im sorry, but as much as you enjoy it, coding is not an art form

october 13, 2026

last week, i rewatched breaking bad and this quote from the pilot episode crossed my mind when i was reading an argument on twitter about coding being an art form:

You’re a goddamn artist! This is… this is art, Mr. White!
Actually, it’s just basic chemistry.¹

honestly i think it sums it up quite well. are chemists artists? physicists? mathematicians? at this point what isn’t an art form?

and i get it, stuff like this gets brought up to discredit vibe coding the same way artists can discredit LLM-generated images as artworks (for good reasons), but people in the tech industry need to seriously stop being such luddite reactionaries and adapt to new tech and admit that LLMs make this field a lot more efficient!

i don’t think coding is an art form, but not because i think it doesn’t fit the so-called universally agreed-upon, all-inclusive definition of art, because that doesn’t exist and i think the word “art” is a family resemblance concept. as cliche as it is, to define is to limit, and the last thing we’d want to see in this world is constrained art.

people who hold the opinion that coding is an art form are conflating art as a skill, like cooking which is closer to a craft, with art as in fine art, and coding does not belong to the latter.

take composing for example, a composer is judged by how the music ultimately sounds, the music that resulted from their composing, and they likely weren’t even hearing the music during the process of composing. this is a very similar case to coding, but no one has ever complained that composing isn’t a separate art form, because it belongs to music, which is an already established art form. coding works the same way except the final product is never an art form, and even when it is (programming visual design, for example) the art form would be whatever the final product is, the same way the process of composing isn’t treated as an art form separate from music.

painting is an art form, brushwork and color mixing are crafts
literature is an art form, writing and grammar and syntax are crafts (an email isn’t literature)
film is an art form, film editing is a craft

something that’s always said about rules in art is that they’re made to be broken, and in a lot of cases breaking the rules resulted in breakthroughs in the medium, take the French New Wave for example. even in art forms where functionality matters, like architecture, architects have always designed buildings that weren’t even meant to be built, while some of those designs became physically possible years later. in art forms, breaking the rules is an extremely common practice. code that breaks the rules? that causes what are typically known as bugs

inherently, no piece of art can be objectively good or bad. art is inherently subjective while code is judged by a goal and specifications that it necessarily needs to satisfy. it satisfies them? it’s good. there’s no more to it, you can’t interpret it, you can’t do anything with it

photography wasn’t always accepted as a form of art because it automated what painters spent days doing, which was an incentive for painters to invent styles photography can never replicate, but nowadays no one objects to photographers being artists, while the camera itself never became an art form, your family photo isn’t a piece of art. the same thing goes for coding, it can be a medium of art (creative coding, generative art, etc.), but writing code itself isn’t art.

so please, LLMs can be incredibly useful, so stop discrediting projects just because AI was involved in the coding process