Developers and software engineers today are grappling with the rise of AI coding assistants and the fear that using them might take the creativity and craft out of programming. Some skeptics even suggest that if you don’t hand-write every line of code, you’re somehow “cheating” - that AI-assisted work is merely about productivity, not creativity. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, effectively collaborating with AI can be a creative act in itself. The key is how you direct and curate the outcome.
Those who learn to partner with AI – guiding it, filtering its suggestions, and combining its vast knowledge with human originality – will likely outperform those who either avoid it or use it uncritically. The “good enough” bar has been raised: simply accepting AI’s first answer isn’t the pinnacle of creative development. Instead, the real skill (and creative pleasure) comes from iterating with AI, injecting human insight, and steering the process to craft better solutions.
History shows that great creators have often acted as directors or curators rather than one-person production lines. Let’s explore two examples – one from art and one from music – that illustrate how curation and direction are forms of creativity in their own right.
Damien Hirst: Art Powered by Vision and Collaboration
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, British artist Damien Hirst rose to fame as a leading figure in contemporary art – and he did so with an army of assistants helping execute his ideas. Hirst has never hidden the fact that he delegates much of the physical creation of his works. In his view, this isn’t cheating or laziness; it’s part of the artistic statement. “I’ve never had a problem with using assistants,” Hirst says, emphasizing that for him the concept of the work takes precedence over the manual labor. In practice, this meant that out of approximately 1,500 of his iconic Spot Paintings, Hirst personally painted only about five – candidly admitting he “couldn’t be arsed doing it” himself. Instead, he carefully oversaw a studio of skilled painters who executed the canvases to his specifications.
Critics at the time argued that Hirst’s reliance on others undermined the authenticity of his art. The ideal of the lone genius toiling over each brushstroke was (and still is) a romantic notion in art. However, Hirst’s approach actually hearkened back to a long tradition of masters with workshops. Renaissance greats like Raphael and Rubens rarely painted everything themselves; they ran studios where apprentices helped bring their visions to life. Andy Warhol did much the same with his famous Factory in the 1960s, reframing the artist’s role as a director of production rather than a solitary craftsman. Hirst followed in these footsteps with a modern twist: the ideas – often provocative explorations of death, beauty, and consumerism – were distinctly his, even if many hands helped with the making.
Importantly, Hirst insists that every piece still bears his personal imprint. “Every single spot painting contains my eye, my hand, and my heart,” he maintains, likening his role to that of an architect who designs a building even if they don’t lay each brick. The creative spark – choosing the colours, the arrangement of spots, the very decision to make them so mechanically uniform – is Hirst’s. The execution could be done by others without diminishing the idea. In fact, Hirst has openly praised his assistants (even crediting one, Rachel Howard, as the best spot-painter he’s worked with) and sees their relationship as symbiotic. This collaborative process allowed Hirst to be prolific and focus on bolder ideas without getting bogged down in repetitive tasks.
Was Hirst any less creative for not painting every dot himself? The art world’s verdict says no. His works became wildly successful – conceptually influential and fetching high prices on the market – because of the vision behind them, not the minutiae of their production. As one art writer put it, for Hirst (and many collectors) what truly “matters is the idea – the provocation. His work isn’t about brushstrokes; it’s about belief systems, commodification, and mortality.” Notably, Hirst is not alone in this philosophy. Fellow artist Jeff Koons, famous for his high-concept sculptures, has said, “I’m the idea person. I’m not physically involved in the production. I don’t have the necessary abilities, so I go to the top people” to execute the work. In other words, directing a team to realise a creative vision is itself a creative act – it requires imagination, decision-making, and an understanding of the craft, even if one isn’t holding the paintbrush or chisel at every moment.
