9 ms·

For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day

• deivid 6mo ago
  This captures a lot of how I've been feeling lately. Thanks for sharing
• emil-lp 6mo ago
  What is Phish?
  • Arainach 6mo ago
    Sentences 5 and 6 of the article, top of the second paragraph: > That move is Phish fans in miniature. Someone cared enough about the song and the bit that they rebuilt a piece of pop culture around the band.
    • dgellow 6mo ago
      That doesn’t really clarify
      • Arainach 6mo ago
        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.
        • emil-lp 6mo ago
          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.
          • Arainach 6mo ago
            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.
          • greatquux 5mo ago
            It's very hard for Phish fans to only provide ONE example. :-). I will try to limit my suggestions to only 3. This is a version of "Sand" from their trancey period and I would think makes for good coding time: https://youtu.be/B73cbfHSuH8?si=WPOI5pYYOfPg7OAi https://youtu.be/B73cbfHSuH8?si=WPOI5pYYOfPg7OAi Here's a rocking version of "Ghost" into a ballad "Mountains in the Mist" from 2003: https://youtu.be/7cMwsBUHjq0?si=5_p64FSvsY08dw0E https://youtu.be/7cMwsBUHjq0?si=5_p64FSvsY08dw0E This is a multi-section crazy of "Simple" from 2021 where it really seems like aliens have landed: https://youtu.be/wF2j2UPLlA8?si=KWvvL3MlLFpc-LHy https://youtu.be/wF2j2UPLlA8?si=KWvvL3MlLFpc-LHy
        • dr_kretyn 6mo ago
          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".
          • Arainach 6mo ago
            That was merely the first occurrence. Elsewhere the article says verbatim "Phish is a band".
        • dgellow 6mo ago
          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
          • Arainach 6mo ago
            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.
            • dgellow 6mo ago
              Stop being lazy in this context is by definition ad hominem. I won’t engage with the rest though.
        • Izkata 6mo ago
          The whole rest of the sentence implies they're talking about something else based on the band, not the band itself.
  • microsoftedging 6mo ago
    Phish is an American Rock Band. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phish
  • tom_ 6mo ago
    Old timey American guitar noodler band.
    • greatquux 6mo ago
      It’s a full band improvisation when at its best not just guitar noodling thank you very much
    • ks2048 6mo ago
      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.
      • thunky 6mo ago
        now - 29 years = 1996: Phish - Billy Breathes 1996 - 29 years = 1967: The Doors - Light My Fire
      • tom_ 6mo ago
        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/ https://justmeat.co/archives/active-low-carber-forum-posts/) Anyway, if it's from the last century, it's old timey to me.
  • tingletech 6mo ago
    It's who the dead heads follow around now.
    • mzg 6mo ago
      As well as Billy Strings, Goose, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Sturgill Simpson, John Mayer…big scene these days
• cyberpunk 6mo ago
  Yep, I’m in this boat too. I’ve given up trying to get that feeling back at work. We were lucky for 20 years, now if we want to do it for craft it’s time to contribute to OpenBSD or something — with phish on, not for money.
  • raddan 6mo ago
    Ditto. I programmed for 30 years with Underworld on. Listening to the beginning of Juanita/Kiteless instantly drops me into flow state. And it no longer fits if I am using an agent. I appear to be almost the same age as the writer of the post; just a little older. And I got that grocery store job. So I am working on a personal OpenBSD-related project. I have no idea if it will ever see the light of day. It scratches an itch and I am having fun doing it, and I don’t use AI. It’s forcing me to read man pages carefully and OpenBSD source code (side note: the lack of comments in their code is almost a “fuck you”). I wonder if I should try out some Phish.
    • cyberpunk 6mo ago
      Everything. Everything. Everything. :))
      • raddan 6mo ago
        Not lager, lager, lager? ;)
    • cmeiklejohn 6mo ago
      To be fair, I often listen to Phish and Aphex Twin. Didn’t we all program to jungle in the 90s?
      • H1Supreme 6mo ago
        > Didn’t we all program to jungle in the 90s? Still do!
  • beej71 6mo ago
    > now if we want to do it for craft it’s time to contribute to OpenBSD or something I think projects like these will end up being the highest-quality pieces of software out there.
• briandw 6mo ago
  Same here. I used to listen to techno and could just disappear into the work. Those days are gone now.
