ego-oriented programming
A term I just invented. It sounds bad, but it just means programming for yourself, not for any external purpose or idea or team or faction or whatever. Not so much selfish as self-involved.
This stance is entirely inappropriate in professional contexts, where the whole point is to embody a kind of other-oriented practice. There's even a term for this: Egoless programming - Wikipedia. Software is not supposed to bear a personal stamp, its more like an effort to attain a Platonic ideal.Well – to me it always has been. "The Right Thing" in MIT hacker jargon always had that quality. Lisp has that quality.
Ego-oriented programming is for amateurs, who practice something for love, not money. And the criteria for evaluation are different.
Of course the rise of LLM-assissted coding means that anyone can be an ego-oriented programmer, in fact you kind of have to be one now. Your personal taste is the one thing the machines can't replicate, and the more idiosyncratic or hard to define it is, the better.