you’re just complaining about unwittingly being promoted from an individual contributor to a manager.
"the higher up the corporate hierarchy, the less music"
For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
141–150 of 191 posts
Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
#142I 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 for me, LLMs are amazing because I get to be an idea guy Enjoy this while it lasts, because very shortly LLMs are going to be fundamentally better at being the "idea guy" as well. I had the same feeling reading this article today as I did reading the NYT article about the closing of Butter Ridge dairy farm. All that family wants to do is raise cows, name them, and milk them but it doesn't work as a business anym…
No they won’t. And what you describe about the farm is just whitewashing marketing
Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
#143Earlier 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…
To be fair, I often listen to Phish and Aphex Twin. Didn’t we all program to jungle in the 90s?
> Didn’t we all program to jungle in the 90s?
Still do!
Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
Coding with agents has also entered a positive feedback loop with million developers essentially paying to perform RL on frontier models.
Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
#145IMO 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…
> 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).
I strongly doubt that. Flow state happens when you can disassociate thinking and doing. Most of your brain is on the thinking while the doing lags behind. It’s like driving on a well known road. You don’t pay that much attention to the act of driving. Instead maybe you start planning what you want to do on your next stop
Using ai auto complete would be like your well known road, but turned into an obstacle course. You need your full focus on the road. Not that different from someone that is unfamiliar with the road, but not a flow state either. Full agentic coding is you being in the passenger seat with a driver known to be sometimes erratic. Less thinking but more worrying.
Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
#146Earlier 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…
Yes, that’s basically what I’m talking about. Without subsidies, that’s a lot of incentive to use more efficient/open weight models, but also to use them in ways that are less compute intensive—fewer tokens, shorter reasoning chains, less nonstop, and generally tie up less hardware for a lot less time.
Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
#147Not Phish, but I have had music on in the background when coding for three decades at least now.
And not even necessarily when coding… I find that if there is no music playing, I will start a song in my head. That can get frustrating—the song loops, perhaps in fact just the chorus. So I turn on the external music and it seems to allow my brain to do other things.
Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> I want the frontier on prem to be true > that don’t ship your codebase to Beijing DeepSeek is open weight, open source.
> DeepSeek is open weight, open source.
Sure, but I can't currently afford the hardware to run the frontier model.
Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
#149Yep, 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.
> now if we want to do it for craft it’s time to contribute to OpenBSD or something
I think projects like these will end up being the highest-quality pieces of software out there.
Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
#150Hi, author here! I’m really disappointed that I wasn’t in the right headspace to name this post “the trick is to surrender to the flow”, the lyric from Phish’s The Lizards. But, you know, hindsight.
That would’ve been a great title!
My brother still follows them across the country. Reading this and the comments gave me real insight into what longtime developers are feeling
I’m brand new to coding and have only done some AI-assisted work while learning. It blows my mind that people can do this at a high level without assistance - major respect
I hope you find that flow again