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For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day

christophermeiklejohn.com

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Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day

#21
post #5
post #3

What is Phish?

Sentences 5 and 6 of the article, top of the second paragraph: > That move is Phish fans in miniature. Someone cared enough about the song and the bit that they rebuilt a piece of pop culture around the band.

That doesn’t really clarify

Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day

#22
post #17

Yep, I’m in this boat too. I’ve given up trying to get that feeling back at work. We were lucky for 20 years, now if we want to do it for craft it’s time to contribute to OpenBSD or something — with phish on, not for money.

Ditto. I programmed for 30 years with Underworld on. Listening to the beginning of Juanita/Kiteless instantly drops me into flow state. And it no longer fits if I am using an agent. I appear to be almost the same age as the writer of the post; just a little older. And I got that grocery store job. So I am working on a personal OpenBSD-related project. I have no idea if it will ever see the light of day. It scratches…

Everything. Everything. Everything. :))

Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day

#23

We’re a long way from figuring out how to get flow state with agents. Maybe some sort of less stonerish upper-based master of the universe overseeing 100s of agents manic state. I think there’d be a lot of demand from long time engineers that loved working in flow state to build tooling that encouraged flow. I think tokens/s needs to get like 10x faster first, because you’re going to be heading into a world where you…

[deleted]

Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day

#24
People are blown away when I tell them that, in the last 6 months, my job of coding has changed entirely, and that I now write very little code, but instead manage agents who write it. It is still engineering, and I still very much care what that code is, it's interfaces, how it interacts with the world, how it is tested, etc. etc., but it has taken me a while to get used to the idea of me not writing the code. I'm still not sure how I feel about it, although I am getting more done, and it has helped me keep better focus on "the big picture". That is tough to do when your day is spent in the weeds.

Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day

#25
I feel his pain. I am more towards the opposite end of the spectrum [1]. I program to get things done. Usually, I don’t like programming. It’s too focused on one thing. Sometimes I like it though, precisely because it’s focused on one thing. But I love the things you can imagine and build with it. So for me, LLMs are amazing because I get to be an idea guy when I want but sometimes I can go deep, also when I want. I’ve kept up too, so I have the experience backing it up.

With that said, when I read this blog post. I feel the author’s pain. And it’s the first time that I emotionally get what the other side of the programming spectrum feels what it has lost. I feel sad about it. And because of it, I will also wonder about ways of bringing it back.

[1] not fully though. Something I can love coding by hand for months.

Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day

#26
post #19

Programming with Claude is still engineering. It is like designing a bridge, which remains engineering even when a worker pours the concrete instead of you. In the past we were forced to pour the concrete ourselves. I understand how many of us enjoyed the sound and the smell of the concrete being poured. Myself, I’m happy to never get my hands dirty again, and focus on the actual engineering.

This is like the third bridge + concrete comparison I’ve seen in the past two days from a new account.

Did I miss something?

Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day

#27
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto. I programmed for 30 years with Underworld on. Listening to the beginning of Juanita/Kiteless instantly drops me into flow state. And it no longer fits if I am using an agent. I appear to be almost the same age as the writer of the post; just a little older. And I got that grocery store job. So I am working on a personal OpenBSD-related project. I have no idea if it will ever see the light of day. It scratches…

Everything. Everything. Everything. :))

Not lager, lager, lager? ;)

Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day

#29

We’re a long way from figuring out how to get flow state with agents. Maybe some sort of less stonerish upper-based master of the universe overseeing 100s of agents manic state. I think there’d be a lot of demand from long time engineers that loved working in flow state to build tooling that encouraged flow. I think tokens/s needs to get like 10x faster first, because you’re going to be heading into a world where you…

> We’re a long way from figuring out how to get flow state with agents

its been the opposite for me. being able to create things with almost zero friction has lead me to have to slow down for my own sanity at times. I've had to setup "handcoding time" as a way to keep me touching virtual grass lest I completely lose myself building stuff at all hours.

literally thinking of taking up Haskell just to have a language that forces me to slow down and think in my off hours.

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