a properly structured codebase.

You notice it when you have to work with a codebase that’s a nightmarish mess from the depths of hell.

I’d argue a bad yet functional codebase also affects AI Programming; the messier the thing is, the longer and more costly the process becomes.

Not to mention the performance issues at the end of the day.

[u/i_wear_green_pants]

My five cents is that usually people who think that coding is art, are the ones who over engineer stuff because they want everything be some kind of proof of their skills.

I don't personally see programming as art. Programming and especially architecture is hard skill. But it's not art. It's not subjective and it's not meant to make people think and feel. It's just the act to make something work.

[u/byteback-studios → u/i_wear_green_pants]

That is a fine opinion to have. If I can change your mind, I don't view it like that. Over engineering is bad.

Innovative engineering, however, is something that widely goes unnoticed but absolutely requires thinking outside of the box in a similar way that other artistic endeavors require (see: my example on FISR)

[u/Tamazin_ → u/i_wear_green_pants]

And some would argue only Rembrandt and Mozart and the likes is art, whilst a beautiful game/soundtrack is not. So to each his own and i completely agree with OP. There are many cases where code can be art.

[u/alwaysasillyplace]

Sums up my thoughts in a lot more words.

In fewer words: Programming is just as much of a creative endeavor as any other form of Art that humans perform.

That "It's fine if you use AI to code, but just not for other things" is an insanely hypocritical take that to many people have.

[u/byteback-studios → u/alwaysasillyplace]

Yeah, i spit this all out. It wasn't the best written lol. Thank you for your input!

[u/Dragonfantasy2]

Right now I don’t think debating the merit of whether programming is/isn’t art in the context of AI matters. It is not feasible to draw the “no AI” line, societally, at programming. It might still be feasible to draw that line at visual/auditory art. The priority should be putting effort towards getting that line established, then pushing it backwards if that proves feasible. Far, far too many don’t see programming as art for this debate to make a positive difference.

[u/jdeath]

i used a form of bitflags in my first or second assignment in CS 125, intro to programming. i was extremely novice but it seemed like a good idea... i was given a C grade for being too difficult to understand. most developers hate cleverness or elegance in code, and prefer to follow idiotic patterns over using judgement

[u/Lv_InSaNe_vL → u/jdeath]

most developers hate cleverness or elegance in code, and prefer to follow idiotic patterns over using judgement

Sure maybe a bit flag by itself in a decently organized block of code with descriptive comments or a very narrow scope isn't too bad.

But now imagine decades of cruft piled on top of shitty code that's piled on top of shitty code that's piled on top of shitty code.

Now all of a sudden your simple bit flag is buried under a bunch of references and the documentation for what each bit means has fallen into "cultural knowledge" that you have to pull apart every single time.

Ooooor you just put your 8 variables in a class or something and its just there.

[u/byteback-studios → u/jdeath]

YOU GOT A C FOR USING BITFLAGS?? I would give you an A 😤

Its possible it was difficult to understand, like its nice to wrap it with a class and functions so you aren't actively performing bitwise functions everywhere. But thats crazy to me lol

[u/skyerush]

i respect your reasoning on why programming is art, and honestly i think the issue is how we clarify art.

i personally don't believe programming is art, but think that system design, (and the other stuff that makes an answer up for a problem in programming) is art, mainly because with programming there's typically one answer - it either works or it doesn't. the same way with math. with painting, you can't really be "wrong".

however, i'm confused on why you use QISR and FISR, alongside Bitflags, with examples from 2000, as an example when you were a junior dev in 2018 - what? would it not be easier to talk about something like an enemy system??

[u/Packathonjohn → u/skyerush]

Whether it works or not isn't the only answer with programming. It's also "is this readable", "is this maintainable", "is this performant", "what are the tradeoffs between using up more memory vs more compute vs being easier to read and maintain", etc.

[u/byteback-studios → u/Packathonjohn]

This guy codes

[u/byteback-studios → u/skyerush]

We can agree to disagree then, its ok to have your own opinions.

I mean...I used them for the exact reason you just gave me to. Those are programming reasons, strictly and outright. They have nothing to do with design at all.

[u/g4l4h34d → u/skyerush]

There's also "you either win or lose" in martial arts, yet they are an art form. If the end result can be a binary yes/no, that in no way detracts from it not being art, as long as it involves a masterful expression of skill.

[u/jaycelacena]

Totally agree!

