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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

#61

Post by gavmor »

cmiles74 wrote: post #46
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 concre…

> 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.

TBH, I've often felt like a weirdo who enjoys "the wrong things" about software engineering.

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

#63

Post by davnicwil »

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 reviewing the viablity of solutions from the LLM which occasionally are going to introduce new ideas, do things in a similar but slightly different way to how you would, or even be subtly wrong in ways that also exercise your ability to adapt and learn and nudge it in the right direction instead.

I don't really understand how the alternative could be true, in the sense of your knowledge not being relevant, as that would imply a couple of things that don't seem true as of now: that LLMs always produce optimal solutions in any given scenario, and (as a corollary) that sysadmin is entirely automated apart from some sort of thin beurocratic human approval/deployment layer.

In my experience so far I've found sysadmin type stuff to actually be what LLMs help me the least with, excluding text-in-text-out scripts, precisely because the setup often has to be so custom to the system, there's loads of side effects that are hard to communicate to the LLM so it oversimplifies and gets things wrong often.

So hopefully you can understand the implied challenge behind the question. I'm not saying your feeling of it being less fun is invalid. But I'm really curious about what you said specifically about the fun of applying knowledge and learning having been diminished. What do I have wrong?

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

#64

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#65

Post by gavmor »

gavmor wrote: post #50

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 gradu…

FWIW my workflow is hours of intense research and design being constantly interrupted by agents finishing/choking on the last plan my previous research produced.

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

#66

Post by [deleted] »

cmiles74 wrote: post #46
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 concre…

[deleted]

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

#67

Post by bluefirebrand »

robotswantdata wrote: post #51

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). 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

I find this impossible to wrap my head around. Any time I autocomplete more than a single line, my flow is destroyed when I have to review what was just autocompleted. The only way I could remain in "flow" in this circumstance would be if I didn't review the code... I'm not ready to trust the LLMs that much yet

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

#68

Post by TFNA »

furyofantares wrote: post #56
nu11ptr wrote: post #24

People are blown away when I tell them that, in the last 6 months, my job of coding has changed entirely, and that I now write very little code, but instead manage agents who write it. It is still engineering, and I still very much care what that code is, it's interfaces, how it interacts with the world, how it is tested, etc. etc., but it has taken me a while to get used to the idea of me not writing the code. I'm s…

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.

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

#69

Post by jdw64 »

cmiles74 wrote: post #46
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 concre…

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