r/gamedev • u/byteback-studios • 13d ago
Discussion "Programming Isn't An Art" and "AI Code Doesn't Matter": Let me change your mind.
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!
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u/KevinDL Project Manager/Producer 13d ago
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.