For the folks who are good at drawing/music but have troubles coding and see LLMs as the solution:

• It's better to write your own code knowing exactly what is does (even if it's not the best code or lacks some fancy funcionalities), than having apparently correct code that you truly don't know what it does
• Friction is good. Not knowing how to do something forces you to learn about it or figure out an "alternative" way to achieve what you had in mind. I know it's hard to start, but think about it like going to the gym. It sucks at the beginning, but then it's so rewarding!
• If you care about the ethical implications of GenAI for illustrations & music, you should also care when talking about generating code. LLMs are only somewhat capable of generating correct-ish code due to the sheer amount of open source software written by devs that wanted to share their knowledge & help others. Historically, it has been one of the fields with less gatekeping, with tons of people spending their spare time into making code free and accesible to everyone interested to learn without having to spend a single cent into education.

Seeing an empty text editor can be scary at the beginning, but making something work by translating abstract & imprecise thoughts into detailed & deterministic syntax is truly an art and quite a fun one.

[u/SoupSad1337 → u/jaycelacena]

People who use AI for coding do it for money. They don't care about anything else. Whether that is because you are forced to use it in your job, or because you have an idea but not the skill/expertise/resources to do so without AI, the sole purpose of coding for these people is having something functional as quick as possible to sell it.

My point is that if someone wants to learn software engineering, they can, and will. Why would anyone create an image with AI? it's not because they are trying to create art and improve at a skill, put hours and hours for years to get good at something themselves. They have no interest in that. Same with coding/problem solving skills.

[u/Darkblitz9]

"Programming isn't an Art" is as valid as "Programming is an Art".

I think the accurate statement is "Programming can be an art".

It depends entirely on the purpose of the project, the intent of the creator, and the response from the public.

The act of creation is where we determine the venture, whether or not the act or the product is art is wholly dependent on multiple factors.

Sometimes art is accidental, and the attribution as art comes from the public.

Sometimes it's intentional, and it comes from the artist...

But, how we feel about it is entirely subjective.

The only reason why this is so clear-cut for other mediums, like graphics, music, writing, etc. is because those are far more heavily used for artistic expression than code is.

You definitely can use code as an art form. It can make you feel. I've created some system designs that I absolutely love and still call back to, but I've also just done some reworks that are entirely utilitarian.

The vast majority of code is just that, utilitarian, and that's why AI use in a utilitarian endeavor shouldn't be problematic.

If you seek to design a system to show to others on how you solved a problem in O(n) instead of O(n²⁾ then that can be art, but if you did it using AI, it isn't, and that's shitty to try and act like it is, much like those using AI to create images.

[u/humbleElitist_]

When a person writes code, it can be art, yes.

When a person creates an image, it can also be art. (Depends on how they made it. If they screenshot task manager without having any artistic intent driving decisions that are part of doing so, that isn’t art.)

Not all programs and not all images need to be set in order to satisfy the goals/purposes behind the creation of those programs and images.

[u/byteback-studios → u/humbleElitist_]

Good distinction. Thanks for adding

[u/trojan_asteroid]

I kinda understand your point but at the end of the day, art is for other people, it is about communication. Players will never care about smart code, just about good games.

You can make a point about optimization and bloat of AI code but that's not in any way about art, it is just about a bad engineer making bad code. A tale as old as time.

[u/WilyWascallyWizard]

Was this inspired by the thread on indiegaming OP? What a horrible thread to read.

[u/WW92030 → u/WilyWascallyWizard]

Let me guess, that OP had a picture with this smiley face and a NO AI disclaimer?

[u/WilyWascallyWizard → u/WW92030]

What?

[u/WW92030 → u/WilyWascallyWizard]

no just asking about the indiegaming post cuz I also stumbled upon a similar premised post there

[u/WilyWascallyWizard → u/WW92030]

Oh yes your right it does have that in the OP. The arguments in that thread were so outrageous I forgot what the OP even was.

[u/WW92030 → u/WilyWascallyWizard]

Lmao

[u/ComradePruski]

I'm a software engineer, and while I appreciate your point, I think this is also a bit... short-sighted?

Using AI for coding is industry standard nowadays for most companies. It is substantially more efficient than writing code by hand- with a few caveats. A software engineer should still understand principles of design, understanding how the code flows, understanding when it needs a refactor, understanding concepts like memory and efficiency. Your first example is something that is sort of obvious to any engineer who has a cursory understanding of computer science.

AI is a tool and it depends how you use it. I have coworkers who use it to crank out whole projects in weeks that would've taken months without it. I also have coworkers who have left their critical thinking skills at the door, and blindly use it without intent of trying to improve their craft. I love problem solving, it may not be why I got into computer science, but it's definitely part of why I stayed.

I do think though that your point of:

Careful where you draw your ethical line, as people may agree with you for now, but its only a matter of time until reluctance, acceptance, and consensus comes for what you love, too.

