Code can be art, code can also be simply a tool to reach a goal.
If you want to create art, do it with your own two hands and your brain.
If you want to just Do The Thing, codegen it. No one cares. In before "Except your users having to use your vibeslop" FYI your Hand-Crafted Artisanal Code will still have bugs, so it's a moot point.
Heck, the very first thing the author does is links to another one of his own blog post where the above points are explicitly stated and explained, then restates at the end of the paragraph that there are no valid arguments for this one. So why keep beating this dead horse? Especially as the opener of the article.
Art was always recognizable as effort and discipline.
We talk a lot about the consumer side of this. Consumers will get tired of the creative output of AI. That it lacks soul. I agree.
But there is also the artist’s side. A craft that you dedicate decades to that’s now indistinguishable from someone who typed a couple sentences. This is a demoralizing place to be.
agree.
1) business does not care. Users do not care. they see the result.
2) you can still reason with AI about best practices and nth level of abstraction for an interface that will never be extended more than once.
do what you will. CNCs did not remove need for artisans.
> as cnc grew, machinists shrunk in headcount and wage.
Headcount, yes, wages, no.
However, you're assuming that cnc operators can't be artisans. Why?
If we allow anyone with a craft to be considered an artisans if they have a high enough skill level - and we should - I'd counter that the overall number of artisans has likely increased even if less of them now have the title of machinist.
> business does not care. Users do not care. they see the result.
Sure, but with LLMs you get a bad result with more bugs and greater fragility. People will care about that even if they don't care per se about the craft.
I agree with your thinking as well. Then, could you possibly critique my thoughts too? It seems like you and I think similarly, and I’m curious whether my logic is consistent.
I skimmed through your article, and I'll address the bolded points
> being able to understand code by reading it is different from being able to do that same modeling yourself starting from a blank screen
That is simply Domain Knowledge. In a specific context, be it a Framework or an App or a Platform or Infrastructure or whatever else, you have to understand it. Of course, if you start from zero and you build it from scratch yourself, you have pretty much the best DK you can have.
That is usually not the case though. If you have external collaborators of any kind, your DK is always challenged. I find myself often dumped into Domains from which I have to gather Knowledge to understand. And, for me personally, having to read code written by an AI, especially now that they've gotten smart enough to not make glaringly stupid errors, is MUCH better than having to read Hand Crafted Code that has been handslopped (yes, I'm going to coin that term now) to meet Deadlines. Shortcuts, hacks, you name it. Terrible codebase sins, accumulated as years, even DECADES of "we'll fix it later".
Of course it's a pain. It always has been. Back in the GPT 4 / Claude 4 days, AI generated code was atrocious, but that is not the case anymore.
The rest of the article, especially these bolded points:
> The weight shifts from the ability to produce directly to the ability to evaluate output and set direction.
> So in the AI era, productivity is increasingly limited by the speed of judgment rather than the speed of writing.
> A manager who steps away from the front line may, over time, lose the ability to perform the work they are managing.
> does being able to evaluate code mean the same thing as owning the mental model of that program?
Are SPOT ON. You can vibeslop anything at the speed of light. But if you don't have the knowledge, taste, and expertise to not lose track of your DK so that it doesn't become an unmanageable mess, it's going to bite you in the proverbial ass.
But, again, that has always been true!
How is the code that was vibeslopped by ChatGPT in 1 minute different from the Junior Dev who spent a week handslopping a new type of wheel? The only difference is quality and speed.
And you need expertise to be able to recognize when something is wrong, and keep your DK updated at scale.
I felt a sense of kinship because your thoughts are so similar to mine. These days on HN, people say AI coding is so bad, but it has its advantages too. If you look at just the code blocks, it really writes better than most people (of course, global consistency is weaker). Hearing your story, I was surprised that what drew me to your comment was how similar our thinking is.
I also think ‘domain knowledge’ is incredibly important. Whether you write code or not matters, and coding as a hobby is good, but now every company forces you to write code with AI, so you can’t avoid using it, and I find myself thinking about how to maintain my own instincts.
I feel good seeing thoughts similar to mine. I upvoted you, and have a great day.
There have certainly been growing pains, and the term "vibecoding" was forged in a long gone era (almost two years ago!!!!) where AI generated code was actually bad.
I can safely say, especially with how close to actual perfection Claude Opus 5.5 is, that it's no longer the case.
Also people generally hate change. The ethical concerns around AI are also understandable and I agree with the vast majority of them, but the vast majority of the "AI BAD" crowd are simply irrationally angry at it and completely unwilling to engage with it in any kind of good faith.
They'll come around. I'm starting to see some change in the gaming community, which was 200% against any form of AI just a little while ago, and now that they're using it to reverse engineer, decompile, mod and mesh together old games there is a lot of people starting to say "Yeah AI is bad, but...".
There is some CRAZY stuff being being worked on which are objectively good for society as a whole which would have you sound insane just last year, and it's only going to get crazier with each new model.
