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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

#171

Post by hyperadvanced »

mday27 wrote: post #139
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

True, but if your true calling was coding, this change would be much harder to stomach

I don’t think anyone’s true calling is coding. That’s like saying you really like the act of writing, so much that you’d become a stenographer or a typist or something where you do zero higher level thinking and just absent mindedly press buttons.

Most people who are good at tech hate coding so much that they come up with elaborate abstractions so that they can avoid doing more of it.

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

#173

Post by stagger87 »

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…

I'm in the same boat, I code mostly by hand. I really enjoy it. The OP seems to have given it up without a fight, and that doesn't make sense to me. Especially because with 30 years experience I'm guessing they have FU money and are probably better than most people using AI anyways. Keep doing what you love and "surrender to the flow".

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

#174

Post by Arainach »

dr_kretyn wrote: post #132
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 re read that paragraph a few times hoping that I missed something. Then gave up and went on to find the answer in comments. I thought the author was describing some feeling, or maybe some action. That "that to me" isn't clear with "that".

That was merely the first occurrence. Elsewhere the article says verbatim "Phish is a band".

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

#175

Post by davkan »

davnicwil wrote: post #161
davkan wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes certainly, I used to have some sense of the future now it’s hard to see past a year.

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

#176

Post by dgellow »

Arainach wrote: post #167
dgellow wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 artic…

Stop being lazy in this context is by definition ad hominem. I won’t engage with the rest though.

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

#177

Post by ytoawwhra92 »

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…

You don't know what your thing is until you try it.

Some people get lucky and the first thing they try turns out to be their thing.

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

#178

Post by ytoawwhra92 »

perrygeo wrote: post #80
cmiles74 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think concentrating on the physical act of typing on the keyboard is maybe taking it a little too far. The author of the OP talks more about holding a lot of the problem in their head and entering a "flow" state where they figure out a solution. Most of my interaction with AI models and agents is still mediated by a keyboard and still requires a lot of "typing ascii characters". ;-)

The "typing ascii characters" angle is a bit hyperbolic, I admit. But my intention is to get people to think about their software, not their personal experience of it. BTW, there's nothing preventing you from using AI agents and staying in the flow state. If you want that, the universe is not stopping you. In fact, not dealing with the minutia of source code may well free us up and allow even greater flow experiences…

When I retire almost none of the software I produced during my career will still be in use, but I'll have memories of 40 years of work to live with until I pass away.

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

#179

Post by tom_ »

ks2048 wrote: post #33
tom_ wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old timey American guitar noodler band.

I was about to argue with "Old timey", but yeah, I guess any band that has existed for over 40 years is old timey. I've been a fan since '96. I guess we're all old now.

The late 90s was the first time I'd heard of them. I was a university student at the time, and one of my friends was a foreign student, from America, and a fan. He also liked this other band called The Grateful Dead. I'd never heard of them either. They sucked too.

(Though, that said: many years later - i.e., quite recently - I listened to a bunch of their stuff on YouTube, while thinking back to my student days. And, actually, some of it is pretty good. At least, it was when they had pigpen singing.)

(Also: if you are a connoisseur of almostbutnotquiteinsanepersonposting, allow me to highly recommend The Grateful Dead's sound engineer's series of posts about his diet: https://justmeat.co/archives/active-low-carber-forum-posts/)

Anyway, if it's from the last century, it's old timey to me.

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

#180

Post by Izkata »

hyperadvanced wrote: post #171
mday27 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but if your true calling was coding, this change would be much harder to stomach

I don’t think anyone’s true calling is coding. That’s like saying you really like the act of writing, so much that you’d become a stenographer or a typist or something where you do zero higher level thinking and just absent mindedly press buttons. Most people who are good at tech hate coding so much that they come up with elaborate abstractions so that they can avoid doing more of it.

I recommend you read the post because that's a really bad misunderstanding of the mindset, and like the comment at the top of this chain says, the post explains it well.
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