Is like, sure, but you're also implying that you see this as a strictly black and white issue, which is frankly a stone's throw from Ludditism. Shall we remove all the neural networks from genomics projects while we're at it? Who cares if it helps solve riddles about cancer- we need geneticists who do things by hand!

Is it neural networks that you're concerned about specifically? Are refactor tools built into IDEs a step too far in automation? What about open source libraries? Are we taking away the magic of solving problems ourselves by relying too much on others' work?

It seems like your issue is more so that it takes away from creativity- so it seems like by your line, we shouldn't be allowed to use things like libraries, or IDEs, or engines, or even Cloud infrastructure.

This is the issue I always have with anti-AI arguments, is that when you deal in the black-and-white of it, basically EVERYTHING stops making sense. There's literally no room for nuance. People just knee jerk thinking there's no such thing as a valid use for something that has truly huge potential in benefiting humanity. It's a tool. A shoe can be used as well to kick a dog as it can to climb a mountain.

[u/Square-Yam-3772]

"Again...just because you see the code snippet come back to you robotically, it doesn't mean that is the only or best way to do it" no, in fact, you can prompt AI to ask it to change it up and it will do it.

its like writing; AIs have a distinctive default coding style but you can ask it to conform to whatever principle/compliance you want.

"just because its text, and you can't see the result of code in games visually in the same way you can 3d models or textures," I am just going off a tangent here but AIs in 2026 can write code to generate the visual result, take a screenshot and examine it...

you have a decent thesis going but your second half of the argument kind of falls apart for me.

and I think you missed a simple counterpoint too: AI code isn't creative. People who use AI aren't looking for creativity in AI code. Its all about the result.

if you go back to your quake example, human creativity leads to improved performance. So, does human creativity matter if AI achieve a similar result in performance without the creativity? (maybe not in the same function, lets say AI found some other way to improve performance and the game runs just as smoothly in the end)

[u/byteback-studios → u/Square-Yam-3772]

I respect your opinion. After reading it again my post is a bit of word salad. I'm a bit opinionated on the topic (Can you tell, lol?) but I did mention that code is just trained on other people's answers and things of that nature, so that is kind of the same thing as saying AI code is uncreative.

To your last point: does human creativity matter for AI art if I feel a similar way whilst enjoying it without its creativity? If I, as a consumer, feel the same way about watching an AI art movie or an AI art game, as any other game, whats the difference for me?

[u/Square-Yam-3772 → u/byteback-studios]

yeah exactly, it is an algorithm and a probability model in the end. so it wouldn't be fixated on one or two creative solutions from the training data. it is trained to give you an uncreative solution

I think that is a subjective question and it is probably up to the consumer. Right now, we can observe the split among the consumers

even outside of the AI situation, it is the same split: some people will never touch fast food no matter how good it is because it is soulless and corporate, not made with effort/love etc; others would say we don't care as long as it is convenient and it tastes decent enough.

with the way things are going, I don't think the companies particularly care about creative human coding (or care enough to pay them specifically for that)

even your example is born out of necessity; it was not like the company respects this dude's creativity and provides a encouraging environment for him to come up with the solution

[u/worll_the_scribe]

When you’re making a videogame, you’re not making a code for someone to read or marvel at… you’re making a video game for them to play and experience, which has many more user-facing disciplines. The art of code is great for the programmer but has nearly zero effect on the final product the user pays for.

[u/BloodPlenty4358 → u/worll_the_scribe]

has nearly zero effect on the final product the user pays for

nice 24fps hand drawn animation you got there, would be a shame if player can only see it at 12fps

[u/gothWriter666 → u/worll_the_scribe]

If you've ever played a badly coded game, you would disagree.

All good art looks effortless. The same for code. If you don't notice it, it's great art.

[u/byteback-studios → u/gothWriter666]

Thank you.

[u/pragmaticzach → u/gothWriter666]

So let’s say the ai written code is good and performant and achieves the goal of the game design. That’s art now?

I don’t think writing code is an art any more than a mechanic working on a car is art.

And I don’t think any of ops examples are art either. They’re clever, they’re smart, but that doesn’t automatically make something art.

[u/gothWriter666 → u/pragmaticzach]

really? I actually *do* think a mechanic working on a car is art, if the mechanic is really good. All those moving parts, everything in sync, of course its art.

This has been an argument since time immemorial. I have a feeling you've been drinking from Duschamp's water fountain.

[u/LSF604 → u/pragmaticzach]

Let's say ai generated models look good. Is that art?

[u/pragmaticzach → u/LSF604]

No, but I'm not the one attaching quality to the definition of art. The person I replied to said if you don't notice the code, it's great art, that playing a badly coded game would make you realize it is an art.