> There have certainly been growing pains, and the term "vibecoding" was forged in a long gone era (almost two years ago!!!!) where AI generated code was actually bad.
That era is also today. And AI bros were lying to us two years ago, telling us how good the AI was at programming then. "But AI is actually good now" is a take with zero credibility any more, because it's been delivered inaccurately so much.
I don't even think code can be art. It can be used to produce art, but it's not art itself. And the production of code can be, at most, a craft, which the output is not really art, like painting/a painting.
Hard disagree. The demoscene is entirely comprised of code that produces art, with insane tricks which are themselves art. Which sort of blurs the entire concept, as you can stretch this reasoning to kind of encompass anything, as per the pen and paper example you provided.
For example, is .kkrieger demo? Is it art? Is the game itself art or just the textures, 3d models and locations and enemies and everything else that it produces? Though only the code generates everything, like in demoscenes, so is the code art?
seems as the question is, if one considers the process of creating an artwork art itself. i guess people finding ingenious ways to create art with code can be considered some form of performance art. it still feels a bit far-fetched to me, but that's just a personal feeling, and as you've said, it's subjective anyways. interesting to think about.
i'd immediately agree for code which looks like art by looking at it, so in cases where the code really is the art. i can also imagine that there's code which looks like art and "generates" it as well, so that seems like code as an artwork.
for cases where code was written/engineered well to create an artwork with the least amount of lines, i'd consider the generated artwork to be art, and the code the result of a competitive coding challenge. again, subjective.
when comparing it to other forms of art i'm not that sure. i've mentioned performance art, which feels a bit like the exception breaking the rule. there's conceptual art as well. is the act of painting art itself? is a photographer finding the optimal place to stand to take a picture art? almost starts to sound like an artwork vs. artform discussion.
The thing about .kkreiger is that most of the size savings they got at the last minute were from extremely aggressive "dead code" elimination [1]. So, uhh, is the art really the code that was gutted by tools? Or is the art everything around the artifact?
Long since. I witnessed it myself back in my high school days, as fellow classmates routinely behaved in revolting ways towards teachers. Outright emotional abuse, sometimes even physical, often for no other reason than simple boredom.
Even back then, teachers never had a way to fight back, lest they suffer legal consequences for the slightest of retorts. Just one of my many examples: snapping back in an angry tone is completely unacceptable because, according to their parents, it causes serious emotional damage to their perfect 16 year old babies, completely glossing over the fact that the "unjustified outburst" was caused by a diary thrown in the professor's face.
Some friends of mine had the insane idea of becoming teachers themselves, and the situation has somehow deteriorated even further, as students are becoming even dumber as time goes on; I'm talking "can't read and write in high school", which I assumed was a joke when I was told. It wasn't. When I laughed, my friend just stared at me with the eyes of a soldier whose body was the sole survivor of a thousand trench battles, as she informed me that I was wildly underestimating how tragic things had gotten. I hate to be the old man yelling at the clouds, but back in my day the dumbest high school student was at the very least able to read. Apparently, nowadays you've won the lottery if you are a professor whose smartest student can actually write. This, of course, is reflected in the students' behaviour.
And now we have AI doing all the thinking, while 10 year olds on strollers glued to a tablet with TikTok have become a common sight.
I was in middle school when iPhones first came out, was saying day 1 this is a cancer. My intro to AI slop videos was sitting next to a 3yo who was watching YouTube Kids on an iPad, and it was https://www.youtube.com/shorts/goZrTf-YYjY
If someone accidentally caused damage to infrastructure or living beings while using any tool, they would be held liable to the fullest extent of the law.
AI is a tool, and it won't be long before the damage caused by its improper use affects real human beings. These were warning shots.
The most absurd part is that everyone agrees, governments and AI companies included, that the scale of the potential damage and the long-lasting effects of losing control of AI should not be underestimated. Yet, at the same time, they downplay this incident, which somehow makes their behaviour even more reckless than it already was.
It's like they're tinkering with a world-ending nuclear bomb, and it accidentally blows up a small facility. "Damn, that was close. Good thing it was just a contained blast, huh?" And then they go straight back to tinkering with it, none the wiser. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if it did already go off, and they are covering it up.
In the analogy where a “world ending nuclear bomb” “did already go off” and someone could cover it up and nobody noticed, in what sense is it a “world ending” nuclear bomb?
If they lost control of a self-replicating swarm of AI agents, coordinating themselves to hack their way into every possible system, it might have already gone off.
While the initial incident is more akin to a biological outbreak than an actual explosion, the possible consequences on the table do indeed include eventual nuclear annihilation.
We’re already in a simulation, and our bodies are in womb-like pods where our bodies are sustained and our brains are used for processing / compute, while are minds are entertained by drivel.
I have always had issues with playing high bitrate BluRay remuxes, with HDR and DTS 5.1+ audio. Granted the last time I tried JellyFin was January 2025 so it is possible this has changed.
I've been using Jellyfin for roughly 5 years, most of my library are Blu-ray remuxes (50-100 GB) and I haven't had a single one fail to play. My setup is Apple TV with Infuse connected to a LG C9 with a modern Yamaha receiver.
