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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

#101

Post by emil-lp »

Arainach wrote: post #76
dgellow wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn’t really clarify

It explicitly says "the band". All the context in the first paragraphs is about the music. It absolutely clarifies. The rest of the article talks about listening to the music, watching them (or wanting to watch them) in concert or in tour. Read the article. Or just look at the top search result for Phish. Stop being lazy.

I literally read the entire article without understanding that Phish is a band.

Call me lazy if you will. You could also have chosen to just say they're a band and recommend me a record to listen to.

Something something 1 in 10'000.

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

#102

Post by sho_hn »

littlexsparkee wrote: post #92
mettamage wrote: post #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’…

So much comes down to timing - lucky author that got to experience it for 30 whole years whereas some of us had a scant few to enjoy building as it was, flow state, and some semblance of security. At least I made plans the last 5 years in anticipation of change, can't imagine the sheer dislocation of just entering the job market now.

Pros and cons. Some of the people who were lucky to enjoy those 30 years are also emotionally being hit the hardest right now, and if life threw a few curveballs at you along the way you don't necesarily have attained the sort of stability where you don't have to worry, either. Plus ageism can make it even harder to pivot.

I have programmer friends in their 40s to 60s who are seriously depressed currently (and 20 year olds worried for theirnl future perspectives, of course). Mental health is not just a young person's game.

I strangely feel quite lucky that I got more and more into electronics and hardware over time as I moved from web and desktop more and more into embedded/consumer electronics and companies who also employ mechanical and EE engineers. When I was younger I used to dumbly worry this meant giving something up (the purity of software approaches, etc.), but instead it made me consider myself an Engineer with a capital E and strive to learn the engineering method more generally, and learn so many other fields of the trade. It turns out this is a much more resilient identity than just Programmer and I recommend that approach.

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

#104

Post by cmeiklejohn »

raddan wrote: post #17
cyberpunk wrote: post #4

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…

To be fair, I often listen to Phish and Aphex Twin. Didn’t we all program to jungle in the 90s?

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

#106

Post by deaux »

davkan wrote: post #20

For me it’s the dead. Most days I’d listen to one or two shows from today in history on relisten.net/today. I’m sysadmin not a dev but I also feel that managing an agent is a fundamentally different feeling than performing admin work like I used to. I used to build bridges out of software. I would learn how they work down to the nuts and bolts, and use them to make robust and occasionally clever solutions for our nee…

I've learnt more, and more quickly, with LLMs than before them.

Not syntax, no. Bash and Powershell are syntex. But tradeoffs, concepts, understanding new domains I didn't know about.

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

#107

Post by coffeefirst »

robotswantdata wrote: post #51

IMO assisted coding (auto complete style) has more flow state than the old days of getting stuck on obscure bugs (as satisfying as those were to crack). Full agent coding however is the complete opposite, you’re in constant damage control of a junior who moves fast and breaks everything. They’ve got better but still do dumb mistakes. lot of engineers are discovering firsthand what it’s like to manage a team of eager…

The other thing is as far as I can tell, the power-tool style modes where you use AI to boost focus and do quick research is both much cheaper and, by the time you account for all the damage control/prompt tuning/other externalities, roughly as fast as full agentic.

I suspect with the prices going up, that realization is going to be pretty appealing.

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

#108

Post by joecot »

artyom wrote: post #36

Everyone is talking about the agents part. I'm going to praise this post for describing it very clearly that some people, from a young age, don't need phases, growing up, trying things, figuring out, exploring the world, finding themselves. Some people are just born something (engineers, in this case), and they're that something for life. I always have a hard time explaining to "normal people" that such life is not b…

The people who go through phases are also born to be something for life: adaptable, and used to change. Being good at doing exactly one thing your entire life a certain way has the potentially fatal flaw of having significant issue doing anything else.

I feel like I've lived 3-4 completely different lives so far, but the constant is the ability to adapt to the next one, and still find joy in it while you're there. "Survival is the ability to swim in strange water."

Personally, the AI tools have been transformative for work, but haven't affected how I work much. I have always coded as a team. I'd often do the largest and most complicated parts myself, but work (both at work work and my hobby work) has always been about passing things between colleagues based on what our strengths were and how much time we had.

The AI tools are another colleague. They work incredibly fast, and I do less coding myself now, but my goal was always to solve the problem, not the code itself. The AI tools do a great job most of the time, but they sometimes screw up and need more guidance or me to step in to fix the thing (usually a very small error compared to the whole). If they screw it all up, we might need to start from scratch, or I might need to just do it myself. But that's not most of the time. And then I figure out the thing missing in my process to move them in the right direction, and improve it.

I feel like any software developer used to collaborating with, training, and mentoring other developers knows exactly how to work with AI tools, and the only main difference is how much effort I put into being really nice about it the whole time.

One main thing has changed. Before I would handle the most complicated problems people were having trouble with myself. Now I allow AI to work on them, even if I know I'll have to fix it. The difference is that I care about the time, the strain, and the morale of my coworkers. AI is just getting paid for iterating tokens, so I don't have to feel bad about what I ask it to figure out for me.

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

#109

Post by skybrian »

Latency matters if you want programmers to be able to work interactively. We multitask because LLMs are too slow.

That's happened before, with people submitting batch jobs in the mainframe era, people working on big projects that take an hour to compile, or people waiting for code reviews.

However, even if the LLMs become fast, the coding agent will likely bottleneck on running tools. You will need to keep your tests fast, too.

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

#110

Post by jorvi »

coffeefirst wrote: post #107
robotswantdata wrote: post #51

IMO assisted coding (auto complete style) has more flow state than the old days of getting stuck on obscure bugs (as satisfying as those were to crack). Full agent coding however is the complete opposite, you’re in constant damage control of a junior who moves fast and breaks everything. They’ve got better but still do dumb mistakes. lot of engineers are discovering firsthand what it’s like to manage a team of eager…

The other thing is as far as I can tell, the power-tool style modes where you use AI to boost focus and do quick research is both much cheaper and, by the time you account for all the damage control/prompt tuning/other externalities, roughly as fast as full agentic. I suspect with the prices going up, that realization is going to be pretty appealing.

Prices are not going up. DeepSeek V4 Pro is 5-10x cheaper than Claude 4.7.

As some of us have been predicting, model capability had already mostly plateaued, and the Chinese have and will continue to relentlessly push cost down. Chinese models will be used for 95% of things, with nation-native models for security/sovereignity-sensitive workloads. Eventually (5+ years from now), efficiency gains and hardware progress will make running local models the dominant way of doing things.

And yes, that puts the investors of Claude and OpenAI in quite a pickle.

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