  • robotswantdata 6mo ago
    Try this https://soundcloud.com/jochempaap/07-01-2010-speedy-j-bunker-nyc-9-hour-set https://soundcloud.com/jochempaap/07-01-2010-speedy-j-bunker... This was a colleague favourite for flow state time
    • jaynetics 5mo ago
      I think you got downvoted because the problem of the OP was being unable to enjoy music while coding with agents, not lacking the right kind of music. I would like to thank you, though, because this set is incredible. I've listened to hundreds of techno sets and this is near the top.
• tahoemph999 6mo ago
  I think this fits well with Phish's isolated monoculture. I also started listening to Phish in the early 90s and have only seen 30 shows or so. Every time I go to a run it is very comfortable. There have been times I havn't seen them for a a good chunk of a decade and the shows feel the same. Eventhough jams have been part of their much of their history variation in musical style hasn't been. That leads to homoginization that makes for great vibe music.
• carlsborg 6mo ago
  Now the echo of my system prompts are bouncing round the room. edit: Bouncing around the room is one of their hit songs. Give it a listen.
• vessenes 6mo ago
  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 are receiving very soft and non-distracting suggestions, probably at the periphery of your consciousness. Most will be thrown away. I can kind of imagine a UI for this. I might experiment a little building something, but it will be by telling some agents to build it.. :)
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  • cultofmetatron 6mo ago
    > 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 that forces me to slow down and think in my off hours.
    • vessenes 6mo ago
      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.
  • nkingsy 6mo ago
    Tokens don’t matter if you have any slow deterministic processes. The bottleneck is already on testing infrastructure in the work I do. Screenshot tests are slow. Enormous codebases are slow. We have whole teams devoted to speeding these things up, so all I can do is get the agent to call the minimum set of commands necessary to check their latest iteration. This of course flies right in the face of the mountains of slow commands the harness tells it to use, resulting in chaos.
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• jdw64 6mo ago
  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 have been a way of life. In my case, I only started doing field work and using AI relatively recently, so I was able to adapt faster than I expected. If your whole way of life changes, the shock must be much greater. In contrast, I had no real status or social position to protect, so perhaps it was easier for me to let go. If I had tried to compete fairly and directly, I could not have beaten the experience and accumulated skill of veteran programmers. Of course, my ability to write code was something I was somewhat proud of. Giving it up was painful, and it brought regret and a sense of inferiority. But at the same time, I also find myself thinking: “Was I really supposed to fight against veterans like this?” Recently, this feels very similar to Durkheim’s concept of anomie. While reading this, I kept thinking about categories such as conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion. There are many points here that make me think. If, in the future, coding changes again from today’s agent-based coding into some other form, what will happen to me then? By observing how senior programmers are reacting now, perhaps I can draw my own conclusions and prepare for that moment. Right now, agent-based coding that depends on specific companies is dominant. But I think the current price of agentic coding is too cheap. At some point, when it becomes more expensive, local LLMs may become mainstream. If that happens, damaged or weakened code-writing ability may become necessary again. So the question is: how should I prepare for that? This was an interesting post.
  • cmiles74 6mo ago
    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.
• kaiwn 6mo ago
  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.
  • blanched 6mo ago
    This is like the third bridge + concrete comparison I’ve seen in the past two days from a new account. Did I miss something?
    • Neywiny 6mo ago
      "justify your existence" "You're absolutely correct. I don't just need to exist-I need to justify why. It's like builders with concrete..."
    • kaiwn 6mo ago
      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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47996022
    • deleted 6mo ago
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  • jebarker 6mo ago
    > the actual engineering I was with you until the last three words. Craftsmanship in writing code is also “actual engineering”, it’s just not the engineering that people will pay a human to do now.
  • deleted 6mo ago
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  • hamrocksissors 6mo ago
    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.
• davkan 6mo ago
  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 needs. Over time i was getting better at bash and powershell and regex and automating little tasks. Gaining knowledge about kubernetes and building images and helm charts was some of the most fun I’ve had professionally. I found enjoyment and value in learning those things and enjoy knowing them for their own sake, much in the same way I enjoy being able to recite mechanics and knowledge about vanilla wow from memory. The knowledge is its own pursuit and obtaining it was fun and fulfilling. Using AI is nothing like that. It’s not “fun” to me in any way. I don’t learn bash and powershell and templating. I don’t get to enjoy simple wins. AI does those all those for me. I’m thinking of becoming an electrician. I can’t imagine babysitting an ai for another 30 years.
  • davnicwil 6mo ago
    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?
