gardens of eden
May. 27th, 2026 09:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavi've had a mini essay in my mind for a bit of the cultural differences between programmers and artists and where the culture clashes with creative work may have come from; with artists having an additive mindset, and programmers taking a subtractive mindset.
(big dose of while i'm not a programmer, i've hung out on hacker news, linux spaces, general nerd spaces for basically as long as I've been drawing, so i'd like to think some accurate observation over the years is present.)
read enough of programmer books and interviews and a trend starts showing that the really good coders have an unerring focus on simplicity.
it goes back to the early days when memory storage was measured in KBs, not the GB or TB range and a programmer simply didn't have enough space to have any comfort zones or to be anything but choosy with code. you had to make do with what existed, sometimes reaching for insanely creative "hacks" to reduce code line by line. floppy disks versus RAID arrays taking care of a corporation. this reduction and simplicity also helps with reducing bugs via complexity; messy code very often meant bugs aplenty.
they're creating and crafting code - but always, the goal is to subtract, compress, minimize, reduce until the finished code is a flawless efficient diamond.
the art of subtraction is a thing of beauty by itself, in a programmer's point of view.
please note that i'm talking about simplicity as a cultural marker; collaborating on a github repo or a UNIX GUI may be technically additive, but that north star is generally subtractive. there's also a quip about how lazy programmers are the talented ones because they automate everything seamlessly. more on that later.
II.
on the other hand - (visual/written) artists, to me, work from an additive mindset.
artists are usually aware (consciously or subconsciously) about the arc of art history over centuries; less in a 'studied in a classroom' sense but having their work loosely inspired by what's around them. digesting [experiences / senses / feelings], recreating it into a thing that's purely theirs via creation, medium, and labor.
the labor is tangible, and builds on each iteration with skill. the specific environment context is real.
get artists together, and generally you'll start seeing an explosion of works and stories; deviantart, artfight for modern digital examples, and art movements and retreats like the impressionists or expressionists for older times. sometimes it's out of spite, sometimes it's out of collaboration, or curiosity. but generally you'll see "more" works on the later side than you did earlier works, and with a thought-line between the two of reacting to each other. duchamp was reacting via satire to an older generation. monet was too. the 2000's anime-explosion were full of artists reacting to the new fresh stylistic and story possibilities that the internet was bringing.
III.
this is perhaps a good-faith approach to some; but i do think, initially, at least - programmers expected artists to have the same mindset they largely did to AI in the early days, where the assumption on generated work was more 'oh it's like collaborating on a github repo'. (i base this off of my time in various programmer watering holes from ~2015-2022 when i mentioned a few times that artists were not going to see it that way, after that period is when i largely left those spaces).
programmers, in my observation, use AI to subtract. like the line above about lazy programmers; there's a certian glee exhibited at vanishing repetitive and (to them) useless monotonous tasks. for some, i bet that glee was like the joy of solving a puzzle, and being able to move on to more interesting puzzles of vanishing more tasks.
artists - the ones that have to create, no matter what, (not the 'do it for clicks/money' grifters) - find their labor sacred. addictive. the Zone. they're by far the most whole and present in that act of labor and get downright crabby if pulled out of it. they live for the that additive act.
interestingly the biggest sense-memory i have of talking to programmers about artist's (early, negative) reaction to ai was a sort of wounded defensiveness. (later reactions is full of different flavors as AI grew sharply to become more of a marxist/economic labor issue versus a hobbyist issue) this is stretching, but almost as if programmers didn't understand why artists weren't happy about the labor being reduced.
and this is where i think, regrettably, a lot of those early missteps and assumptions were culture clashes more than anything.
there's a growing cross-over of STEM and the arts (look at the early users of the internet, before facebook); and while they're both innovative -- there's still a pretty distinctive culture in each that looks at the other with suspicion, and i think it goes deeper than just social issues, down to how both approach their tools.
(big dose of while i'm not a programmer, i've hung out on hacker news, linux spaces, general nerd spaces for basically as long as I've been drawing, so i'd like to think some accurate observation over the years is present.)
read enough of programmer books and interviews and a trend starts showing that the really good coders have an unerring focus on simplicity.
it goes back to the early days when memory storage was measured in KBs, not the GB or TB range and a programmer simply didn't have enough space to have any comfort zones or to be anything but choosy with code. you had to make do with what existed, sometimes reaching for insanely creative "hacks" to reduce code line by line. floppy disks versus RAID arrays taking care of a corporation. this reduction and simplicity also helps with reducing bugs via complexity; messy code very often meant bugs aplenty.
they're creating and crafting code - but always, the goal is to subtract, compress, minimize, reduce until the finished code is a flawless efficient diamond.
the art of subtraction is a thing of beauty by itself, in a programmer's point of view.
please note that i'm talking about simplicity as a cultural marker; collaborating on a github repo or a UNIX GUI may be technically additive, but that north star is generally subtractive. there's also a quip about how lazy programmers are the talented ones because they automate everything seamlessly. more on that later.
