Mastodawn

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

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Bob Smy Uncle 1d 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.

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Nolan Lawson 1d 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.

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Bob Smy Uncle

@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.