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.
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.
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.
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
> 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
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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”).
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.
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)
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.
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 our ambitions.
Ironically, Phish's music emerges from egoless expression (to paraphrase keyboardist Page McConnell). Giving up your own personal stake in the process is literally what brings something as beautiful as Phish's music into existence. We need to do the same with our software; give up the notion that "our" code is meaningful.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
Yeah honestly. I could easily architect the thing out but coding it is so boring. I love this new paradigm and sometimes the LLM even suggests a better architecture!
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.. :)
The thing about flow state is that it is about being deeply focused on one thing. I’m not sure that orchestrating hundreds of agents will help—it’s not really about “CPU load”, at least, not for me.
I HAVE found another way to achieve flow state. Hand tool woodworking. Especially planing. There’s something about the rhythm of the tool, combined with the awareness of what the tool is doing, that makes the rest of the world evaporate, just like when coding. I could see myself doing that instead. Sadly there is even less call for slow woodworking than there is for slow coding.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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
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".
Interesting that boring is the salient factor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
To be fair, I often listen to Phish and Aphex Twin. Didn’t we all program to jungle in the 90s?
Everything. Everything. Everything. :))
Not lager, lager, lager? ;)
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?
"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..."
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
> 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.
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 our ambitions.
Ironically, Phish's music emerges from egoless expression (to paraphrase keyboardist Page McConnell). Giving up your own personal stake in the process is literally what brings something as beautiful as Phish's music into existence. We need to do the same with our software; give up the notion that "our" code is meaningful.
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.
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.
> 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.
We should always care about our own subjectivity. If anything, subjectivity is too easy to discount in this day and age.
The product and the process are not orthogonal.
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.
It's like writing code with assistant Einstein who is 4 years old.
Yeah honestly. I could easily architect the thing out but coding it is so boring. I love this new paradigm and sometimes the LLM even suggests a better architecture!
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?
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.
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".
Yes they will fire you. The sharks are circling those who just take tickets and implement what they say.
Beautifully written and while I'm not a Phish fan per se, this otherwise summarized exactly how I've been feeling this year.
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.
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.
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.
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-ve...
Incredible comment, lmao
Sad and lovely and speaks to how I’ve been feeling as well. I’ve been writing code since I was a boy and now I’m nearing retirement. I also miss flow.
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.. :)
The thing about flow state is that it is about being deeply focused on one thing. I’m not sure that orchestrating hundreds of agents will help—it’s not really about “CPU load”, at least, not for me.
I HAVE found another way to achieve flow state. Hand tool woodworking. Especially planing. There’s something about the rhythm of the tool, combined with the awareness of what the tool is doing, that makes the rest of the world evaporate, just like when coding. I could see myself doing that instead. Sadly there is even less call for slow woodworking than there is for slow coding.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've learnt more, and more quickly, with LLMs than before them.
Not syntax, no. Bash and Powershell are syntex. But tradeoffs, concepts, understanding new domains I didn't know about.
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?
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.
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.
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.
you’re just complaining about unwittingly being promoted from an individual contributor to a manager.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> I’m sad.
Simple solution: keep going what you've been doing. Open up https://relisten.net/ and keep jamming, you'll probably be fine.
Same here. I used to listen to techno and could just disappear into the work. Those days are gone now.
Try this https://soundcloud.com/jochempaap/07-01-2010-speedy-j-bunker...
This was a colleague favourite for flow state time
This is me. Different music, same deal. Finding you’re not as alone as you thought you were is what the internet is for.
> 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.
Same. Used to listen 100k+ minutes/year in Spotify, most of it being Racionais MC’s while working and it’s completely gone.
What is Phish?
Phish is an American Rock Band. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phish
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.
now - 29 years = 1996: Phish - Billy Breathes
1996 - 29 years = 1967: The Doors - Light My Fire
It’s a full band improvisation when at its best not just guitar noodling thank you very much
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.
That doesn’t really clarify
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 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.
It's who the dead heads follow around now.
As well as Billy Strings, Goose, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Sturgill Simpson, John Mayer…big scene these days
Oddly enough i have a similar bit about electronica, but its a fine line between productive programming and distraction
I wonder if he was listening to Phish while playing Doom.
Been programming since I was 14 - now 44.
The flow state is gone. Sadly
I have never understood how people can program while listening to music.
This captures a lot of how I've been feeling lately. Thanks for sharing
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.
absolutely the journey.
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.
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.
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.