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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

#161

Post by davnicwil »

davkan wrote: post #114
davnicwil wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 triv…

appreciate the response. I understand better now, and agree with a lot of what you've said about kinda the mechanics of scripting stuff 'by hand' being just quite fun and satisfying but maybe no longer the expected way to do things, and so in some sense the sweet spot of that being something you can be paid to do is largely over. Interesting times for our profession.

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

#162

Post by dgellow »

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.

Please don’t use ad hominem on HN. I did read the article and it wasn’t clear at all, as you can see others also faced that situation. You don’t have to engage if you think we are lazy. The aggressive tone is completely unwarranted for such a casual discussion

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

#163

Post by coffeefirst »

underdeserver wrote: post #159
beej71 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DeepSeek is open weight, open source. Sure, but I can't currently afford the hardware to run the frontier model.

Okay but that hardware doesn't have to be in Beijing, it can be in a Dutch data centre.

Yep. I’ve been using the Kagi Assistant with Kimi2 running out of providers in the US and Netherlands. The total monthly cost averages around $2.

It be great if more people drop good open models. But either way stuff like this is the future.

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

#164

Post by foltik »

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.

It may feel like you’re designing a bridge, but in reality you’re just asking a worker to do that too, and rubber stamping it when the drawings look reasonable.

One day you’ll be asked why it collapsed and realize you don’t actually understand it anymore.

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

#165

Post by specproc »

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…

What I really enjoy is learning. I came back to computing after many years in another field, and was completely in love. Everything finally clicked, I'd spend hours reading everything I could, coding, trying things out, letting half-half-built projects pile up as I discovered new things.

AI has completely ruined this for me. Its boring having someone else do stuff for you. And worse, I feel I'm un-learning at a rapid rate.

The magic has gone, I'm not sure I want to be in this game in another five years.

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

#166

Post by modriano »

llmthrowaway20 wrote: post #125
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 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…

> Enjoy this while it lasts, because very shortly LLMs are going to be fundamentally better at being the "idea guy" as well.

Maybe for the ideas that are so far from novel that there's a corpus of training data that could train an LLM to reproduce it. But for actually novel ideas, LLMs won't ever be much use. They can't interact with the world directly, they can only interact with text (or I guess bits).

And I guess that's not much of a distinction, as truly novel good ideas are very rare and you can go very far applying a good idea into a new domain. But at the edges where true novelty is required, LLMs will either hallucinate or guide you away from the edge.

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

#167

Post by Arainach »

dgellow wrote: post #162
Arainach wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please don’t use ad hominem on HN. I did read the article and it wasn’t clear at all, as you can see others also faced that situation. You don’t have to engage if you think we are lazy. The aggressive tone is completely unwarranted for such a casual discussion

The top search results for "Phish" and "Down with Disease" show Phish the band. There is no ad hominem - writing a comment asking someone else to answer that question for you without doing that basic step is lazy.

The article says "Phish is a band". Verbatim. It talks about Phish and listening to music in every paragraph.

If people read this article and didn't get that, perhaps I should stop dismissing the news articles talking about the state of education and attention spans as hyperbole.

> I’d need to ask the interviewer to put Phish on....I could not, with any reliability, get into the zone without the music.

> All I ever wanted to do was listen to Phish and program

> I heard Phish for the first time at thirteen.

> Phish is a band that rewards you for staying in one place for a long time. The jams are long. The compositions unfold.

> The band would play in Hampton or Alpine Valley or wherever

> I have listened to Phish every day since I was fifteen...I have listened to certain shows so many times that I can sing the solos back, note by note,

> I tried to keep the music on. I’m writing this in the days after nine nights of Phish at the Sphere. Since I finished grad school and got a real job, I’ve gone to every show I could, every tour, every residency, making up for lost time. The music is more present in my life now than it has ever been. It isn’t what’s gone

I don't care if English is your first language - if anyone read the article they make the point that it is a band over and over and over. Explicitly.

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

#168

Post by bayarearefugee »

hartator wrote: post #59

> Phish Thought it was an early AI or something. OP, I sure it’s just a transition. AI will get faster, feedback loops shorter, and we will be back at a more traditional flow state.

> OP, I sure it’s just a transition. AI will get faster, feedback loops shorter, and we will be back at a more traditional flow state.

You are right that it is a transitional state, but the end of the transition isn't that developers return to flow, it is that developers no longer have any reason to be employed.

The end state (assuming LLMs and other AI systems continue to improve at current rates or better) is one where everyone can produce any kind of digital content quickly with minimal toil.

Some people, who imagine themselves as modern Jobs-esque idea men of great taste like the idea of this but they aren't fully thinking about the consequences of easy content creation.

If you can get an LLM to produce a product of such clearly great design through your innate sense of taste, many someone elses can also point their agentic LLMs at your product, clone everything good about it very quickly and undersell you in a rapid race to zero value in a market that is a sea of competing noise.

As AI systems continue to improve at their core ability of mimicry there will be no moats in software anymore, for anyone.

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

#169

Post by Arainach »

emil-lp wrote: post #101
Arainach wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Asking others to explain things without doing a single search of your own is lazy, as is not reading the article:

> Phish is a band that rewards you for staying in one place for a long time. The jams are long. The compositions unfold.

"Phish is a band". Literally. Verbatim.

Coworkers who do that get told not to, and if they do it a second time their boss gets told to talk to them about it.

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

#170

Post by hyperadvanced »

uncircle wrote: post #126
hyperadvanced wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great reason not to identify too much with your work. I have enjoyed AI because it has reminded me that my real calling is art, and that I should be doing that at 8 pm, not coding

Not sure if your 'enjoyed AI' is meant literally. I have escaped my existential crisis and found solace in art as well, simply because it's a very human method of self-expression and taking shortcuts to pain, effort and creativity by prompting LLMs is still frowned upon, at least by those that take art seriously. The only way I can still enjoy programming now is if it's applied to artistic endeavours. I'm done with t…

I do literally enjoy working with AI sometimes, other times it is hell. But sometimes coding by hand is hell, too, usually when working on other people’s extremely hacky and procedural code.
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