Is There Room For Beauty In A Vibe-Coded Future?

 

Beautiful Code was published nearly 20 years ago in 2007. The blurb on the back cover promises an over-the-shoulder look of leading developers creating elegant solutions to hard problems. Some of those shoulders belong to well-known heavyweights of an earlier period, including Brian Kernighan and Jon Bentley. A bit closer to the present, Yukihiro Matsumoto, nicknamed Matz and inventor of Ruby, writes "Treating Code As An Essay."  Notably, Matz argues that code is meant to be read by humans. Ideally, beautiful code would be simple, balanced, and make developers happy and productive. In contrast, I must point out, AI generated code is meant to be, at most, corrected.

Separately, Bjarne Stroustrup had this to say when asked by Lex Friedman on how can you tell when your code has reached the Einstein level of simplicity:

"It's easier to recognize ugly than to recognize beauty in code. . . sometimes beauty comes from something that is innovative and unusual, and you have to sometimes think reasonably hard to appreciate that. On the other hand, the messes have things in common."

I myself have explored this subject in "Beauty In The Eye of the Coder:"

"Code that runs wickedly fast can be beautiful, but perhaps that is more of a measure of cleverness. A better indicator of beauty, however, might be how well the code stands up to time. Requirements change, database fields are added, code is refactored by multiple authors. Time conspires to distort and contort programs, but the ones that endure are often considered beautiful."

Vibe-coding is none of this. It is neither beautiful, nor ugly.  It is neat; indentation and naming conventions are consistent. It can make hobbyist programmers happy, and it's been known to make experienced programmers annoyed.  It is functional, but not efficient or enduring; with every modification, vibe-coding regenerates the entire program, which could be cause to repeat a full suite of regression testing. The main takeaway is that, within certain boundaries, vibe-coding works well enough, and is getting better.

If future programs are mainly AI generated, or handled by AI agents, it would seem that beautiful code wouldn't matter anymore. But if I learned anything from reading about Steve Jobs and watching Apple, it would be that beauty always matters.

From Walter Isaacson's book Steve Jobs:

“I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.”

    -- Steve Jobs, while sitting in on calligraphy class at Reed College

Isaacson observed:

"It was yet another example of Jobs consciously positioning himself at the intersection of the arts and technology. In all of his products, technology would be married to great design, elegance, human touches, and even romance."

Thus, while beautiful code isn't the goal of programming, it is a sign of a thoughtful process. Programming isn't just writing code.  It involves understanding what the user wants and needs, framing the problem so it can be properly solved, and testing creatively. Coding itself requires identifying parts that can be reused, parts that can be put into a library, and parts that can make up a framework, all for the purpose of sharing code with others, and not just with your teammates, but with the world at large (think open source). Vibe-coding has no such ambition.

Beautiful Code is a corollary to a book published nearly 20 years earlier, back in 1986: Programmers At Work. In a similar vein, Programmers At Work explored the works and thoughts of 19 programmers of the micro-computer age, including Bill Gates (Basic) and Jef Raskin (the Macintosh Project). While beauty wasn't the book's focus, it explored related themes of creativity and problem solving. 

Beauty endures. It is both a driver and an outcome of great works, and will not give way to vibe-coding.