Programming Isn't Special

Programming is art, and treating it as mere functionality has enabled widespread surrender to AI-driven code generation. The core argument contrasts the strong resistance to AI in other creative fields with programmers’ relative resignation, tracing that attitude to a mystified split between “functional” work and “art.” Using John Berger’s critique of mystification, the piece reframes mundane creative labor - journalism, copywriting, UI design - as artistic practice rather than something opposite to art. Concrete software examples underline that aesthetic choices matter: the invention of Deferred is recounted as an explicitly aesthetic solution to callback tedium that influenced a lineage from MochiKit to async/await, and everyday software criticism (OS and game reviews, API design) demonstrates software’s expressive impact.

Erasing ordinary, on-the-job creative tasks with AI removes the practice and contemplation necessary to cultivate skill and make genuine innovations possible. Automating away the “boring” work deprives programmers of the small-probability opportunities that occasionally produce major breakthroughs, worsens software literacy, and detaches users from meaningful understanding of systems. The remedy is resistance: preserve mundane creative labor, apply automation to raise abstraction levels without destroying creative decision-making, and treat programming with the same defenses afforded other human arts because programming is fundamentally artistic.