Kanye West’s Yeezus: A Masterclass in Musical Curation
Moving from fine art to music, consider Kanye West, who in the 2000s and 2010s became one of the era’s defining musicians by embracing a role as creator-curator. Love or hate his public persona, West’s approach to making music – especially exemplified by his 2013 album Yeezus – showcases the power of direction and curation in a collaborative creative process. By the time of Yeezus, Kanye was less a traditional producer banging out beats in isolation and more a visionary editor assembling an eclectic collage of sounds from many contributors. He essentially asked a huge number of music professionals to send him ideas, beats, and snippets of sound, which he then filtered, adapted, and wove together into the album’s final form.
The credits of Yeezus read like a who’s-who of avant-garde music talent: Daft Punk, Arca, Hudson Mohawke, Travis Scott, Gesaffelstein, Justin Vernon (of Bon Iver) – to name a few. West “amassed an army of collaborators to help carry out his vision”, finishing the album in record time by leveraging the strengths of each contributor. In the studio, there might be a dozen people bouncing around ideas and refining tracks. Kanye essentially acted as the project lead, pulling together disparate creative minds and ensuring the result served his singular vision for the album.
One illustrative anecdote comes from British electronic producer Evian Christ, who was a newcomer tapped for the project. Kanye’s team reached out on a Friday with an urgent request: Kanye would be in the studio on Sunday; could Evian Christ whip up some beats for him to hear? In Evian’s words, “I had two days to make some tracks specifically tailored to Kanye West. I didn’t go to bed that night. I just made track after track – nine altogether – and sent them over. A couple of days later, they were like, ‘This is great, we’ve started working on one.’ That track eventually became ‘I’m In It.’” This story perfectly encapsulates West’s curatorial approach: rather than crafting every sound personally, he cast a wide net for interesting material and then chose what fit his artistic intent. It’s akin to a film director shooting hours of footage to later cut and arrange the best scenes into a cohesive movie.
Kanye also gave his collaborators room to be creative, further emphasising his role as coordinator of creativity. French DJ/producer Gesaffelstein, who worked on Yeezus, recalled that when they asked Kanye what he wanted from them, Kanye simply said: “Just do what you want!” – letting them experiment freely. From there, Kanye would cherry-pick and refine the contributions. Gesaffelstein was impressed by Kanye’s team-oriented process: “When you go to the studio with Kanye, there are a lot of people with him. Everybody shares ideas… It’s really different [from] a solitary [workflow]”. In other words, the studio became a creative hive mind with Kanye as the curator-in-chief, nurturing the best ideas and discarding others. The end result of this curated chaos was Yeezus – an album that sounded like nothing else at the time, blending industrial noise, electronic distortion, and raw hip-hop minimalism into a bold new aesthetic.
Crucially, this heavily collaborative, directed process did not dilute Kanye’s artistic impact – if anything, it amplified it. Yeezus received widespread critical acclaim and proved enormously influential. It debuted at #1 on the charts and was ranked among the top albums of the year by dozens of publications. More importantly, its sound pushed boundaries that rippled through music in the following years. The album’s fearless mix of abrasive electronics and hip-hop has since been cited as an inspiration for a new wave of experimental pop and rap. (Even in 2024, The Guardian noted that pop innovator Charli XCX’s work was venturing “into Yeezus territory,” reflecting how Kanye’s curated creativity paved the way for others.) In sum, West proved that being a great artist can mean being a great editor and curator of talent. He treated the studio like a sandbox of ideas, shaping the best of them into a visionary final product. The creativity was in the selection, combination, and overall direction of the music – much like a tech lead choosing the best libraries, patterns, or contributions to incorporate into a software project.
Lessons for Software Development: Collaboration as Craft
What do these examples mean for software developers worried about AI or other tools “taking away” the creativity of coding? Simply put: You don’t have to do it all yourself for the work to be creative or valuable. Just as Hirst’s art is no less original because he wielded a concept instead of a paintbrush, and Kanye’s album is no less his own because he sampled and guided others’ sounds, your software isn’t less your creation if you utilise AI assistance, libraries, or the work of teammates. In fact, knowing how to direct and curate these resources is fast becoming a key developer skill – and a creative one at that.
