For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by raddan » Sun, May 03, 2026, 6:41 PM UTC

sho_hn wrote: post #102

littlexsparkee wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yea…

It's funny that you mention EE. When I went back to school for CS in the early 2000s (I was a philosophy major... dumb), I was taking night classes with EEs who were fleeing to software. This was in the Boston area. A large contingent of my classmates worked at Avid. They started moving jobs out of the US and employees were told that if they switched to software they could remain employed. The mood was pretty grim, and these folks commented to me more than once that I was lucky that I loved writing software, because largely, they didn't.

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

#112

Post by superjan » Sun, May 03, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

Phish? It turns out to be a band: https://phish.com/

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

#113

Post by foolserrandboy » Sun, May 03, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #100

konart wrote: post #91

I'm not sure how I feel (or should feel) when I read posts list this. Here I am still coding (mostly) by hand. While I also sometimes do chat with qwen or use an agent to save some time writting tests or yaml, or "implementing" a draft version of a change, I can't really understand this "the job is changed". Do some companies in some countries force you to use these agents? Are they going to fire you because Jack or…

When ChatGPT came out, I was beyond excited. I had a tool to generate config files, and bounce ideas off of, and help unblock me when I got stupid arcane logs I didn't understand. That didn't feel existentially depressing at all; it was just glorified Google in my mind. When the vibe coding tools like Claude and Codex came along, I got into this kind of dread. I'm sort of required to use them for work (we are "AI-fir…

Can you describe how you work in this higher level? Sounds like scratches a similar itch that traditional programming offers.

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

#114

Post by davkan » Sun, May 03, 2026, 6:45 PM UTC

davnicwil wrote: post #63

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 completely understand the active/passive difference but I have a question for you that I think especially applies to sysadmin: isn't the knowledge you have and your continual learning just as important if what you're essentially doing now is using an LLM to help you find problems, propose solutions, and test the solutions? Maybe it's even more important since you've gone from crafting your own solutions to reviewin…

So the biggest change is the day to day workflow change of just pumping out little powershell scripts for whatever I need and not building those scripting skills or performing the manual rote admin work. Rather than manually expand a disk in the hypervisor and then sshing in and expanding the partition and filesystem Claude spits out a one liner and I run it. While not challenging or particularly rewarding those trivial tasks are a soothing part of the constant flow of work that i didn’t dislike. Solid things in which i understood every aspect becomes a black box that does it for me and i have to reinterrogate or accept it, and in which it’ll never be worth the time to learn myself.

As for the deeper work, the most recent example I have is deploying an observability stack for our lab cluster. In the past i would have done way more upfront work on understanding the alternatives and the deployment. I would have known every line of config before pressing deploy including the ones I chose not to set. The why and how of everything. Now the most efficient way is just to tell Claude to stand up a monitoring stack in the manner that apps are already deployed on the cluster and iterate with Claude once it’s up and running. Why bother diving deep when you can be running a proof of concept in five minutes and then just see if it falls over.

Another part of it is that i really dislike learning through a prompt. I don’t like summaries, i like man pages. I don’t want to interrogate a result i want to provide a complete solution.

Part of it too is I’m fairly new to all this professionally. I’ve only been at it 5 years, though hobby much longer. Basically i can feel myself growing and getting better and now suddenly there’s this genius moron in my pocket that so much better than I ever dreamed I could be while simultaneously having huge shortfalls. It’s a just an instant paradigm shift and after the first week of glee it’s not been a positive feeling.

It’s not that my existing knowledge isn’t relevant at all, there’s still a huge base of networking and systems knowledge that’s necessary. It’s routinely surprised me in my career when i speak with a greybeard developer who is a an absolute wizard to me but dns/tcp etc are just a black box to them. Or when I talk to a friend new into the selfhosting hobby and i try to explain something to them that think is simple and i realize there’s 10 years of accumulated knowledge underneath that simple concept in order to actually grok it.

I don’t know if that answered your question, just an unstructured ramble. I think the heart of it is that googling and research and things being concrete and complete understandings of workings and interactions and variables and secrets and configs etc are giving way to a black box pumping out systems and it mostly working out of the box and often that is simply good enough for now and it’s on to the next thing.

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

#115

Post by raddan » Sun, May 03, 2026, 6:45 PM UTC

TFNA wrote: post #68

furyofantares wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? When I've brought it up with anyone that doesn't code, I've found them to be totally disinterested in the topic.

I don't code (well, I write scripts for my own personal use and use Emacs), but I follow with interest these reports from software developers. Why? Because my profession is similar screen- and keyboard-based intellectual work, and what has come for devs will probably come for many other careers.