II.
on the other hand - (visual/written) artists, to me, work from an additive mindset.
artists are usually aware (consciously or subconsciously) about the arc of art history over centuries; less in a 'studied in a classroom' sense but having their work loosely inspired by what's around them. digesting [experiences / senses / feelings], recreating it into a thing that's purely theirs via creation, medium, and labor.
the labor is tangible, and builds on each iteration with skill. the specific environment context is real.
get artists together, and generally you'll start seeing an explosion of works and stories; deviantart, artfight for modern digital examples, and art movements and retreats like the impressionists or expressionists for older times. sometimes it's out of spite, sometimes it's out of collaboration, or curiosity. but generally you'll see "more" works on the later side than you did earlier works, and with a thought-line between the two of reacting to each other. duchamp was reacting via satire to an older generation. monet was too. the 2000's anime-explosion were full of artists reacting to the new fresh stylistic and story possibilities that the internet was bringing.
III.
this is perhaps a good-faith approach to some; but i do think, initially, at least - programmers expected artists to have the same mindset they largely did to AI in the early days, where the assumption on generated work was more 'oh it's like collaborating on a github repo'. (i base this off of my time in various programmer watering holes from ~2015-2022 when i mentioned a few times that artists were not going to see it that way, after that period is when i largely left those spaces).
programmers, in my observation, use AI to subtract. like the line above about lazy programmers; there's a certian glee exhibited at vanishing repetitive and (to them) useless monotonous tasks. for some, i bet that glee was like the joy of solving a puzzle, and being able to move on to more interesting puzzles of vanishing more tasks.
artists - the ones that have to create, no matter what, (not the 'do it for clicks/money' grifters) - find their labor sacred. addictive. the Zone. they're by far the most whole and present in that act of labor and get downright crabby if pulled out of it. they live for the that additive act.
interestingly the biggest sense-memory i have of talking to programmers about artist's (early, negative) reaction to ai was a sort of wounded defensiveness. (later reactions is full of different flavors as AI grew sharply to become more of a marxist/economic labor issue versus a hobbyist issue) this is stretching, but almost as if programmers didn't understand why artists weren't happy about the labor being reduced.
and this is where i think, regrettably, a lot of those early missteps and assumptions were culture clashes more than anything.
there's a growing cross-over of STEM and the arts (look at the early users of the internet, before facebook); and while they're both innovative -- there's still a pretty distinctive culture in each that looks at the other with suspicion, and i think it goes deeper than just social issues, down to how both approach their tools.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-05-28 08:23 am (UTC)while the humanities are entirely about the mess of, well, humanity and culture. It's about connectivity, meaning, philosophical, pleasure, chaos, and embracing the nonsensical.
The clash between the coders and the creators comes down to an ideological difference on the function of society. coders have a really bad habit of trying to legislate mess out of the equation of living (as you classified as reduction), which is frankly impossible, while artists and artisans seek to understand what it even means to live in the first place. artists seek to understand the question while coders are convinced they have the answers. this is why you can get nerds who are fundamentally incurious about what their labor can practically mean or provide outside of theoretical engineering.
(as an aside -- personally this is why I have contempt for a large chunk of them because unsurprisingly it attracts a kind of patriarchal, chauvinistic ,condescending type of personality that borders on narcissism at best and straight up sociopathy at worst. artists and all creative types are their own brand of unhinged but at least when they try to act more intelligent or all knowing they're rightly knocked down a peg and laughed at while society venerates the stemlords regardless of how demonstrably idiotic they are lol)
and I guess for context, my father was one of *the* leading computer scientists for the age we live in today, but for all his faults he was exceptional among the stem community in that he had an extreme respect for the arts and creativity, because ultimately he approached coding as an act of creation, an art. that's the real crossover that is lacking in today's divide and it's largely a manufactured one, because our education system since the nascence of the internet has put a lot of importance on the stem academic pursuits while treating the humanities as optional.
we have literally taught coders that the arts, history, social sciences, and anything outside of cold hard calculus is quaint and optional, so we can't also be surprised they turned out to be utterly incapable of understanding society but have the audacity to think they can shape it.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-05-28 08:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-05-28 08:46 am (UTC)meanwhile the rise of vibecoding and general grifting in the stem community has actually made the labor of coding messier and more complex with a lot less comprehension, especially with the advent of the mindset "move fast and break things". one of my semi-weekly hangouts is with a dear friend who does coding for shopify and let me tell you when I say that no one there understands their own code nor do they make any effort to try to, and in fact go out of their way to make it more complex for no reason at all, is putting it lightly. he vents at me for literally hours about how utterly deranged the profession of coding is these days and his position isn't unique among start ups or businesses in general.
from what I can understand your premise is kind of equating an approach to tool usage via coders but comparing it to the community bonding of artists, which is a separate arena, but imo there's very little difference in how artists and coders approach their respective crafts, it mostly comes down to coders being taught to disrespect the value of artistry and the bonds of society, especially when it comes to AI.