Programmer art

Programmer art is the placeholder a developer draws when nobody else is going to. Grey boxes, a capsule with a face, proportions that are wrong in a way the author stopped seeing on day two. It ships more often than anyone admits, and it is affectionate as an insult, because the alternative was no art at all.

I did not draw these either. I said what I wanted, took back what came, changed it, and passed it again, for as many rounds as it took. That makes them programmer art AI-assisted programmer art: a genre about eighteen months old, with its own tells. Neither of these started as my idea and neither ended where the model left it.

What the model could not do was tell me when a drawing had become funny. So the standard was mine, and it was not a sophisticated one: I stopped when one made me smile.

Which is the argument the rest of this site makes, arriving in the most literal form available.