KTConf 2026 Creative Coding Slides

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…