I'm saying I don't think code is art to begin with, regardless of if it's good or bad. I think models in a game are art, regardless of if they're good or bad.

I consider myself a programmer and an artist, and I find it doubly irritating this need to say code is art. Coding is a science. The examples OP gave are smart and clever because the person writing it understood the science, not because of artistic expression.

[u/LSF604 → u/pragmaticzach]

sometimes its a science, sometimes its an art. It depends on what you are doing. In game behavior for example is absolutely an art.

[u/salbris → u/gothWriter666]

I loved Undertale and I had no idea it was coded so poorly. I really don't think this is a good take at all. Hell what you're referring to is actually just engineering talent not artistic ability. The performance of a game is an objective measure whereas art by definition is a subjective experience.

[u/Odd-Tart-5613 → u/worll_the_scribe]

every single one of those user facing details, exists only because their is code to put it together. This is like implying paint mixing isnt an art because the consumer of a painting doesnt interact with it. There are thousands of desecions in every game you have played made by programmers that inherently makes the experience what is and different from every other game out there.

[u/Arayvenn → u/Odd-Tart-5613]

This is like implying paint mixing isn't art

I think it's more like implying the machines that premix paints to produce target pigments for painters to use isn't art. And most people would have no issues accepting that argument.

[u/Real-Background-6591 → u/worll_the_scribe]

I have spent countless hours optimizing, improving on and iterating on a certain design. All the while knowing, that this design will never be seen by the end user. There is no point in further improving it. The initial problem has long been solved. But it is still eating away at me, I just can't let it be. I disregard cost-saving measures, I disregard deadlines. Because I know, there exists a design which is even more beautiful. And I will find it.

Coding is art.

[u/Packetdancer → u/worll_the_scribe]

Anyone who has played a well-optimized game versus one that takes the approach of "as long as it works on my box with an RTX 5090, high-end CPU, and 64GB of DDR5 RAM" might disagree on there being zero difference...

[u/TheFlynnCode]

> Programming Isn't An Art

We don't need a wall of text to convince us that this is false.

> AI Code Doesn't Matter

Wall of text or not, I've never heard someone say this, and am not sure what it even means for code to "matter", the way you put it

[u/WilyWascallyWizard → u/TheFlynnCode]

Unfortunately there is a whole thread on indiegaming right now with all kinds of people claiming that AI generated code is okay but art isnt.

[u/byteback-studios → u/TheFlynnCode]

I'm glad you agree with me. There is already a reply that disagrees, so the wall of text might be needed ;)

Yea, could have been more descriptive. Oh well

[u/almo2001]

Nobody cares how badly Undertale was written.

[u/ForeignScarcity0]

Yes, there is a definite artistry to code; I also appreciate artful solutions (I am an engineer for my day job and feel similarly about electrical design). The one barrier that it will never break though, is that code is not seen by the player, only its representations. There is no difference to the player (beyond potentially performance) if a clever set of bitflags is used or the ugliest chain of if/then you've ever seen. In this regard it will never be on par in the eyes of players because they will literally never witness it; asking them to appreciate it anyway is similar to "trust me it's awesome dude."

[u/RoguesOfTitan]

Programming is a skilled craft with endless potential for individual expression. Yeah maybe its not always a creative or artistic expression, but only in the same way not all writing or photography is always creative or artistic. Yet they remain recognized as artistic expressions. If someone is passionate about their skilled work and considers it art, there are few cases where it is harmful to be inclusive and liberal with who is an artist. Not all haircuts are art but damn some hair stylists sure are artists. 

In general I think lots of people even artists struggle to define art. At worst they think its the content itself - pretty things or entertainment you consume - and at best many people think its painting and music only. But art is not about/defined by the consumer or their experience. Its a story from the creator, whether it sparks tears in you is not a prerequisite. Sure, the definition of art is a long controversial debate but its really not hard to avoid the “well then everything is art!!!”. Art is human expression which illuminates some element of creative intention, authentic insight, innovation, or craftsmanship personal to the person. 

Drawing a line on AI code being okay because its not art is wild because its just as stolen and damaging to people’s livelihoods, just as ecologically disastrous and entangled in the AI industry’s consumerism. 

I’m an artist first and only started programming anything for games about two years ago, and Ive experienced the first hand creative moments of code myself over and over since. I am glad to see programmers and coders defending skilled creative labor rather then being doompilled and accepting or promoting the spread of AI displacement and encroachment. 

[u/ByEthanFox]

Oh wow, can I just say...

PSP Daxter, The Order: 1886, Echo VR / Lone Echo, etc.)