It's worth mentioning that one reason LLMs can clean up on coding tasks is because of the volumes of available data. Not only has the world produced copious volumes of code, they continue to produce copious volumes of code, and some code can even be generated synthetically (ie, not from an LLM, albeit at high cost).

Other domains are not like this. There will probably never be enough poetry out there to make an LLM do anything but be a poor imitation of a poet. This data is extremely hard to generate.

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

#116

Post by giveaccountpls » Sun, May 03, 2026, 6:45 PM UTC

perrygeo wrote: post #55

kaiwn wrote: 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.

Thanks for this perspective. Do we really miss typing ascii characters into an editor? That seems to me the least consequential and least interesting part of building software systems. Always has been. Dare I say those stuck on nostalgia for pressing keys are demonstrating that they cared more about their own personal experience than about the outcome of their work? Now that coding is automated, we have to elevate ou…

> Giving up your own personal stake in the process is literally what brings something as beautiful as Phish's music into existence

Unless Page McConnell is creating his music with AI these days, I don't think this point holds.

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

#117

Post by sho_hn » Sun, May 03, 2026, 6:48 PM UTC

raddan wrote: post #111

sho_hn wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yea…

It's funny that you mention EE. When I went back to school for CS in the early 2000s (I was a philosophy major... dumb), I was taking night classes with EEs who were fleeing to software. This was in the Boston area. A large contingent of my classmates worked at Avid. They started moving jobs out of the US and employees were told that if they switched to software they could remain employed. The mood was pretty grim, a…

Right, I also hear that sentiment pretty often. I don't regret having a software career and am very glad for my 25 years of C++ and many other things. I wouldn't want to be without that, and it probably did and does pay better.

However, it's pretty nice that these days I can also swing a semi-decent PCB, know my way around scopes and logic analyzers quite well, CAD something up for DFM in a number of processes from thermoplastics to machining, taught myself a fair bit of structural engineering, set up a FEM analysis correctly, etc. If only because it lets me bridge worlds and tie software and hardware together more effectively in the projects I'm in.

I cannot do any of these things as well as a seasoned veteran, but it has given me a broader appreciation of engineering overall and the commonalities between it all, to the point where I can also muster up leadership in engineering orgs more broadly and am not as hurt over the prospect that my pure programming skills might get devalued or diluted, or change.

For example, software engineers generally scoff at the perceived crustyness and lack of agility in classical mechanical engineering processes, but on the other hand mechanical engineering is far more experienced at defense-in-depth type approaches, dealing in components that have a failure rate to them and designing with error bars and safety factors, and I find some of that mindset has transferred quite naturally to engineering with our unreliable LLM friends at scale the past two years.

It takes a lot of the sting out if listening to Phish isn't your only move. Well, maybe not a lot, but at least it doesn't get so existential. Don't be a Programmer, be an Engineer. It's a lot easier to feel useful during a time of much doubt.

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

#118

Post by uncircle » Sun, May 03, 2026, 6:51 PM UTC

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…

> Some people are just born something (engineers, in this case), and they're that something for life.

Yes, and it's very not fun when your identity is being reshaped before your eyes in the matter of a couple years.

I wonder how many developers are going through real grief right now, while everybody else, lacking empathy, are just repeating "get a grip, it's just a tool" or "you better adapt or you're done".

Well, I know I have gone through these difficult emotions, and I choose now not to identify with my work, or at least my career any more. I certainly do not identify as what most people these days refer to as 'software engineer' any more.

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

#119

Post by cess11 » Sun, May 03, 2026, 6:51 PM UTC

I was around when cPanel and Wordpress broke through and saw professionals scoff at it and left it to others, who subsequently built the majority of web sites.

It's interesting to now see professionals making a similar move themselves when a new cPanel/Wordpress has arrived and wring their hands about how they 'get more done' but 'lost the craft'.

Inbetween I've come across quite a lot of scoffing about using XML to generate code in Java and C#, or just XML itself. Buying queries from a database corporation seems quite a bit weirder to me than designing a data schema, especially if both use cases are supposed to lead to some server boilerplate and an API on a database.

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

#120

Post by robotswantdata » Sun, May 03, 2026, 6:52 PM UTC

jorvi wrote: post #110

coffeefirst wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I want the frontier on prem to be true but IMO not good enough yet unless async.

What started as all-you-can-eat $50 buffet has quietly become a $6k bill, frontier models that don’t ship your codebase to Beijing don’t come cheap anymore.