• nu11ptr 6mo ago
  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 still not sure how I feel about it, although I am getting more done, and it has helped me keep better focus on "the big picture". That is tough to do when your day is spent in the weeds.
  • furyofantares 6mo ago
    Really? When I've brought it up with anyone that doesn't code, I've found them to be totally disinterested in the topic.
    • TFNA 6mo ago
      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.
      • raddan 6mo ago
        It's worth mentioning that one reason LLMs can clean up on coding tasks is because of the volumes of available data. Not only has the world produced copious volumes of code, they continue to produce copious volumes of code, and some code can even be generated synthetically (ie, not from an LLM, albeit at high cost). Other domains are not like this. There will probably never be enough poetry out there to make an LLM do anything but be a poor imitation of a poet. This data is extremely hard to generate.
        • llmthrowaway20 6mo ago
          This is a wild take. Of all things, you think a large language model will be stumped by poetry? I would wager everything I had that an AI could already win a blind poetry contest, especially if any effort was put into fine-tuning it. Unbelievable effort has been put into optimizing them for coding given the financials; next to none for poetry.
• mettamage 6mo ago
  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’ve kept up too, so I have the experience backing it up. With that said, when I read this blog post. I feel the author’s pain. And it’s the first time that I emotionally get what the other side of the programming spectrum feels what it has lost. I feel sad about it. And because of it, I will also wonder about ways of bringing it back. [1] not fully though. Something I can love coding by hand for months.
  • deleted 6mo ago
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  • littlexsparkee 6mo ago
    So much comes down to timing - lucky author that got to experience it for 30 whole years whereas some of us had a scant few to enjoy building as it was, flow state, and some semblance of security. At least I made plans the last 5 years in anticipation of change, can't imagine the sheer dislocation of just entering the job market now.
    • sho_hn 6mo ago
      Pros and cons. Some of the people who were lucky to enjoy those 30 years are also emotionally being hit the hardest right now, and if life threw a few curveballs at you along the way you don't necesarily have attained the sort of stability where you don't have to worry, either. Plus ageism can make it even harder to pivot. I have programmer friends in their 40s to 60s who are seriously depressed currently (and 20 year olds worried for theirnl future perspectives, of course). Mental health is not just a young person's game. I strangely feel quite lucky that I got more and more into electronics and hardware over time as I moved from web and desktop more and more into embedded/consumer electronics and companies who also employ mechanical and EE engineers. When I was younger I used to dumbly worry this meant giving something up (the purity of software approaches, etc.), but instead it made me consider myself an Engineer with a capital E and strive to learn the engineering method more generally, and learn so many other fields of the trade. It turns out this is a much more resilient identity than just Programmer and I recommend that approach.
• jazz9k 6mo ago
  Where you get your satisfaction matters. Is it in the end product? Or the journey producing it? I've been writing code for 30 years. I welcome AI. It brings different challenges and can reduce the time needed for the end product.
  • icase 6mo ago
    absolutely the journey.
• Mizza 6mo ago
  If you found Phish twinned well with deep, focused work, you might enjoy grindcore for frequently interrupted work, since most of the songs are less than a minute long, like these: https://discordanceaxis.bandcamp.com/album/original-sound-version-1992-1995-reamp https://discordanceaxis.bandcamp.com/album/original-sound-ve...
  • sudopsuedo 6mo ago
    Incredible comment, lmao
    • shomp 6mo ago
      If you can't change the work, change the genre
  • tahoemph999 6mo ago
    I have a similar tendency. I doesn't really work for me to write code and listen to lyrics so EDM and grindcore, like carcass, works for me. Either there are few words or you can understand them.
• artyom 6mo ago
  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 boring at all, in fact, I can't remember a single time in my life where I was actually "bored".
  • meroes 6mo ago
    Interesting that boring is the salient factor.
