Nolan Lawson

New post: "The diminished art of coding" https://nolanlawson.com/2026/03/22/the-diminished-art-of-coding/

I'm still exploring the themes from "We mourn our craft." This post could maybe be summarized as "go touch grass," or more precisely: "go touch poetry."

The diminished art of coding

Programming is an art. It’s less like fine art or music and closer to architecture or carpentry – combining form and function – but it is an art. If you don’t believe me, consider code …

Read the Tea Leaves
Mar 22 at 9:54pmWeb
Show threadBob Smy Uncle4d ago
@nolan At sequential jobs, I would send a PR, receive a "nit: formatting" response, fix it, and never get my code rereviewed and merged. When I suggested we add an autoformatter to the git hooks, I got various responses to the tune of 'don't waste too much time on that', but man, the projects I shipped involved rewriting so much old code, wasting time polishing new code feels silly. The llms provide a layer of abstraction, I suppose, where everybody *knows* it's not worth time to polish.
Show threadNolan Lawson4d ago
@Cheff Formatting nits are indeed silly, and I'm happy for tools like prettier and eslint to catch that. I think what's being called into question these days is even higher levels of polishing – DRY, KISS, separation of concerns, etc.
Show threadBob Smy Uncle4d ago
@nolan Well... Oof, yeah. If there was anything I would ever really pride myself on after a day of coding, it was DRYing up a massive scroll of stacked booleans into three ifs and a function call. So that is what I might hope might make it in to code I prompt, but... only maybe. If it works, and nobody's checkin' my work, then it works.
Show threadJoshua Thayer4d ago

@nolan I feel grateful the sea change in our profession has happened towards the tail end of my career. I’m fortunate to have worked while craft was valued and mattered, grew to balance that with deadlines and velocity, and now I’m approaching the new era with a kind of horrible wonder. Craft and a critical eye still seem valuable but it’s not yet clear to me how those are best expressed.

I share your conclusion- more than anything I’m inspired for more human connection- music, friends, kids.

Show threadNolan Lawson4d ago
@joshua I go back and forth on this. Sometimes I wonder if it were better if I were at the start of my career, because then I wouldn't feel so nostalgic for the old way of doing things. Overall though I guess it is interesting to live through times of such upheaval.