To add more texture to this idea: Hirst didn't simply delegate blindly. He often created the first versions or prototypes himself, setting the stylistic and conceptual tone. These initial pieces acted as master references for his team. Under his close supervision, assistants replicated his designs, following specific instructions around colour, form, and scale. His role wasn’t just about handing off tasks—it was about defining the creative system and then managing quality, consistency, and evolution. This mirrors an effective strategy when working with AI: by creating a strong, intentional starting point, you give the model a concrete example to emulate and expand upon. The clearer your initial vision, the more likely AI is to generate aligned and useful iterations.
Consider a developer using an AI coding assistant to generate a chunk of code. The uninspired approach would be to accept whatever the AI suggests at face value. But a creative developer will treat the AI like a capable junior partner: reviewing, testing, and tweaking its output, much as an artist or musician evaluates contributions. You might prompt the AI to generate multiple solutions, then pick the best parts (just as Kanye collected many beats and kept the one that fit best). You might use the AI to handle repetitive scaffolding (just as Hirst had assistants paint the spots), freeing yourself to focus on high-level design and tricky algorithmic decisions. Far from being “cheating,” this is like a screenwriter who doesn’t act in the film but still shapes every scene and line of dialogue. The end product – a well-crafted, maintainable, and innovative piece of software – is what matters, and it’s a result of your guidance and decisions at every step.
In many ways, software development has always been about standing on the shoulders of others and managing abstraction, which is a form of curation. We regularly use open-source libraries or prebuilt frameworks rather than writing everything from scratch – is that cheating, or just smart utilisation of resources? Few would argue the former. Using AI is a natural extension of this trend. It can boost productivity, yes, but it can also boost creativity by handling the boilerplate, the boring and giving you more bandwidth to experiment and refine the truly inventive aspects of your project.
Key Benefits of Embracing Collaboration and Curation in Coding:
Focus on Vision: Like Hirst honing the concept of a piece, you can focus on setting up the base system, the overall software architecture and user experience while delegating lower-level tasks to AI or tools. This big-picture thinking is where human creativity shines.
Incorporating Diverse Ideas: Just as Kanye integrated sounds from many genres and collaborators, you can use AI to introduce solutions or ideas you hadn’t considered. You remain the editor, deciding which ideas to keep and which to discard.
Speed and Iteration: Collaboration (with humans or AI) accelerates the development process. This allows more iterations, which is often where creative breakthroughs occur. Faster prototyping with AI means you can try multiple approaches and learn what works (or doesn’t) more quickly, refining the product in creative ways.
Learning and Skill Enhancement: Working with AI can expose you to new patterns or idioms in code (much like an apprentice learning in a Renaissance workshop). Far from making you obsolete, it can expand your toolkit as you understand and assimilate the AI’s contributions – improving your craft.
Conclusion: Output Over Ego
At the end of the day, whether in art, music, or software, the measure of success isn’t how many individual keystrokes you personally typed – it’s the quality and impact of the output. Is the final product correct, reliable, maintainable, and useful? Does it solve the problem or deliver the experience it was meant to? If so, it hardly matters whether one line or many lines were suggested by an AI, or borrowed from Stack Overflow, or written by a colleague. What matters is that you, as the developer, directed and assembled those pieces into something that works beautifully. The process is a creative one, even if it doesn’t fit the old romantic image of a lone coder building everything from scratch.
Great software engineers in the AI era will be those who master the art of collaboration – merging their own original thinking with the strengths of tools and (AI) teammates. It’s a lot like being a conductor or a film director: you might not play every instrument or operate the camera, but you’re orchestrating the whole and making countless creative judgments along the way. So rather than fear that AI will usurp all programming creativity, see it as an opportunity to elevate your creative role. By embracing direction and curation in your workflow, you can achieve results far beyond what either you or the machine could do alone. As the examples of Damien Hirst and Kanye West show, not doing it all yourself isn’t cheating – it’s often how the best work is done.
Top comments (0)