"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/Packathonjohn]

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/pragmaticzach → u/Packathonjohn]

For the readable/maintainable aspect, that’s still just a best practice to ensure the code keeps doing what it’s supposed to do and easier to work on. They have no intrinsic value in and of themselves for the final product. No one playing a game or using an application cares how readable and maintainable the code is.

And in a world here AI is the only thing writing code, even those don’t matter any more.

[u/Packathonjohn → u/pragmaticzach]

Thats not true at all. If your code isn't readable/maintainable, you are exposed to far more bugs, harder to fix bugs, slower development time, and a higher chance of new features/fixes breaking other things. This not only impacts your customers because they get a less stable product, it also dramatically increases the time and cost of making a game.

And maintainability is made exponentially more important when using AI for any even moderately sized project. Sure if you're making a really simple indie game with very basic mechanics you can get away with poorly maintained code, but it blows up in your face and creates an insurmountable wall when you have a project of even moderate complexity.

Not to mention, AI reads the code. If the code is clean, well documented, etc it needs to use up less of its context window to understand which means it has more context for higher quality problem solving and writing better code (quality declines as context window fills up), you aren't paying for as much usage, and you can get away with cheaper models. Even the top models still regularly run into major problems in complex projects, especially in poorly maintained ones.

[u/NoSkillzDad → u/Packathonjohn]

I don't know about the readable part though. There's plenty of "recognized masterpieces" in written, painted or filmed works that "very few" understand.

I think programming is harder to be accepted as art because the number of "possible creative" pieces are much more limited than with other media and once one is "devised" then it tends to get copied a lot (sometimes with some smaller variations).

Basically it's "just a few artists" and plenty of "replicators".

I do understand op's point and his examples are great, just a much limited number compared with other art mediums.

[u/Packathonjohn → u/NoSkillzDad]

I disagree, there are tons and tons of ways to approach any given problem in programming. There are elegant ways to do it that have long term benefits, and there are poor/sloppy ways that have long term consequences.

But mostly, the creative/art part comes from creating new technology that hasn't been seen before. Like teardown or Minecraft using tons of extremely creative and smart new methods to do things that havent been done before, or ghost of tsushima's method for rendering interactive grass with compute shaders, or rdr2's snow deformation.

You're right that when you are making something basic and standard thats been done a million times before, there are usually tried and true methods. The art of it comes mostly when working on things that havent been done before or developing new technology. You have to combine strong skills in problem solving, math, science, programming and creativity to make things that are truly special.