Software is art. Code is just one representation of it.
It's like an architect designing a building. The drawings are not art by themselves. They need to represent the design in a way that's faithful, precise, easy to understand for anyone with experience, logically structured and easy to update if any requirements change. That is code. If you write bad code your app will be slow and hard to develop further, but it doesn't make the whole thing bad because the code is not the software.
The physical structure is also just another way to represent a building, the one people actually interact with in real life. That is the binary you give to your users. But the art is in the design that came from the mind of the architect, not the drawings or the steel and concrete. It's the thing no machine can replace because it's completely subjective.
UX and graphics is art. API design is art. These are the things that matter and none of them depend on you personally writing the code, or how the code looks at all.
You can treat your code as art and spend months making it look perfect. There's nothing wrong with that, and if you decide to do it then your code will probably end up being better quality too. But you can't pretend it's the only way.
It's like an architect designing a building. The drawings are not art by themselves. They need to represent the design in a way that's faithful, precise, easy to understand for anyone with experience, logically structured and easy to update if any requirements change. That is code. If you write bad code your app will be slow and hard to develop further, but it doesn't make the whole thing bad because the code is not the software.
The physical structure is also just another way to represent a building, the one people actually interact with in real life. That is the binary you give to your users. But the art is in the design that came from the mind of the architect, not the drawings or the steel and concrete. It's the thing no machine can replace because it's completely subjective.
UX and graphics is art. API design is art. These are the things that matter and none of them depend on you personally writing the code, or how the code looks at all.
You can treat your code as art and spend months making it look perfect. There's nothing wrong with that, and if you decide to do it then your code will probably end up being better quality too. But you can't pretend it's the only way.