  • joecot 6mo ago
    The people who go through phases are also born to be something for life: adaptable, and used to change. Being good at doing exactly one thing your entire life a certain way has the potentially fatal flaw of having significant issue doing anything else. I feel like I've lived 3-4 completely different lives so far, but the constant is the ability to adapt to the next one, and still find joy in it while you're there. "Survival is the ability to swim in strange water." Personally, the AI tools have been transformative for work, but haven't affected how I work much. I have always coded as a team. I'd often do the largest and most complicated parts myself, but work (both at work work and my hobby work) has always been about passing things between colleagues based on what our strengths were and how much time we had. The AI tools are another colleague. They work incredibly fast, and I do less coding myself now, but my goal was always to solve the problem, not the code itself. The AI tools do a great job most of the time, but they sometimes screw up and need more guidance or me to step in to fix the thing (usually a very small error compared to the whole). If they screw it all up, we might need to start from scratch, or I might need to just do it myself. But that's not most of the time. And then I figure out the thing missing in my process to move them in the right direction, and improve it. I feel like any software developer used to collaborating with, training, and mentoring other developers knows exactly how to work with AI tools, and the only main difference is how much effort I put into being really nice about it the whole time. One main thing has changed. Before I would handle the most complicated problems people were having trouble with myself. Now I allow AI to work on them, even if I know I'll have to fix it. The difference is that I care about the time, the strain, and the morale of my coworkers. AI is just getting paid for iterating tokens, so I don't have to feel bad about what I ask it to figure out for me.
• phamilton 6mo ago
  Long agent runs make such a difference. We focus a lot on new models and long context, but the bigger impact is in automatic verification. I've been leaning in more on e2e test suites. They are slow, brittle and inefficient. But that's almost a feature. I can step away and come back an hour later, and use that time to think about bigger problems.
• ks2048 6mo ago
  > I’m sad. Simple solution: keep going what you've been doing. Open up https://relisten.net/ https://relisten.net/ and keep jamming, you'll probably be fine.
• mrdrqr 6mo ago
  you’re just complaining about unwittingly being promoted from an individual contributor to a manager.
  • shomp 6mo ago
    "the higher up the corporate hierarchy, the less music"
• RobRivera 6mo ago
  Oddly enough i have a similar bit about electronica, but its a fine line between productive programming and distraction
• sublinear 6mo ago
  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.
• willio58 6mo ago
  > 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.
• gavmor 6mo ago
  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.
  • gavmor 6mo ago
    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.
• robotswantdata 6mo ago
  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 but useless employees. Not fun at all
  • bluefirebrand 6mo ago
    > 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
  • coffeefirst 6mo ago
    The other thing is as far as I can tell, the power-tool style modes where you use AI to boost focus and do quick research is both much cheaper and, by the time you account for all the damage control/prompt tuning/other externalities, roughly as fast as full agentic. I suspect with the prices going up, that realization is going to be pretty appealing.
    • jorvi 6mo ago
      Prices are not going up. DeepSeek V4 Pro is 5-10x cheaper than Claude 4.7. As some of us have been predicting, model capability had already mostly plateaued, and the Chinese have and will continue to relentlessly push cost down. Chinese models will be used for 95% of things, with nation-native models for security/sovereignity-sensitive workloads. Eventually (5+ years from now), efficiency gains and hardware progress will make running local models the dominant way of doing things. And yes, that puts the investors of Claude and OpenAI in quite a pickle.
      • robotswantdata 6mo ago
• giardini 6mo ago
  Our dormitory had two roommates, science majors, who always listened to rock music while studying. If their door was closed and you could hear music, they were lost in thought. I never could study to music and much preferred studying in a quiet carrel in the university library.
• mvcosta91 6mo ago
  Same. Used to listen 100k+ minutes/year in Spotify, most of it being Racionais MC’s while working and it’s completely gone.
• hartator 6mo ago
  > 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.
  • bayarearefugee 6mo ago
    > 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.
• foreman_ 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• sghiassy 6mo ago
  Been programming since I was 14 - now 44. The flow state is gone. Sadly
• makerofthings 6mo ago
  This is me. Different music, same deal. Finding you’re not as alone as you thought you were is what the internet is for.
• itrunsdoomguy 6mo ago
  I wonder if he was listening to Phish while playing Doom.
• dekhn 6mo ago
  The grateful dead were definitely my introduction to flow state. It wasn't just programming, it was using a MUD in the late 1980s. In my case, the Dark Star from Live/Dead (a long, extended jam that explores the outer reaches), I like a subset of the dead and phish for flow state programming but like the author find that modern work requires too many distractions to enter and stay in the flow state for a long time. In my case, large portions of the dead and phish don't work for me at all- the worst is when Phish is doing a great job and then suddenly they sort of lose the groove, or when they get stuck in repetitive loops.
• abacadaba 6mo ago
  just make your claude code task completed notification sound play tweezer feel this though. also how the era of debating like the best code styles and which new frontend framework is etc best that used to be fun to talk about feels like its coming to an end because no one really cares anymore as long as the bot can build the feature.
