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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

#41

Post by vessenes »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #29
vessenes wrote: post #12

We’re a long way from figuring out how to get flow state with agents. Maybe some sort of less stonerish upper-based master of the universe overseeing 100s of agents manic state. I think there’d be a lot of demand from long time engineers that loved working in flow state to build tooling that encouraged flow. I think tokens/s needs to get like 10x faster first, because you’re going to be heading into a world where you…

> We’re a long way from figuring out how to get flow state with agents its been the opposite for me. being able to create things with almost zero friction has lead me to have to slow down for my own sanity at times. I've had to setup "handcoding time" as a way to keep me touching virtual grass lest I completely lose myself building stuff at all hours. literally thinking of taking up Haskell just to have a language th…

Yeah I agree — I don’t think I said what I’ve experienced very well — there is a different sort of state you can get in during a large multiagent session. But to me it’s more manic, not ‘smooth’ or peaceful. On a good day hand coding I will often feel groggy coming out of it, possibly subverbal, like I’ve recruited most of my brain to doing one thing for some time. I’ve never had a job that I could do that in, but I imagine the subset of engineers that do are pretty happy.

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

#45

Post by sublinear »

Am I the only one who doesn't get either side of this?

AI still sucks pretty bad at writing code. The only people I've ever known to need a "flow" state to write code are junior devs.

Everyone else is used to constant interruptions and has been through every layer of abstraction many many times. This is why those with experience find it so tempting to say this job can be automated away, but they forget how many gotchas there are, how they crop up, and how brittle all this crap always was. AI is actively making this problem worse.

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

#46

Post by cmiles74 »

jdw64 wrote: post #18

Reading this, I felt a familiar kind of sadness. I have also felt some version of this recently: the sense of loss, and the question of whether I am still a “real programmer” if I am no longer writing code in the same way. There is a strange grief in letting go of a skill that once gave you pride. But when I think about it from the author’s position, I may actually have been lucky. For this person, writing code may h…

I understand that commercial companies want to get as much value out of each developer as possible, I understand that managers want work to complete as quickly as possible. I can see why they are so excited about LLM tooling and the current increase in output.

This post makes a good point: managing LLM models isn't really the same thing as thinking hard about a particular problem, solving that problem and then concretizing it in code. If the work becomes managing models, I think we're going to see a pretty stark divergence between what people enjoy about developing software today and what the job is requiring. I'm not yet convinced LLM tooling will stick but, if it does, it makes me wonder what kind of person will be doing software development. Maybe some of same people and they find something else to enjoy about the job but I bet a lot of a different kind of person.

Personally, I am very uncomfortable with the idea that all software development might be mediated by LLM tooling and, as a consequence, require payment to a large corporate entity like Anthropic or Google. Hopefully some open source projects will remain open to accepting PRs from people, like the author of the OP, who enjoy working in that "flow" state. I enjoy writing software as a hobby (as well as at my job) but it looks like the hobby might become a larger source of personal fulfillment.

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

#47

Post by hamrocksissors »

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.

Chemical engineer here - I look at this similar to how a lot of professional engineers work, drafting gets passed off to eng techs, pfds get passed off to eng techs... The "actual engineering" is in the ideas, the applications, the reviews, and most importantly the final accountability.

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

#48

Post by willio58 »

> The jams are built for one continuous arc of attention. The work is staccato.

Couldn't agree more. I'm personally okay with how engineering is changing. At the end of the day, the code is a means to an end for me. That said, the "queue" aspect of how software development is headed is so real. It's a different way of working, and I find the biggest challenge is staying engaged and tuned in while you might have agents take 30 seconds here, 2 minutes there, 5 minutes there, etc. It's easy to get distracted when waiting.

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

#49

Post by kaiwn »

blanched wrote: post #26
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.

This is like the third bridge + concrete comparison I’ve seen in the past two days from a new account. Did I miss something?

lmao, I think I read it here and then I proceeded to think I came up with it myself. I’m a fraud. (I put “concrete” into the search field and found it)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47996022

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

#50

Post by gavmor »

This is a brilliant, obscure, high-fidelity indicator that speaks volumes (pun? pun intended) about the change and—critically—casts the change in unambiguous relief.

Programming does not exist or, rather, programming doesn't pay. Whatever this is—vibe coding, agentic software development—it's a new and different discipline, and it may be the only game in town [citation needed].

It's not even been a particularly gradual change. It's been a stark, totalizing turnover in the last 18 months. I don't know how long this era will last (maybe we'll discover a new sort of operational scurvy, and this movement will be mocked and scorned as a ludicrously anemic fad) but it'll leave a distinct layer of discoloration in the geological record.

I've never really been into Phish. Lately, I've been vibing out to the hyperactive chiptune groups Anamanaguchi and Toby Fox. Justice also makes my playlist, alongside more pathos-laden groups like The Glitch Mob and Moderat.

Hell, once I get this teams-of-teams jj-and-weave harness firmly in hand, I can pop into Agent-of-Empires and drop the needle on some Al Hirt—Music to Watch [Pulls] By.

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