For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day. In 2026, the music is out of phase with the work
27 points by bert
27 points by bert
A beautiful personal tribute to the practice of programming, interrupted by the switch to LLMs.
This is engineering. I keep being told that.
People have to keep telling people because it's pretense and coping more than anything else. Programmers writing specs like they're middle managers who took a high school programming course once and says "That basically makes me a programmer, yeah?".
Context: Phish is a rock band formed in 1983. The band and its music are not intrinsically related to programming.
I got into Phish in 1995. A lot of people found Phish the year Jerry died.
Beautiful. Music is very powerful, even if it can have downsides. When I've been very into a new band working on a specific project, then I can't help thinking about the project when listening to that band, and that sometimes sucks.
I'm wondering. How much is people's jobs part of their identity? I started programming when I was 12, and I've never stopped. And I'm not talking about my job, that for the most part is also programming, but about what I like to do on my free time.
Sure, sometimes life gets in the way, sometimes I'm not in the mood, and sometimes I need a break. May be is OSS, may be is gamedev, but it has always been there with me.
I haven't been pushed to replace my coding with agents (yet?), but even if that comes to happen, I don't think I will stop programming. And I will enjoy music when doing it.
How much is people's jobs part of their identity?
Way too much!
I've personally found that I gain a lot of psychological safety when I have active side projects. You know how code reviews are supposed to be ego free, "You are not your code" and all that? Well, it is so much easier to take the ego out of your work code when you have some other place to put it.
Oh, we're replacing $GOODTECH with $BADTECH because something something total rewrite yada yada internal politics blah blah your team ate my team? Yes sir! By next year I will either be admiring your foresight or chuckling at the trainwreck, but either way, I know it will be from the comfort of my private garden.
Deep feels and hard relate.
I designed a kernel that lets me think in code and that’s where I get the remnants of satisfaction, but my day to day has also shifted to be out of time with the music.
I’m no longer balancing a single flow state, but juggling state flows. The silver lining is that I’m less depressed from all the plates I’d kept spinning in my head all those years.
Every free weekend and holiday I also squirreled away for me and my coding addiction. On the one hand, I’ll miss that, but on the other hand it was such an utterly and lonely endeavor with each passing year drifting me further from my friends and family.
I honestly will not miss the last decade of HCI engineering; typescript/react
A lot of it was off base, but what I miss was when DIY tech was mainstream, which, the past few months, I am seeing more and more people concerned with their canoes and who has the paddles.
I keep thinking of a homemade hacker club where we still share the latest tips and tricks from ye olde definition of live coding.
Does Phish have an extraordinarily large list of songs? I have favorite music but they are usually a few songs (or one) per band/singer. And I still get tired of the rotation.
they do but they also have a bag of holding's worth of live show bootlegs and recordings from their whole career and every show is different, so there's a lot to go through if you are interested in it
They do, they have 16 studio albums, 13 live ones, but most importantly their live shows include improvisation so there's lots of unique content.
It does still sound like they enjoy listening repeatedly and obsessively based on playing the same thing for commute and knowing some improvised solos by heart. Good on them to have enjoyed it fully over 30 years!
To complement sibling comments with an example, consider the classic Phish original, "Stash". I happen to know that it's on the famous Guitar World list of 100 top guitar solos (out of print; see Reddit, Hal Leonard, YT playlist of covers), as I spent my youth struggling through them. However, the version that's on Guitar World's list isn't the version from the studio album A Picture of Nectar where it was first recorded, but from the live album A Live One recorded several years later. In general, studying Phish starts with the live recordings rather than the studio albums!
And just to put a bow on it, here's the youtube link. As with quite alot of live Phish, it's a long track and mutates quite a bit as they improvise. The journey's sort of the point, so best to let it play itself through before trying to form an opinion.