Art is something done with the express purpose of aesthetic appreciation, eliciting emotional responses and so on.

Nature for example can be beautiful, and certainly can draw out emotional responses from people. But unless we bring religion into the mix, it is not made with any purpose, it simply is.

The closest thing I think of programming as art is obviously videogames, if I consider that game mechanics are added with the undeniable purpose of inspiring in the player emotional response, it can certainly be done with aesthetics in mind, and I can think of a few examples where it is used to question norms.

While your tale sounded pretty interesting, it is the same sort of interesting as solving a math puzzle. I enjoy math puzzles.

But it is not the same sort activity as writing a short story, or composing a a symphony, or painting a still-life. Those are done with different purposes. Art is something done with the purpose of exploring emotions, aesthetic beauty, question societal norms, etc.

The closest programming gets to that is if you are writing a jingle for advertisement, or drawing a signpost, or writing a technical article.

I, at least, never wrote a stock management system to explore the depth of human emotions.

While you can engage in the act of programming from the angle of craft and while you may have started to code because you really enjoyed how it felt like solving a puzzle, programming is primarily a profession. It is a lot closer to accounting than to painting.

There is still space for coding without AI, stuff like advent of code, etc. While it may sound old fashioned as a lot of people did it to practice code challenge for interviews, some did that simply for the pleasure of coding.

But when your job is working in some system for a corporation, big or small, there's no space there for craft or passion, just the reality that what matters is the sausage, not what went into making it.

You may (and probably should) still care about certain engineering principles; correctness, performance, readability, maintainability, etc. But that's about it, whether you write the code or an LLM does is immaterial.

So much ARR.

The game mechanics always spin around the notion of regret. Tim must undo his actions in order to overcome his challenges. In every stage this deals with the irreversibility of actions, so instead of fixing things, Tim strives to undo them.

In a few puzzles the solution involves killing yourself before fiddling with time. Perhaps Tim, at some point, contemplated suicide as a solution to his problems. This is rather dark, but what was he chasing after all? What is this princess he is obsessed with?

The princess in my view was the personification of an ideal of perfection. Tim was chasing a situation where he would be free of shame and regret, unburdened by responsibility. He looked for it in a variety of places: in a girlfriend, in marriage, in work, in his own past. But the princess is nowhere to be found. Whenever he reaches a castle, the princess is elsewhere.

The more he pursues this ideal, the more it eludes him. Like the girlfriend he wanted to protect, but she took his actions as suffocating - "you're going the wrong way and you're pulling me with you". Like the engineers who worked in the first atomic bomb, brilliant men that did their best, but in the end, they were all sons of bitches.

What Tim was chasing doesn't exist, like princesses in fairy tales. In his view, there's a knight in shiny armor that gets the princess, but never himself.

In that sense, the ending of the game is positive. He realizes that each step of his journey is a building block in his castle, and finally admits that while he needs many more blocks what he has is a good start.

His goal was always there. The perfection of life is the journey, not the destination.