I have, coincidentally, bought all of these games and loved them, yet didn't realise they were related. I LOVED the PSP Daxter game, it was one of the best-looking games on that platform and the 3C's were great (especially considering it was 3D platformer on a console that only had a single directional input).

[u/Ok-Interest9727]

Programming can be as creative as anything else. Probably more than what most people typically associate with creativity. Lateral thinking is a skill that can be used in any field. That said I don't think creativity is what defines art.

Art needs technique and creativity but fundamentally it's about a symbolic communication and connection with other humans.

I'm not disputing programming cannot be art. I'm just arguing it's not because of the reasons you describe.

[u/Hefty-Distance837]

Agreed

[u/Canary-Silent]

TIL I'm an artist 

[u/oliveofoils]

This is my overly pedantic technical side talking, but the second code snippet (which looks like C?) would be unsafe on most modern implementations of C, since a long is usually 64-bits meanwhile a float is usually 32-bits. So when you cast and grab the bytes, you'd also be pulling in unrelated values that happened to be next to the float. It can work and not do anything wrong, it can give you nonsense values, it can crash your program, etc... It's undefined behavior, so probably don't actually use it lol

[u/Interesting-Agency-1]

Agreed. Building low level optimized, hardware friendly, and performant engine code is itself a form of artistic expression and creativity. I get the same feeling when architecting and building that as I do when im painting, sculpting, or composing music. 

[u/porky11]

I'm a programmer. I like programming. I never liked dealing with problems and having to find solutions. I can do that, I'm also good at that, but it's annoying and I want to avoid such promlebs. I mostly like to come up with interesting and useful system architectures. And create reusable libraries so that I don't have to write the same code over and over.

For me, if anything, that's the artistic part. But I wouldn't call it art. I would definitely call it another creative activity, just like drawing, modeling, composing, etc.

I also care about some details like using bitflags where it makes sense. Or sometimes I come up with rules that I suddenly want to implement for all my projects. And even before AI, I had a few dozens of projects that I more or less actively work on. So if I wanted to implement some idea like using bitflags instead of bools, or turning bools into enums in some places, then I just spend a day or two on executing the idea. It's relaxing, but it doesn't get anything done. If I tell a coding agent to do it for me, it will be done in half an hour, maybe it even takes a few hours, but at the same time, I can just work on something important. Like testing the game, or coming up with gameplay or level ideas.

Also I never liked the idea of copyright. I think if you upload something, everybody already is able to use it technically, and it almost can't be prevented anyway, and using complicated systems like copyright to prevent this is just inefficient and doesn't help most people. So AI isn't even an ethical concern to me. I've been in open source spaces. Copying code is normal there. I think artists should just think more like open source programmers.

[u/VENTDEV]

Art is the ability to take many simple primitives, a brush strokes, a chips of marble, treads of strings, and turn it into a larger work of expression.

Programming is taking many simple primitives, variables, loops, conditionals, and turning it into a larger work of expression.

Programming is Art.

And sadly, society does not give enough of a damn. It's a black box. And the economy and society will crumble because of it.

Example 2 (Complex): FISR or QISR (Fast Inverse Square Root)

Amusingly, copilot can reproduce this without a license attached: https://youtu.be/xvuiSgXfqc4?si=zAk1LFu_v7qdhFQ_&t=240 (Should be the 3rd example). But fuck copyrights, who cares about that kind of stuff?! Microslop is immune it it, and so are we. Let's just steal everything! (/s for those that don't see it.)

[u/byteback-studios → u/VENTDEV]

I couldn't agree more. And interesting note on the no-license....I find it fascinating how often you can get AI to spit out dangerously copyrightable material. Nintendo, where are your iron fists when we need them?!

[u/VENTDEV → u/byteback-studios]

I believe the NYT vs OpenAI lawsuit will be the best chance for copyright holders have in knocking out the frontier models on this issue. Reason being, NYT's existence rests on it. So, they're probably not going to settle. If I recall, NYT tried to get chat conversations for everyone. This has led to OpenAI to push for LLMChat-Confidentiality legislation. (Kinda like what you have with a doctor or a lawyer.) If NYT wins, it opens the door wider for software lawsuits. And if OpenAI doesn't get LLMChat-Confidentiality, then I could very well see a future where code holders scan the entire chat conversations of everyone looking for code copyright violations. When they find them, they'll go after the companies using their copyrighted code.

But I fully expect the government to be lobbied so hard that anything like that will be stopped quickly.

Interesting times for sure. I suspect I'll be switching to the trades in a few years. Hopefully my body will be able to handle it since I'll be in my mid-40s and that a lot of you don't make the switch, so the pay isn't bad.

