There’s a song from Bo Burnham that I really like. It’s called Art is Dead and it starts like this:

“Engineers like to seem complicated
But we’re not complicated
I can explain it pretty easily…”

Sorry, it was “Entertainers”, not “Engineers”, my bad.

Anyway, in the last few weeks I’ve read a lot of posts and watched lots of videos from developers and software engineers all over the world, famous and not, being frustrated over AI. Frustrated, scared, dismissive. The whole spectrum.

As always in life, I’ve started to notice that there are mostly two sides, we could identify them with 0 and 1. A small amount of people seems to be in the middle (0.5, or “on the fence”, as Tim Minchin would sing). But most of them, they just pick one side.

001101

Think of 0 people as the ones (pun intended) that are in the first/second stage of grief:

“AI is useless.”
“Opus 4.7 is stupid.”
“I tested it and it couldn’t even do X.”

These are the developers who need AI to fail, because if it doesn’t, something uncomfortable becomes true about their craft.

On the other hand, 1 people are in the third (or fourth) stage.

“AI will steal all our jobs.”
“We’re all doomed.” “The robots are coming.”

And, finally, there’s people like me, who have reached the last stage: Acceptance.

Nobody Misses Their Horse

I’ll take a tangent, but maybe it will illustrate my point. When cars appeared, people were outraged. Horses were reliable, alive, they had character. Cars were dangerous, noisy, impractical. Everyone said so.

Look around now. When was the last time you rode a horse to work?

Manual gearboxes had the same treatment:

“Automatics are for lazy drivers.”
“You don’t really know how to drive unless you drive manual.”

Nowadays most cars sold globally are automatic, and a modern dual-clutch gearbox is faster than any human hand ever was.

I could go ahead with so many more examples, but I think you got the point. In every case, the resistance was real, and the outcome was inevitable.

AI, to me, seems like the next in line. The pattern is always the same: resistance, denial, adaptation, normalcy. The developer community is somewhere between the first two right now, and a little bit of the third.

Thank God I’m An Engineer

But hey, here’s something I’ve known for a while: I was never a developer. I was always an engineer.

The difference matters. Why? Because developers care about the code they write. Engineers care much more about the result. And look, this is not a difference in semantics or definition. It’s a difference in the way of thinking, something you have in your heart. You could be an engineer without even knowing and, for sure, even without a degree.

Here’s the deal. I never lost sleep over whether my code was elegant and followed the latest cool practices written on a book by some opinionated person (that would later be challenged by some other opinionated person). I lost sleep over whether it worked. Whether it was fast enough. Whether it did what it was supposed to do. And yes, sometimes that made me unpopular in the “code is like art” circles. I’ll live.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that every “code is art” person does not want to hear: the final user has never, ever cared about your code.

Twitter became X in 2023. It is now 2026. The meta tags on every website still say “twitter” (open this page’s source and just search for “twitter:card”). Millions of users, billions of visits. Nobody notices. Nobody cares.

Most codebases out there are a maze of spaghetti, legacy systems held together with duct tape and prayers. Tech debt layered on tech debt. Thousands of engineers and developers who all made different decisions at different times, with different priorities. They are still making billions. So, really, who cares?

And before anyone misunderstands me, let’s be super clear.

I am not saying or suggesting to write bad code. I have a dignity.

But obsessing over code beauty? Really? While your product has bugs everywhere, is not performant at all, and everyone else is shipping? That is just vanity.

Art Is Dead

Here is what I think the “code is art” crowd is really afraid of: if AI can write code, then the craft they built their identity around is suddenly worth a lot less.

And they are half right.

  • If your identity is “I write beautiful code”, well then, my friend, AI is definitely your enemy.
  • If your identity is “I build things that work”, AI is an awesome gift.

Users, CEOs, people in general do not care if your code is pretty. What matters is that the output is correct, the product works, and everything does what it should in a reliable (and fast) way.

Shocking news: AI can produce that.

You know what’s even more funny? AI can also read spaghetti code, understand it, and work with it just fine, without complaining.

Code Is Dead

Let’s circle back to the provocative title of this post. Is coding really dead? Well, not really.

Is designing, architecting, and finally implementing a good, robust, performant, reliable product something that AI can do alone? Not really. Not for now, at least.

But here’s my point: nobody misses their horse, either. Nobody is sitting around lamenting the golden age of travelling by horse. They just moved on. And the world got faster.

AI is a tool. A remarkably powerful one. So if you’re an engineer (read: “someone who cares about the result”), it’s probably the best tool you’ve ever had.

Because users, especially nowadays, aren’t waiting. The products aren’t pausing. And the people who embrace this truth are already shipping while the rest are still arguing about it.