• ramesh31 6mo ago
  For me it's Toto. Musically they are incredible; a supergroup of the best session musicians in the industry who worked on some of the most iconic albums of all time. But lyrically it's complete nonsense, so you can lose yourself in the music while still being focused on what you're doing, since the words are just basically gibberish.
• UltraSane 6mo ago
  I have never understood how people can program while listening to music.
• natdempk 6mo ago
  I 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.
• zeafoamrun 6mo ago
  Beautiful 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.
• timcobb 6mo ago
  What 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.
• konart 6mo ago
  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 Jill push changes two (or more) times faster than you?
  • wolttam 6mo ago
    Yes, companies will hire employees that are significantly faster if they can do some for around the same cost. And they can - the current crop of tools provide undeniable productivity uplifts to developers, even if they’re only using the cheaper open weight models. I was like you, using them for one shot things until January of this year. My token usage has roughly 100x’d since then, once I saw the value in the agentic loop.
    • konart 6mo ago
      >Yes, companies will hire employees that are significantly faster if they can do some for around the same cost. And how do you test this when you hire? An interview where you have to implement something using LLM only?
  • zeafoamrun 6mo ago
    Yes they will fire you. The sharks are circling those who just take tickets and implement what they say.
  • tombert 6mo ago
    When ChatGPT came out, I was beyond excited. I had a tool to generate config files, and bounce ideas off of, and help unblock me when I got stupid arcane logs I didn't understand. That didn't feel existentially depressing at all; it was just glorified Google in my mind. When the vibe coding tools like Claude and Codex came along, I got into this kind of dread. I'm sort of required to use them for work (we are "AI-first"...), but even if I weren't the tools are useful enough to me that I kind of feel like I have to use them because if I don't I'll be left in the dust. And now it kind of feels like a lot of my job has been converted into babysitting interns. I don't get to write a lot of code by hand anymore, because most of what I do ends up being yelling at Codex to automate most of what I used to do. It's not all bad; I never got any enjoyment out of the initial bullshit of getting the initial project and configurations set up or futzing with configuration files, but I did get joy out of writing the actual implementation of the code, and now I don't get to do that much anymore. A silver lining though; I do get to think in higher levels now, which is kind of fun. A lot of what I get to do now is write stuff in TLA+ and/or Mermaid (depending on the complexity and how much fancy concurrency I want to do), feed that into Claude, and get it to implement that. That part is fun, but I fear that I'm an outlier and that kind of programming won't catch on because engineers love to take the fucking idiotic position that they "don't need to do math to do programming".
• JustinELRoberts 6mo ago
  Beautifully written and while I'm not a Phish fan per se, this otherwise summarized exactly how I've been feeling this year.
• cmeiklejohn 6mo ago
  Hi, author here! I’m really disappointed that I wasn’t in the right headspace to name this post “the trick is to surrender to the flow”, the lyric from Phish’s The Lizards. But, you know, hindsight.
  • SummSolutions 6mo ago
    That would’ve been a great title! My brother still follows them across the country. Reading this and the comments gave me real insight into what longtime developers are feeling I’m brand new to coding and have only done some AI-assisted work while learning. It blows my mind that people can do this at a high level without assistance - major respect I hope you find that flow again
• nschampions2004 6mo ago
  This sounds the closest to what I’d imagine Jordan was to winning. “All I ever wanted to do was listen to Phish and program”. As someone trying to find their why, this strikes home.
• skybrian 6mo ago
  Latency matters if you want programmers to be able to work interactively. We multitask because LLMs are too slow. That's happened before, with people submitting batch jobs in the mainframe era, people working on big projects that take an hour to compile, or people waiting for code reviews. However, even if the LLMs become fast, the coding agent will likely bottleneck on running tools. You will need to keep your tests fast, too.
• superjan 6mo ago
  Phish? It turns out to be a band: https://phish.com/ https://phish.com/
• cess11 6mo ago
  I was around when cPanel and Wordpress broke through and saw professionals scoff at it and left it to others, who subsequently built the majority of web sites. It's interesting to now see professionals making a similar move themselves when a new cPanel/Wordpress has arrived and wring their hands about how they 'get more done' but 'lost the craft'. Inbetween I've come across quite a lot of scoffing about using XML to generate code in Java and C#, or just XML itself. Buying queries from a database corporation seems quite a bit weirder to me than designing a data schema, especially if both use cases are supposed to lead to some server boilerplate and an API on a database.
