# Programming Is Art (Orchid)

A short essay on orchidfiles.com from 6 September 2026, following an earlier post there titled "Developers want to write code by hand" that is not in the vault. It is autobiography first. When the author started programming, the whole day was code, the social circle was programmers, and the draw was that learning a technology let you build anything. Over time the preference turned out to be for creating products rather than writing code. He worked only at startups, wanted to become a team lead or manager, and did not care whether he wrote the code or delegated it. Code became a job, and income from projects became the point.

The other kind of person writes code regardless of income, in open source that will never pay, because they cannot help it. They enjoy designing, working out logic, fixing bugs and understanding the whole system, and they will never hand that to agents. "For me, building projects is a way to make money. For them, programming is art."

He draws two conclusions. His arguments about how AI helps him build are irrelevant to the artists, who do not need help with anything. And the claim that AI will replace programmers is illogical to them, since even autonomous AI a hundred times faster than a person would not stop them writing code line by line.

The last paragraph turns around. He does not use AI to write prose, because it produces soulless, bland text that nobody wants to read. He wants to find the wording, edit, cut paragraphs, and have new ideas arrive while writing, and says the thinking in the moment matters to him and not just the result. Writing is the art he pursues regardless of money, and he assumes people who enjoy writing code feel the same.

## Reading it

The essay settles the disagreement by treating it as a difference in motive: builders want products, artists want the process, and nobody is wrong. [[artisanal-programmer-label]], published a week later, objects to exactly this move. Once hand coding is filed as art, the argument that it produces more reliable software drops out of the conversation, and caring about results belongs to the AI side by default.

His own writing paragraph is the strongest counter-argument, and he does not notice it. He says the thinking while writing changes what gets written, which is a claim about the output, not only about enjoyment. That is the same claim many hand coders make about code, like the "typing out code is the process by which I figure out what we should even be doing" line quoted in [[agentic-coding-is-a-trap]]. [[back-to-coding-by-hand]] fits neither of his types: someone with a paying app who went back to writing code by hand so they could understand it again. Personal enjoyment is the first of the reasons in [[i-will-never-use-ai]], and [[checking-for-human-writing]] takes the opposite view of writing with LLMs, that the judgement is what makes it yours.