The diminished art of coding

The author argues that programming has long been an art form balancing craft and pragmatism, but LLM coding agents have decisively tipped the balance toward function over form. When reviewing AI-generated code, nitpicking style details feels pointless since agents will rewrite them anyway. The craft now lives at a higher level of abstraction—architecture, systems design, and judgment—rather than in the fine details of individual lines of code.