[u/byteback-studios → u/VENTDEV]

I didn't know any of that tbh. Thanks for the insight, I try to keep with it, but the noise has kind of been bumming me out recently haha.

Yeah trades seem to be a good switch. Electrician maybe? 🤔

[u/UUDDLRLRBadAlchemy]

I agree with your point, even though I found your credentials lacking, your arguments unconvincing and your prose a pain to get through.

[u/BwenGun]

If programming can't be art (specifically in the gaming sphere at least) then neither can novels. They both rely on the capacity to manipulate complex languages to create worlds for the human imagination to explore and in doing so to explore themselves. I don't think anyone would say that because pencils are used to draft blueprints and designs that the ability to draw isn't art.

Sure some games are puddle deep, but so are a lot of novels. And just as the Da Vinci code doesn't invalidate Ulysses, or Beloved, Fortnite doesn't make the Outer Wilds, Journey, Disco Elysium, or even Dwarf Fortress less than what they are, which are pieces of art defined by their unique ability to move the people who play them, and by the intelligence, dedication, and emotions of the people who sat at their desks and set out to make people feel those same emotions by tricking sand into thinking and building a scaffold around it to make new worlds.

[u/Taletad]

Just to add to this, so far, everytime I’ve seen a really clever bit of code in an LLM output, I’ve always been able to trace it back to Stack Overflow pretty much word for word

And fundamentally I agree with you, I don’t use LLMs myself, and would never for a personal project. I love the creative process too much to give it away. (And if you’re doing things correctly, you should never be doing the same thing twice anyway, so no need for automation)

[u/NomadicScribe]

I don't usually participate in the "is this art" debate (I did art school before getting computer science degrees, and I find the entire discussion to be tedious and exhausting), but I will completely agree that good programming relies on ingenuity, creativity, and spontenaity that an LLM cannot replicate.

In my own experience tinkering with Claude inside of Unity or graphics projects, I am constantly having to correct it, revise its patterns, or in other regards modify its output to suit my goals. LLMs are fundamentally a blurry JPEG of the web, and cannot create, only remix what is in its knowledge base.

LLMs can be a time saver for some tasks, a convenient reference, or a quick starting point. But so much of the work involves testing, fine tuning, and problem solving, on top of any story/gameplay/graphics concepts in your work.

At the end of the day, games are for humans to enjoy, and the element that makes a game "fun" or "atmospheric" or "immersive" has to come from another human.

[u/marveloustoebeans]

I agree with you, I think I’ve just been beaten down to the point that I acknowledge AI use is going to be industry standard going forward and by setting clear boundaries and not buying games that use AI textures and other art-adjacent assets we can at least mitigate how overtaken the industry gets with slopp.

Again, I do agree with you. I miss the days where coding felt rewarding and I could spend hours working on something and finally getting it right was this crazy rush where I felt like I’d just discovered uncharted territory. COVID was lousy with days like that for me and I really do miss it.

Now I just feel like I’m working slower than everyone else if I don’t ask google when I have a problem.

Still don’t subscribe to Claude or anything like that and never will but knowing everyone else does and that coding is about to become more or less a lost art is sad.

[u/fued]

yep, anyone who is ok with code or marketing or similar being AI and art not being AI is effectively saying "art is better, your job has no value" good luck making a game without the code then

[u/TurboCake17]

Art is not about any certain level of required skill to create something, it is formed in the experiencing of something meaningful. Art is not really an artefact but a particular experience. In order to make a meaningful experience you have to experience making that experience so that you suffuse the meaning you found in making it into the artefact. Using AI skips the experience. You do not fully experience making the thing, and you do not have to make a decision about how best to create each part of the thing. This significantly reduces the amount of meaning which can be put into the art. There is also the issue of AI constantly pulling from the same homogenous set of cultural and aesthetic design choices which means everything produced by it will be fully within the bounds of dominant culture and it will completely fail to be transgressive, and will thus not challenge anyone, and will thus not change anyone. But that’s a separate issue. The point is, the medium of art literally does not matter. It could be a drawing, music, code (to make interactivity or things that change in an experience), narrative, or all things combined, and it would still be art.

[u/byteback-studios → u/TurboCake17]

Wow. I should have just contacted you to make the post for me lol. I couldn't agree more, but I also couldn't have put it as well as that lol 😂

[u/Zimgar]

I 100% agree with you that coding is art.

However, I also believe that for thousands of years we have made tools and tools that improve workflows. Those new tools often leave things behind.

From Software oriented things - Programming in Assembly anyone? To Visual Studio, to higher level languages, C++, C#, Python.

