The Death of the Code Poet
AI-generated image · Bay Street Wire
As AI consumes the industry, the delusion that programming is a mystical art form is finally colliding with the reality of functional labor.
As first reported by the blog Deciphering Glyph, the tech industry has long operated under a cloak of "mystification," treating the act of writing code not as labor, but as a transcendental craft—a digital alchemy that separated the 'code poet' from the technician. But as LLMs move from novelty to necessity, the facade is cracking.
In an analysis from Deciphering Glyph, the author reflects on the romanticized era of the 'code poet,' a title they claimed in their youth. This desire to frame programming as art is evident in the creation of tools like Deferred, which the author describes as an intentional poem regarding asynchronous task execution. The goal wasn't just functionality—as existing callback and errback parameters already worked—but to solve the 'ugly' and 'annoying' aesthetics of the process. This focus influenced a lineage of developments, from MochiKit.Async and JQuery Deferred to JavaScript Promises and the eventual async/await syntax.
However, this romanticism is colliding with a harsh reality. Deciphering Glyph notes a stark divide in how creative professionals view AI: writers have struck for protections and thousands of artists have signed protest letters, yet many experienced programmers remain convinced that using AI is acceptable, even as the technology makes many miserable.
The justification for this resignation is a pivot in identity: the claim that programming isn't actually art. If the output is merely functional, the logic goes, then the tool used to achieve that function is irrelevant.
As Deciphering Glyph points out, citing John Berger’s "Ways of Seeing," we often mistake well-executed work for divine relics. Berger observed that a commissioned portrait is often just the result of a painter needing work and officials wanting a picture. Programming is no different. Whether it is the functional prose of a journalist or the architecture of a software system, the distinction between 'high art' and 'mundane work' is often just an accident of commerce and opportunity.
We can keep pretending the craft is mystical, or we can admit that when the goal is simply to get the job done, the 'poetry' of the code is a luxury the current market no longer values.