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.

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".

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.. :)

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.

you’re just complaining about unwittingly being promoted from an individual contributor to a manager.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Same here. I used to listen to techno and could just disappear into the work. Those days are gone now.

What is Phish?

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.

> 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.

> 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.

Phish? It turns out to be a band: https://phish.com/

Beautifully written and while I'm not a Phish fan per se, this otherwise summarized exactly how I've been feeling this year.

> 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.

This is me. Different music, same deal. Finding you’re not as alone as you thought you were is what the internet is for.

Oddly enough i have a similar bit about electronica, but its a fine line between productive programming and distraction

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.

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.

This captures a lot of how I've been feeling lately. Thanks for sharing

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

"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.

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.

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).

Can we get the link to that TikTok? lol

Also what do you think about goose

I have never understood how people can program while listening to music.

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.

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.

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.