Transcoding is a whole can of worms I chose to avoid by playing everything directly.
Infuse is the magic ingredient that avoids the codec/transcoding issues other people sometimes experience. It supports direct play of pretty much every possible video thx to its built-in codecs. I’ve been using it for 2 years and I don’t think I had a single case of transcoding. It is paid, but worth it IMO.
This is almost certainly a you problem. Tons of people play remuxes with Jellyfin.
I would check that your client supports the requisite codecs, and has a sufficient network connection. Or alternatively check that your server has enough horsepower (GPU or CPU) to transcode.
Are you sure the client and the server are powerful enough? Do they support all required codecs? I have issues with 4k movies because my Jellyfin is served by a mac mini, and my client is an old Android tablet that doesn't support hardware decoding, but that is hardly Jellyfin's fault. Though they just updated ffmpeg to the latest version, so it might help.
It's something that's been bugging me for a while: once we reach a "good enough" small model, and qwen 3.8 27b is already getting damn close to it, does it make sense to just bake weights and everything directly into an ASIC, and use that for highly optimized inference? AFAIK only groq and cerebras are moving in that direction, and only to be providers themselves... It would be a dream to buy one for <$1k.
This is exactly what Taalas has already done, and the reason they got quickly acquired by AMD. Their chip runs Llama 3.1 8B at 17k tok/s, and even if llama 3.1 is dated, I can think of many problems I could use it for, especially at those speeds. They're certain to be working on a newer set of weights by now.
"Sean we forgive you" became a meme for a reason. The fact that to this day they keep working on the game is truly noteworthy; they could have called it quits at any point in time, especially after NMS got good enough.
Obviously it's not purely ego driven (if at all), so I wonder how the financial aspect plays into that narrative.
I suppose the fact that it sold so much throughout the years gave them enough runway to actually work on it with no worries? And I suppose that people would be skeptical of a new game launch by this studio, thus dooming them to work on NMS for eternity... we'll see how Light No Fire's launch will do.
That and I'm pretty sure they are using NMS as a backport target to test systems for Light No Fire (which is an instant buy for me, Hello Games have completely redeemed themselves in my eyes).
> so I wonder how the financial aspect plays into that narrative.
I've been wondering about this for a few years now. Do they really sell enough new copies of the game to fund development of several new expeditions a year? I suppose they must, but it's still surprising - more so as the years went on.
Honestly though, at a certain point, they could've started charging for the expeditions as DLC and I wouldn't have even complained.
I wonder if the ports play a role in getting additional updates over the years. Every year or so, NMS gets a port to a different platform, with a sales bump, and maybe part of that process includes adding just a little bit more to the base game.
at this point, i think they continue because of the goodwill it builds. as the other comment says, light no fire will be an instant buy for me because of the support they've given no mans sky over the last decade
Programming, as in manually typing the code, is a means to an end.
While I do enjoy coding, building things is what was rewarding, not actually laying down brick after brick after brick after brick.
I've done that for 10+ years. The fact that I don't have to do that anymore is a relief that cannot be overstated. I only have to check on the code that The Ideal Intern produces while I focus on what actually matters, and that is: Building The Thing.
It's all about how you use it and how careful you are with it, and the fact that today there are people IN THE FIELD that still question this baffles me.
Soon you won't be doing anything. At best you'll just be a bag of meat attached to automated processes you don't understand in order to take legal liability for it.
Literally a scapegoat, except of a different species.
That would be an interesting legal case. I would expect it to lead to negligence on the part of the employer for lack of training, etc rather than attach to the employee pressing the button.
Are employees usually liable for process-related issues? Like individual employees weren't liable for dispensing too-hot coffee but McDonalds was liable. Or how cops aren't liable in their individual capacity if it was a failure of training, etc.
For instance: give John the job of monitoring the HR AI so it isn't racist. To do that he needs to do impossible task of checking 10,000 automated resume evaluation decisions per day. No one can do that, so eventually he just approves them all.
Then if the system is determined to be super racist, you proceed to blame it on John, and fire him for being negligent and not doing his job. You put out a press release, and hire Steve into John's role. Your decisive actions show you're taking the problem seriously and the company isn't to blame.
As is so often the case SMBC has already got a comic for this. I sincerely regard Zach Weinersmith (and also separately Randall Munroe) as two of the most pertinent voices in modern philosophy.
Code is code.
Code can be art, code can also be simply a tool to reach a goal.
If you want to create art, do it with your own two hands and your brain.
If you want to just Do The Thing, codegen it. No one cares. In before "Except your users having to use your vibeslop" FYI your Hand-Crafted Artisanal Code will still have bugs, so it's a moot point.
Heck, the very first thing the author does is links to another one of his own blog post where the above points are explicitly stated and explained, then restates at the end of the paragraph that there are no valid arguments for this one. So why keep beating this dead horse? Especially as the opener of the article.
This kind of mindset baffles me.
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