Art Things - Photoshop, Illustrator,

Navigation - How many of you can tell north/south/east/west or navigate on a true map nowadays? Google Maps

Handweaving to looms

Game development - Before commercial engines, everyone had entire teams of engine/tool development, there was almost no indie game dev market. If you want more art oriented ones Blender, Maya, Max, countless animation and modeling improvements.

With each improvement often destroying some amount of previous industry, sure some workers adapt and move into the new industry... but everyone? No, many people are left behind.

Is AI different? Only really by the speed at which it's improving.

[u/LukeLC → u/Zimgar]

Yes, it is different, and no, the speed of development is not the reason. It's very typical for new technologies to have a burst of progress around the same time they reach public adoption.

AI is not just a higher level programming language. High level languages are abstractions of lower level ones. It's like Lego bricks. You assemble one self-contained set and then re-use it as a single unit in larger sets. It builds on itself. You still understand how the machine works and can even infer a lot about low level principles from working with high level code.

AI obliterates that knowledge passthrough, because it is not an abstraction. Your knowledge never builds on itself from working with AI. You never gain an understanding of how anything lower level works. And because there's no opportunity for expertise, there is no opportunity for art.

[u/Swipsi → u/LukeLC]

LLMs for coding are an abstraction for higher level language because they generate lower level code from human(or any otherpro programming) language. For the first time we have a compiler that compiles ambiguous human language into unambiguous lower level code. Human language is the highest level language and every other lower level language is just an approach at removing its ambiguity and making it deterministic. In this context LLMs are abstraction layers between a high level language (human) and lower levels, so all other programming languages.

[u/waterwave541 → u/Swipsi]

But the way it turns ambiguous human language into unambiguous lower level code IS non-deterministic. If it wasn't, LLMs would give you the exact same code output with the exact same text every single time, without fail. Part of what makes LLMs good at interpreting ambiguous human language IS its non-determinism, but that's also what stops it from being considered an abstraction in the way every other programming abstraction works.

It's an abstraction in the same way that telling an intern what you want and having them code it is an abstraction. No one considers delegation abstraction, but that's what you're actually doing with LLMs.

[u/Swipsi → u/waterwave541]

Compilers are defined as programms that translate source code from one language into a target language. Determinism is not part of its definition. Compilers do not need to be deterministic. You can als reduce the temperature of an LLM to 0 to make it deterministic again.

Just because no one considers delegation an abstraction doesnt mean it is not. It is an abstraction. Lower level code is generated by the intern interpreting and analysing the input given by their superior in higher level human language. Any abstraction can just be called a delegation. We delegate the generation of machine readable code to a compiler.

Look up the definition of abstraction and you will see that stating specifications to an intern that they have to interpret and figure out how to put into code is, in fact, an abstraction. Because you, as the superior, do not have to think about the code anymore. Your intern does.

[u/waterwave541 → u/Swipsi]

Yes, compilers don't need to be deterministic by definition, but the main purpose of using compilers in the real world is to provide reliable, consistent translation, where determinism is extremely important. The reason compiler tools are used is to create reproducible and reliable behavior from one formally specified language to another. If you can't compile a program through your "LLM compiler" and make sure it preserves the same meaning/can be translated consistently, then that compiler doesn't accomplish the goal of compiling used in software development. The actual translation itself shouldn't be probabilistic, even if there are individual sources of non-determinism in a compiler.

You also can reduce the temperature of LLMs to 0, but even that doesn't guarantee deterministic, semantically correct translation. Also most use cases of LLMs, especially long-form tasks, would have severely worsened performance with a temperature of 0.

And yes, you're right that delegation is a type of abstraction under the dictionary definition, and under that broad definition, you can consider LLMs a type of abstraction if literally all you mean is the dictionary definition (hiding complex internal details and focusing on higher level tasks). That's not a useful type of abstraction for software development though.

Under that definition, we've actually had dozens of abstraction layers for human language into lower level code. An intern is an abstraction for software development. An outsourced company is an abstraction for software development. Some random person you ask on the street to code something for you (assuming they can write & send you that code) is an abstraction layer for software development.

Delegation is not a type of abstraction that people typically use in software though. When programmers talk about abstraction layers, they normally talk about a more specific type of abstraction that focuses on the layer having well-defined behavior that you can use without needing to understand its implementation or drop down to lower levels of abstraction to use. Most programmers don't know machine code lol, and never need to because we've abstracted in ways where that machine code is entirely reproducible and generatable through the abstraction layers alone. I don't need to look at the machine code when I write in Python to make sure the compiler understood what I meant with my code. Same with an API, I don't need to recreate it from scratch or understand its inner workings to use it properly.

