Post #1413637

2026-04-18 14:16 UTC

&gt; My code is not intended to evoke emotion. It does not change people think about the world. The actual *code* I write for rustc is unimportant and shitty, but the *result*... it absolutely is meant to evoke an emotion (cognition and relief) and change how people think (I try to teach them a programming language!). Even APIs that I write I try to make them so misuse is unlikely, which in turn teaches people how to use them correctly. I am not an artist, just some moron with a tool. And I won&#39;t claim some high minded goals. But there&#39;s absolutely artistry involved. It&#39;s impossible for there not to be when people are involved. A string concatenation function isn&#39;t going to be hung in the Louvre, a lot of code is functional widgets. Very rarely anyone thinks about the &quot;artistry&quot; of a screw or a nail, but one absolutely thinks about the artistry of a chair. It might be that the perspective of someone who works on an end user application is different to that of someone working on a standard library, but even in the latter I&#39;d say there&#39;s a lot to think about and innovate. It&#39;s like discounting the artistry of a wedding photographer: most of the job is mechanical and repeatable, but the person behind the shutter is doing something beyond pattern matching, even if unconsciously! They are reasoning about consequences, and problem solving on the spot.

Replies (2)

@ekuber@hachyderm.io 2026-04-18 14:25

I guess the point being made in the original (alluded) thread is that "thinking about the problem and writing the code to apply it" is fundamentally the same creative process as "thinking about the problem and writing a prompt for an LLM", and the main difference is that a lot of the final shape of a widget is the result of cascading problem solving that only happens in the process of doing. The constraints and how we interpret them changes the result. It's Schroedinger's innovation, you can't tell if you need to change things in your original thoughts until you attempt to apply them. If the problem space is constrained enough, sure, you'll end up with one of a handful of options (there's only so many ways of splitting a string) and that process or the result is not creative. But that's focusing on the screw and not the chair.

Open ##1822787
@wbftw@hachyderm.io 2026-04-18 18:44

@ekuber idk, I feel stupider after reading the original thread and don’t particularly want to take it apart. But my brain disagrees with me on that. > My code is not intended to evoke emotion. It does not change people think about the world. Yeah, no. Either we are doing “engineering” and thus care about people who use (even as a transient dependency) the “widgets” we build, or we are engaged in something else, likely at the expense of said people. Ironically, the latter will also cause said people to have “emotions” and make them think about the world, but in a less happy way. I do find it “interesting” that we now have the right way to write code, which is to tell an llm to write it (kinda like think hard and then write it down). And, yay, we are all architects now. Fuck that.

Open ##1822803