Julian Fong, a software engineer at Pixar, wrote a short thread on Mastodon with an interesting take I haven’t seen before:

I still don’t use any AI code in my work, but I have to review more and more of it these days. One of the things bothering me about that these days is just how lacking in personality that code is.

RenderMan is a code base which is now over forty years old. It is a collection of idiosyncratic styles written by equally idiosyncratic people.

I’ve been in this code base for 26+ years and I can recognize the author of many chunks simply by looking at indentation, comments, or coding style. And I can often map style to personality quirks of the author.

Dan McCoy’s code for converting general polyhedra from 1990 still survives today. Probably one of the few pieces of code left that actually has a for ( ; l; l = l->next) loop for linked lists. Dan is also the only person I’ve ever seen use the abbreviation R.N.G in comments.

Tom Duff is the inventor of the Duff Device, so you can imagine what kind of code he might write. But he also left a comment in the implicit field code which was a quote from the Preface to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, from 1755. That’s just who he is.

(In a fit of hubris, many years later when I refactored the code, I left an answering comment which was a quote from the Preface to Noah Webster’s “An American Dictionary of the English Language. I’m not sure Tom ever noticed this.)

I was just thinking of Duff’s Device the other day!

I’ll let you read the rest on your own, but will excerpt the ending, too:

I could go on and on about all of our recognizable quirks, but living in a code base with that history is like living in a Berkeley Craftsman home. It’s old, it’s creaky, okay, it’s missing AC and you’re probably going to die when it hits 100 in the summer (which happens all too often these days), but dammit, it’s charming and it’s artsy. […]

[With Claude-generated code] there’s no typo or quirk that immediately recalls an interesting whiteboard discussion in the author’s office. It’s just code and comments repeating what the code does.

Code is art. I work at a studio full of ungodly talented artists, but I will still die on this hill. Code is often messy and dirty and it’s a pain to create and get right but the results reflect the personality of the creator and the pain of the creation. Just like the rest of art. Sometimes you have to look at the source code to see that, but it’s there if you look for it, hidden beneath the surface.

In the era of the telegraph, a century ago, you could listen to the dits and the dahs and decode the literal message, but you could also pay attention to the rhythm and the timing and the quirks of someone’s particular finger on someone’s particular Morse key – and learn to recognize not just a particular person, but also, sometimes, even their mood. There are stories of Allied spies knowing exactly which of the German operators they surveilled (but never met in person) was sending messages at a given moment, just by learning their tapping style, known as “fist.”

I found it delightful to read Fong’s stories of his coworker programming fists.