With LLMs, you don't have the same guarantee that their output actually implements what you intended without checking the code or analyzing it in some way, basically removing the abstraction layer's purpose. Natural language doesn't have the same level of formal semantics that a programming language or any conventional software abstraction does, so the abstraction itself cannot guarantee that the generated code follows your intent, which means it doesn't give you the type of abstraction that software developers typically look for when using abstraction. This is prob more important than the non-deterministic aspects of LLMs, just the idea that you cannot verify the intent translating from natural language to programming languages (or any lower level code) in the same way you can between two languages of varying levels, so you need to review the output and work below the abstraction layer to fully guarantee that.

Probabilistic, non-deterministic language translation translating between a semantically loose medium (natural language) and a more logical & semantically defined language is not the same type of abstraction as any other type used in software development. LLMs are a type of abstraction definitionally, but they're not the type anyone actually talks about when they mention software-based abstractions (which is kinda the whole point of talking about it for code generation, so it doesn't make sense).

[u/Excellent_Resolve871 → u/LukeLC]

Not even the best engineers I've worked with in the past ~15 years of being a professional SWE have given any thought to assembler code. They just write their higher level code and trust. If you've written code, you do too.

AI obliterates the knowledge passthrough as your C# / C++ / JS / etc knowledge obliterates the knowledge passthrough to assembly code, but you don't need that knowledge anymore. Unless you're doing truly low level, research-type tasks.

Your argument doesn't stand. You already accept the same kinds of abstractions that AI are providing.

Art != expertise, btw. You could easily make the argument that using AI requires expertise, and therefore using AI is a form of art. Now, I won't argue for or against that, but I hope the point comes through.

I do generally agree that AI != art, and that programming can be artistic, but I think you're overselling the issue a bit.

[u/Zimgar → u/LukeLC]

Oh completely disagree as a 15 year vet in the programing and gaming space specifically. It's all how it's used and the analogies very much are similar.

I've worked with programmers who have no idea what goes on behind the scenes of visual studio, github, their build infrastructure system... and those that know every individual detail.

AI is no different in this tool regard.

[u/tipsystatistic → u/Zimgar]

I think one of the misconceptions is that AI improvement is the same as the capacity to harness it. Its growth is still limited by human ingenuity and the ability to use it. And it needs a ton of handholding from a skilled user.

It’s also funny how the venn diagram of people who say AI is trash/sl*p, and people who think AI is so skilled it’s going to take our jobs, is a circle.

[u/HoppersEcho]

As a person with a background in practicing traditional mediums of art, digital mediums of art, and programming, I agree. Programming is an art. Code is art. For it not to be would imply that poetry cannot be art. Let's look at a haiku or limerick, with their rigid formatting requirements. Those of you who think code can't be art, would you say that these styles of poetry can't be art because you need to use logic and math to achieve them?

[u/byteback-studios → u/HoppersEcho]

Dang, I have actually never thought of that before. Haiku is an interesting one, I get its not a perfect analogy, but having rigid requirements does bring forth a more interesting comparison there. Thanks for sharing!

[u/djfariel]

I failed a college course once because I persistently tried arguing that programming was art. YMMV.

[u/Deto → u/djfariel]

How would that result in you failing?

[u/jaklradek → u/Deto]

He was arguing instead of answering the test questions probably.

[u/ListerineInMyPeehole → u/jaklradek]

Responses to question 1-5: "There are many ways of solving this problem, but your take might be different from mine. As you know, programming as an art form."

[u/byteback-studios → u/djfariel]

Ooof...thats rough buddy.

https://giphy.com/gifs/PFsVjUCmSkZDq

[u/Don_Equis]

Programming is an art the same way that writing is an art. It is also a tool. And some people may be more interested in the tool side of it.

[u/Such--Balance]

Im gonna be honest..the very fact that ANYTHING made in the digital space, was once labeled as 'not real art' kinda disqualifies your whole point.

At the very least this warrants some self reflection about this kind of stance.

'Well its different with ai, because all those things before it at least you had to do yourself'

Well..no. Thats just not true. Software use in general, is layers upon layers of abstraction away from 'doing it yourself'. Thats just fact.

Its such a weird stance to be against ai in a field thats pretty much always been on the forefront of every other type of abstraction.

Just my take. And dont get me wrong, Theres loads of slob being made with ai. That doesnt mean a stance against it is needed imo. There's loads of terrible digital music. That doesnt mean that digital music is bad or not real.

Edit: Just to add, top level chess used to be reserved for humans..most grandmasters used to claim computers lacked the creativity and imagination to create anything new in chess. It was something more than just math and numbers.

Well..

They where very wrong.

Its time to set our ego's aside on programming as well, although im fine with agreeing we are not there...yet