So you’d take joy in making your coworkers’ lives hell instead?

I understand the kind of joy-of-expression that lives in things like https://poignant.guide/dwemthy/, but if you attempt to put that in a production codebase, I’m not gonna be at-all positive in code review.

Great, I'll let every reviewer of my code know that they've been doing it wrong.

Are you saying that you actually write the kind of code that I linked? Because my expectation was that you’d look at it and say “well, my code certainly doesn’t look like that. It’s quite reasonable in comparison, in fact.” I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone write code like Dwemthy’s Array in a project that has to “do something productive”, even if they’re the only one working on it.

Maybe the sort of code you linked isn't the sort of code we're talking about? Nobody is running around bigco writing demoscene stuff or whatever.

Doing the things I said well makes you an irreplaceable member of a team, worth your weight in gold.

Save art for the canvas, for your weekends, for your loved ones. Bring a professional self to your job.

Not sure why you seem to think code written with feeling behind it is some unmaintainable mess. That's been the opposite of my experience.

The way people fail in this line of work, if they have skill, is burnout. Burnout is the thing that'll get you. So you do whatever you can to stave it off - and that requires working on something you actually care about in some way.

We aren't talking about "code with feeling behind it" but rather "code as some kind of art".

You might have a different idea of what art looks like. Well designed abstractions are elegant, conceptually simple, and not-leaky. These tend to make code more maintainable and easier to comprehend.

One of the things you learn after writing code long enough, is that there is no such thing as a perfect abstraction, or even a non-leaky one. Eventually you run into edge cases, either in performance or functionality, that causes you to add warts to your abstraction.

Stipulating that no abstractions are perfect shouldn't be an excuse to abandon the entire notion. There's still a gradient of more or less elegant and flexible abstractions.

This definition of art, though not wrong, is so expansive as to be meaningless, especially in the context of this discussion.