Programming Is Art

The argument starts with a split that feels almost moral: some people code to build things, and some people code because writing code is the thing itself. The author puts himself in the first group. He says his early life revolved around development, from waking up with code to sleeping with it on his mind, but what he really wanted was to make products people actually used.

That difference shaped where he worked. He says he preferred startups over large companies because he liked starting from nothing and moving toward something useful. He also wanted roles like team lead or manager, or any job that let him step away from writing every line himself. If someone else could handle the code, he was happy to move into other tasks.

Money, he says, eventually became the main reason he kept programming. Even his side projects were tied to income, not just to the pleasure of making them. But he draws a line between that mindset and the people he calls true programmers: the ones who write code regardless of payment, work on open-source projects that may never earn anything, and enjoy the challenge, the bugs, the logic, and the shape of the whole system.

That’s where his view of AI gets sharp. He says AI tools help him build projects, but they’re irrelevant to people who treat programming as art. In his telling, even a system that could work autonomously and solve problems far faster than humans would not stop those people from coding line by line. They wouldn’t be protecting a job. They’d be protecting the act of making the thing itself.