Your Code Isn’t a Masterpiece — It’s Just Design

I’ve worked with a lot of talented engineers. Some of them, though, fall into a common trap: they start treating their code like art. They chase some perfect, ideal form. They sculpt their abstractions. They critique code like it’s a canvas meant for a gallery showing.

I get it — we all take pride in our craft. But here’s the thing: code is design, not art. And there’s a big difference.

Code Is Design, Not Art

Art is form — it’s meant to evoke an experience. Its value is subjective. It lives to be admired, interpreted, critiqued.

Design is form and function. Its value is measured by how well it works, how it solves a problem, how it’s used.

Code is design. Its worth isn’t in how clever it looks in your editor. It’s in how effectively it serves the product and the people using it.

Signs You Might Be a Code Artist

A few recent examples from my own team:

🛠 The “Perfect” Component
We adopted a component library — a great one, filled with well-designed parts. But instead of using its focused components, one teammate built a “Swiss-army knife” input component. One prop controlled which type of input it rendered. In theory? Very elegant. In practice? A Frankenstein component with confusing flows, too many responsibilities, hard to maintain or update. The engineer thought they were sculpting the ideal input — but ignored the wisdom of the many designers and engineers who had already built specialized components.

📜 Endless PR Reviews
Pull request reviews can be brutal when you have a team of “artists.” I’ve seen PRs get ripped apart for days: practical feedback buried under lofty ideals, nitpicks, and debates over the “right” way. Sometimes it sounds like snobbish movie critics tearing down an action flick for not being Oscar bait. Meanwhile, the real goal — getting value into users’ hands — fades away.

🔍 Hidden Complexity
There’s a trend on our team of hiding complexity inside “helper” functions and classes. The main flow looks clean and simple — on the surface. But dig in and you’ll find convoluted logic, over-engineered abstractions for problems we don’t even have yet. The interface looks minimalist, but the underlying design is fragile and hard to change.

🎨 UI/UX Irony
Funny thing is — the same engineers who debate the perfect form for code will often slap a basic table and button onto every UI. They’ll agonize over the “art” of internal code but forget that actual design is about how humans interact with what we build.

Why It Matters

When engineers get too attached to their code:

🚫 Delivery slows down
🚫 Reviews become battles, not collaboration
🚫 Over-engineering creeps in
🚫 The product suffers
🚫 The team wastes time chasing ideals instead of shipping value

It’s not that style or elegance don’t matter — they do. But only in service of function. The user doesn’t care about your abstraction layers. They care whether the product works, solves their problem, and feels good to use.

A Better Mindset

Here’s what helps:

✅ Treat code as design — not art
✅ Value clarity, maintainability, and adaptability
✅ Ship working code and improve iteratively
✅ Review with empathy and focus on real impact
✅ Avoid over-polishing — sometimes “good enough” is good enough
✅ Remember: you’re not sculpting marble — you’re building with Lego

Final Thoughts

I’m not saying don’t take pride in your work. I do. But real craftsmanship means knowing what matters and what doesn’t.

Perfect code that never ships? Useless.
Functional code that improves the product? Invaluable.

So the next time you find yourself chipping away at your code like a block of marble, ask yourself: is this about the user? The product? The team? Or is it just about me?

Ship it. Iterate. Move forward.