I have never understood how people can program while listening to music.
For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
81–90 of 191 posts
Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
#82I think flow state can come back as the models get more sophisticated/mature and then more optimized for speed. It will not be the same type of work as before, but the flow of building and engineering at the speed of thought can happen again. You can see hints of this with the faster models today.
Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for this perspective. Do we really miss typing ascii characters into an editor? That seems to me the least consequential and least interesting part of building software systems. Always has been. Dare I say those stuck on nostalgia for pressing keys are demonstrating that they cared more about their own personal experience than about the outcome of their work? Now that coding is automated, we have to elevate ou…
> Do we really miss typing ascii characters into an editor? Yes. > Dare I say those stuck on nostalgia for pressing keys are demonstrating that they cared more about their own personal experience than about the outcome of their work I care about the outcome, which is why I don't trust it to a fucking LLM Valuing quality over velocity is not selfish
> Valuing quality over velocity is not selfish
Fully agree. I never mentioned velocity or advocated for lower quality. In fact, this statement very well sums up my point: we should care about the thing we're producing, not our personal experience of coding it.
Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
#84Programming 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.
Works great. No wonder China is eating our lunch.
Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
#85People 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've found that nobody that doesn't code is at all interested in the topic.
This triple-negative is hard to parse.
Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
#86Beautiful post. The job has totally changed in that last year and there are no guideposts. Maybe I should spend half of my work day in still zen meditation to maximise my ability to manage the agent swam for the rest of the day? Who even knows.
Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
#87What is there to say except everyone is different and to each their own! I can't imagine wanting to listen to Phish for extended periods of time, muchless while working. But it's beautiful that someone else might. I am sorry for your loss original poster.
Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
#88Programming 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.
Thanks for this perspective. Do we really miss typing ascii characters into an editor? That seems to me the least consequential and least interesting part of building software systems. Always has been. Dare I say those stuck on nostalgia for pressing keys are demonstrating that they cared more about their own personal experience than about the outcome of their work? Now that coding is automated, we have to elevate ou…
Dare I say those stuck on nostalgia for pressing keys are demonstrating that they cared more about their own personal experience than about the outcome of their work? Now that coding is automated, we have to elevate our ambitions.
YES. The beauty of programming is and always was that, first, you enjoyed it and, second, for some oddball reason you could actually get paid to do it. And one can't produce anything good unless you actually love working on it which means you want to put yourself working on it. The outcome might accidentally serve the one who pays for it but ultimately what did get the work finished was the sensation when you were reaching the point where you would finally tie things together and see everything you designed come to life and work together.
AI doesn't give you that personal involvement. We can do it but it's a different line of work and we care very little about what goes in and what comes out. We just do the grunt work of connecting the two ends. We're not for a fuck interested in elevating ambitions which is a word that relates to what is outside while all the good stuff comes from the inside.
Re: For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do we really miss typing ascii characters into an editor? Yes. > Dare I say those stuck on nostalgia for pressing keys are demonstrating that they cared more about their own personal experience than about the outcome of their work I care about the outcome, which is why I don't trust it to a fucking LLM Valuing quality over velocity is not selfish
> Valuing quality over velocity is not selfish Fully agree. I never mentioned velocity or advocated for lower quality. In fact, this statement very well sums up my point: we should care about the thing we're producing, not our personal experience of coding it.
The product and the process are not orthogonal.