Yesterday, I had the pleasure to give a talk for the local Kotlin community on creativity in software engineering and the impact generative AI has on our ability to be creative. KTConf took place in an iconic venue, the M museum in Leuven, so I felt obliged to include a slide about a painting. To my dismay, nobody in the room knew anything about art history or could identify the painting (Manet’s Bundle of Asparagus). That allowed me to demonstrate you’ll likely find something like Manet’s painting very creative if some expert tells you it is. In the context of coding, the same concepts apply: you’ll need to have some technical background in order to judge whether something is creative—during both the process (the code) and the end product (the thing that hopefully makes your end users happy). Thus, technical knowledge is one of the prerequisites for being a creative programmer. The talk, entitled A Critique On AI-Assisted ‘Creative’ Programming, predictably included a summary of my book The Creative Programmer. Here’s the executive summary of the talk: Nobody will dispute that creativity is essential to being a successful programmer. With the rise of LLM systems, we lazy coders are even more allured to take the shortcut and by handing out the most mundane aspects of our everyday jobs. Yet what we do not know is that by doing so, we are also seriously hampering our happy, silly, and joyful side of programming, or in other words, the creative aspects of programming. In this talk, we’ll explore why AI-assisted tools are not beneficial but detrimental to our creative side—that very side that is sorely needed when facing complex issues that require coming up with a new and unique approach.Be inspired by what makes creative geniuses tick. Stop being a prompt engineer. (Re)start that critical thinking brain. Fulfil your Homo Faber destiny! The slides are also available in PDF format, although being the nerd I am, I did write them in Markdown and used Marp to present. Besides the idea of the Creative Programmer, the second takeaway I wanted everyone to think about was the fact that we’re so eager to off-load “mundane” work to our new LLM-based assistant. But without that 90% of “boring” transpiration, the 10% of interesting illumination will never occur. We, as inherently lazy humans, are yet again thinking only of the short-term wins. Yes, we can now push a story to production in three days instead of a week. But those days we’ve won now will most certainly come back to haunt is later in the maintenance phase. An example slide, zooming in on creative domain #6: the creative state of mind, and the dangers of off-loading the transpiration to an LLM agent. If you’re interested in a bit more background behind the main ideas that were touched on, here are the related posts where I based the slides on: My book The Creative Programmer; The Creative Programming Problem Solving Test (don’t forget to press that I’m Feeling Lucky button); The most important slide, the mind map summarising the seven domains of creative programming in software engineering, is explained in the article what is creativity for software engineers; The critique on genAI found its roots in my commentary on genAI through different lenses that summarises the papers I’ve mentioned; Bert Hubert’s AI Train talk that inspired me to include a warning for ecologists and economists; Dan North’s Programming is not a craft blog post from 2011 that caused quite a stir back in the day but is ever so relevant nowadays. 95% of the people in the room claimed to be code craftsmen, yet we’re increasingly telling someone else to craft something. Why? To create something is to be human (or the other way around). The dangers of a depressing professional existence lurk around the corner. James Gosling’s interview on the Telusko YouTube channel (see below). James’ interesting choice of words: In the spectrum of problems in SE, coding has never really been a big one. The places where there are problems are in like testing. […] So I view AI in part asstealing the fun and making the torture worse. - James Gosling Stealing the fun and making the torture worse. His words, not mine. If you have any questions or concerns related to what I might or might not have said yesterday, you’re welcome to reach out! For those who couldn’t make it, unfortunately there’s no recording available. Perhaps next year? Related topics: / talk / By Wouter Groeneveld on 19 September 2026.  Reply via email.