Maker or Artist

Open source software has always been placed on a foundational trust for other people. We are seeing what happens when we break this trust, frustratingly quickly. In this broken state, we’re able to peek under the surface, at the underlying politics and other dynamics of this ecosystem. My thesis is: there are two types of software developer, ‘Maker’ (derogatory) or ‘Artist’.

The unfortunate thing is that we needed both of these types. A maker cares purely about creating an artist, only the destination. The artist cares about the journey, and concerns themself with things like ‘code quality’, ‘technical debt’, and ‘does this code look readable to a colleague’. The maker may perhaps be more suited to the boring administrative parts of open source, for example facilitating funding, setting up a non-profit foundation, stuff like that. The maker would, in theory, much rather be telling programmers what to do than how to do it.

Most of my friends are what I would call artists. They tend to live somewhere along the messy intersection between software development and game development.

I think game development (and by extension game modding) is a fascinating way to look at the difference? I just watched this Icely Puzzles video about how there are these LLM’d game mods that just like put a character controller into a different game. Minecraft character in Skyrim or whatever. You could go on about how it’s bad because an LLM made it (and how you believe that LLMs are a fundamental evil), but it’s actually bad because there’s no artistic expression in it. (Not that it’s impossible to use an LLM with artistic intent, it’s just that it’s very hard to without muddying what you’re trying to say.)