Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. That’s when you think you know what you want to make. The process, which is an iterative one, is what leads you towards understanidng what you actually want to make, whether you were aware of it or not at the beginning. Design is not merely about solving problems; it’s about discovering what the right problem to solve is and then solving it. Too often we fail not because we didn’t solve a problem well but because we solved the wrong problem.
When you skip the process of creation you trade the thing you could have learned to make for the simulacrum of the thing you thought you wanted to make. Being handed a baked and glazed artefact that approximates what you thought you wanted to make removes the very human element of discovery and learning that’s at the heart of any authentic practice of creation. Where you know everything about the thing you shaped into being from when it was just a lump of clay, you know nothing about the image of the thing you received for your penny from the vending machine.
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@[email protected] I’ve been using claude.ai to do basic web development - a thing I’m not very good at. I do get a wall of code, but I know enough about how code generally works and where the the functionality I want is located that I can trim out the pieces I don’t want and modify the pieces I do want to get the final result.
I think a good art analogy is sculpting, where rather than mould the medium, you take away from the medium. Either way, you still need to understand and practice.
@[email protected] Not sure the sculpting analogy holds. Michelangelo didn’t start with Peter and remove the bits he didn’t like to arrive at David; he started with a block of marble.
(And his chisel didn’t require new fossil fuel power plants and data centres that contaminate fresh water at a time when humanity faces an existential threat of its own making to its own habitat.)
@[email protected] spare a thought for where the clay and marble comes from and who’s mining it.
And I’m pretty sure neither of us are art experts to make an air tight analogy for art and coding.
Let’s instead argue about how much resources are spent making a “somewhat deterministic” code generator and whether all the other “features” are worth it.