• jmbwell 6mo ago
  I’ve been finding it difficult to hand things over to an LLM completely, and I wonder if this is part of it. I’ll let it help me organize at the beginning, and then I’ll have it come through and refactor or review, but the crafting part is where I want to spend my time. I love hitting tab but it seems like every time I do, I get this sensation like I’ve sort of time-warped into the future by a few seconds, and I wonder what I’d have written if the LLM hadn’t done it for me. At which point I’ll never know. Great for generating volumes of output. Less great for going into a flow state and coming out with something that looks like I made it, something that I see my hand in And yeah, maybe it’s because I never quite get into a flow state when I do it this way. Hmm
  • shomp 6mo ago
    If the LLM behaved more like a programmer-in-flow-state and we could "hitch a ride" or "ride the wave" along, maybe we can recover some of this unbrokenness of attentivity.
• slopinthebag 6mo ago
  Totally self inflicted btw. You can simply choose to not use agents in an autonomous way if you don't enjoy the workflow. Life is too short to do something you don't enjoy (employment aside ofc, but keep trying to change that).
• shomp 6mo ago
  "This is engineering. I keep being told that" -- made me laugh out loud. We've gone from painting, to pointing to finished pieces in catalogues. Not to be utterly unhinged and tone-deaf but, there are other genres, such as jazz and screamo and noise that might suit the mood more aptly.
• JKCalhoun 6mo ago
  Not Phish, but I have had music on in the background when coding for three decades at least now. And not even necessarily when coding… I find that if there is no music playing, I will start a song in my head. That can get frustrating—the song loops, perhaps in fact just the chorus. So I turn on the external music and it seems to allow my brain to do other things.
• patrick-elmore 6mo ago
  The staccato framing is right. It's also describing the default posture, not the settled one. That loop (open a session, ask a question, redirect, switch) happens before the spec discipline is tight enough to trust the result without watching. When you've actually delegated well, you're not context-switching constantly between sessions. You hand over a detailed spec, wait for the agent to finish, and evaluate. The watching gets compressed to the handoff and the return, not the whole run. Most engineers haven't gotten there, because getting there is hard. The spec has to be good enough that the agent can hit an ambiguity without needing to ask, fill a gap without needing your correction, and still produce something worth using. That's a different kind of writing than what most engineers were doing before. It takes the kind of attention that's hard to find when you're also redirecting three other sessions. The flow state question is the more interesting one. It doesn't disappear. It moves. The continuous-arc attention used to live at the implementation layer. Now it's available at the spec-writing layer. Most people haven't redesigned their work to find it there. The new deep-work mode runs from a high-level goal through a narrow, implementation-ready spec through a validation pass. That can be a continuous arc if you've structured the work to allow it. It just doesn't look like the old one, and the muscle memory for it doesn't exist yet. Whether that's actually flow or just a different kind of concentration is a real question. The engineers that I know (myself included), who've found something like the old rhythm have moved most of their time/effort upstream in the process. The ones still in the redirect loop are usually starting with stories with the same information they always had in them, ran through an LLM to make them appear more tightly defined.
• beej71 6mo ago
  What is the "grunt work"? I think there's a difference of opinion with the commenters. :) The work is, among other things: * Writing components * Writing glue * Requirements gathering * Architectural design * Testing Which parts are the grunt work depends on the individual. Personally, writing components was the most challenging, least grunt work job there was. Requirements and design was the next most fun, but not really very challenging. Writing glue and testing was grunt work--had to get done, but was mind-numbing. As one of my friends put it, "Beej, writing software was never the goal." I might counter that managing LLMs was never the goal, either, so we'll get to see where that leads.
• rglover 6mo ago
  Choose when and where and how you apply it and the sadness goes away. There's zero rule that you have to use an LLM in your workflow; even if your peers insist it's "stupid not to." When I started to get this feeling recently (the sadness around the flow state being knocked off-axis), I started asking myself "what are you rushing toward? Do you really need to be working like this? Is this truly rational or just socially congruent?" YMMV but may be helpful for some.
• duncangh 6mo ago
  Can we get the link to that TikTok? lol Also what do you think about goose
• iamanllm 6mo ago
  As a phish fan, this is an especially sad read. I wonder what new developers might feel, if they have the same sense of wonder and joy, listening to a brand new jam, working with an agent to create something, learning a thing or two about development, and being proud. I hope so.