## 2026.09.12 / Saturday

### Art (of|or) Programming

> It's never finished

> Sometimes I come back to it and it's not what I want it to be
> now, so I change it

> I never know when to say "It's finished" and stop working on it

> AI takes what we do and uses it without understanding, copying
> the form, but seldom the meaning

Any of you, programming folks, maintainers of small (or big)
open-source projects recognise yourself in the first sentence, the
second, or "all of the above"?

Surprisingly, they weren't uttered by a coder, but by an artist, a
friend of mine, who is an established painter (so I can trust her
struggle is real).

Funny how it made me feel "artsy" in all my programming
endeavours, without giving me a chance to say anything like "oh,
it's exactly how I feel about my work too"

Her changes are "additive". A painting can be changed by putting
another layer of paint on the already existing art piece. As
programmers we have the luxury of "rolling back" our changes,
fully replacing parts that are "no longer what we want them to
be", removing them, moving around, refactoring into include files,
libraries, modules. Sometimes we still do the "painters job" by
kludging ad-hoc fixes directly on top of existing code. Except
what gives a painting a tactile, human, real texture is just
making the crust of complexity around the code thicker.

The concept of "elegance" is, on the other hand, quite similar,
though. Less is better than too much.

There was an "unfinished" painting on the easel - face and one hand
looked like a painting already, the rest was still a draft, a line
drawing, that already gave the idea of what it will become, some day.
In a way it was already perfect, enough. Like an early release of a
personal project, working for ones, kind of working for some,
unfinished for a few. There's no stiff, set in stone definition of a
finished product, like with commercial products, so "finished" is just
an unwritten contract between the creator and the recipient. "I made
it the way that felt right" - "That works for me, perfect."

Or not. But the subjectivity of art is another story. If you don't
like my art - create your own.