Writing code is a craft.

It may not be "art", but coding and software architecture choices are expressions of taste, knowledge and talent. Watching an experienced craftsman is wonderful.

There's satisfaction and pride in coming up with a clever solution to a difficult problem. There is indeed beauty in a good algorithm and elegance in clean code.

While I never much liked doing code review, I marvel with respect for other people's talent while reading their code of a magnificent implementation, just like I can appreciate a smart dirty hack solving a problem with the digital equivalent of spit and duct tape.

I'm sad for the industry I spent decades in because this is getting lost. Using a coding assistant turns coding into full-time code review, I'm asked to read code coming from an entity that doesn't actually think. My deep desire to talk and discuss with the person who wrote this, who can explain their thoughts with me, is replaced by a subservient chatbot interface and I have to identify its hallucinations.

I understand how we got here, and I understand why some folks are excited about this, but to me, all of this is a wasteful allocation of resources into something I didn't join this industry for.

The Apollo project of my generation should not have been THIS. We should put our resources and talent into fighting climate change. And now we literally burn a giant pile of money and the planet with it to fill every nook and cranny of life with AI slop.

LLMs are destroying art: the art of code, literature, and culture.

My views on how LLMs have made me stop caring about code as an artform, articles generated with LLMs, and culture copied from an RNG

Joshua Rogers’ Scribbles (joshua.hu)

"What we’re losing with LLMs is art, which means we’re losing culture, and at the end of day, diminishing our enjoyment in the world: which is really the only point to life in the end."