That trick is Phish fans in miniature. Someone cared so much about the song that they recreated a piece of pop culture around the band. This is how this scene works. People spend their time doing stuff like this for free, because the music demands it.
For thirty years, it was me at my desk.
I used to joke that if I ever had to interview for a new job, I’d have to ask the interviewer to phish so I could actually program for them. I say this as a joke, because saying it outright might sound insane. But this was no joke. After three decades, Kew and the state were united. I can’t, with any credibility, get into the zone without music. The conditioning was complete and I knew it.
I would joke and people would laugh, and I would laugh too, and underneath it all we both knew I was telling the truth.
I came to Phish in 1995. By then I had done years of self-taught programming. In 1998 I got my first professional job in tech. I was 15 years old.
Around the same time I also tried to get a normal teenage job. There was a grocery store near my house and I went there to apply, thinking I could go get groceries on the weekends like everyone else. He rejected me. Not because I was too young or too inexperienced. They told me I was overqualified. Having a 15-year-old kid programming on his own application was, somehow, too much for a grocery store.
So I continued programming. There was never any other plan.
I just wanted to listen to Phish and program. That was the complete list. There were no qualifiers in this. Instead it didn’t have a third thing I sometimes wanted. There was no balance I was striving for. There was music and code, and nothing else competing for space.
I was so fortunate that I could make a career in it. For thirty years, the thing I wanted to do most was something I got paid to do. That’s not true for most people, and I knew it then, and I know it now.
Other kids my age were figuring out what they liked, trying things, growing in stages and branching out. I was watching him do this from the desk. I chose early. I started writing code as a child. I first heard Phish when I was thirteen. By the time I turned fifteen and had a professional schedule, the choice was finalized. I had two things, and I didn’t want a third.
If I had a free Friday night, I knew what I was doing with it. If I had a long weekend, I would know what I was doing with it. If a holiday came, I knew what I was doing with it. Activity did not change. The output changed, the project changed, the song changed, but the shape of the time remained constant.
This situation continued for the next three decades. I’ll fish and write the code. That was the day. That was the night. It was my job, and it was also my hobby, and there were no seams between them.
The work I did in that state is the work I’m most proud of. Distributed Systems. Backend Services. That hard thing that requires you to have a lot in your mind at the same time and be there. Phish is a band that rewards you for staying in one place for a long period of time. The jam is long. Creations come to the fore. If you give it an hour, it gives you something back. It matched the size of the job exactly.
Before graduate school, I worked a day job writing music software at Berklee College of Music, and took night classes at Northeastern. I will catch the 12:00 am train home. As soon as I sat down, I wore the skirt. Most nights I used to sleep near it before the train arrived. (Maybe that’s why I like “Foam” so much.)
I was in graduate school for a decade. Most of the dissertation, over two hundred pages by the end, was written between 2021 and 2023, after I returned to Pittsburgh from Europe. I was too poor to go to the show. So I planned the Nights of the Couch Tour. There was a live stream. I’ll set it up on one screen and write on the other. The band would play in the Hamptons or Alpine Valley or wherever, and while they played I would write about distributed systems, and at some point in the second set the dissertation unraveled a little and I understood something I hadn’t understood that morning.
The dissertation is the longest single thing I’ve created in that ritual, but it’s not the only thing. Entire pieces of production software also emerged from those nights. Systems that ran for years, handled real loads, served real users. The entire system, from first commit to shipped version. I would put on a show and stay inside the work until something came into existence that didn’t exist when the show started.
I’ve been listening to Phish every day since I was fifteen. Every day. Back when I was in graduate school, I lived in Europe, where going to a show meant flying back across the ocean, I heard. I’ll sit at my desk in another country and put on a show about the nineties and code. I’ve listened to some shows so many times that I can sing a song solo, note for note, without even thinking about it. Boardwalk Hall Halloween. NYE 1995. Trey would play a phrase and my mouth would already be in front of it.
I was feeling lucky. I still feel lucky. There aren’t many people who get to spend thirty years inside the thing they loved when they were fifteen.
The work has changed since January.
I don’t really write code anymore. Now the main thing is to manage the agents. I open a session, ask a question, redirect, switch to another, check the merge, review what came back, send it back for changes, switch again. The day is queuing. Things happen at different times and require different responses, and responses are short and the context is constantly different.
This is engineering. I keep being told this. This is engineering and it’s the future and it’s more profitable than what I used to do. That’s all probably true. But this is not the work I have been doing for thirty years. Its shape is different. The rhythm is different. Its sitting pattern is different during the day.
I tried to keep the music on. I’m writing this in the days following nine nights at Fish at the Sphere. Since I finished graduate school and got a real job, I’ve been to every show, every tour, every residency to make up for lost time. Music is more present in my life now than ever before. This is not what is gone.
But the trend of music along with work has ended. Jams are created for a continuous arc of attention. Work is stable. I’ll be three minutes into a song and I’ll have already context-switched four times. The singing is happening and the work is happening and they are no longer together. They are parallel, but they no longer touch.
I am sad. I don’t go into that situation anymore. I don’t know how to be honest about this without it seeming like I’m complaining about progress, but I can’t pretend that nothing has been taken. The flow state I had for thirty years is no longer part of my workday. The creativity that used to exist inside it is also not there. I do useful things. I don’t feel anything like what I felt while doing them.
I keep thinking about that overdub. Vanessa Bayer at the lunch table, lost in song, having fun, while the rest of the world is doing whatever it is. I was his for thirty years. Now I am a colleague. I am at the desk. I am looking.
The flow state was just not where I got work done. This was the place where perfection lived. Creativity, connection, the feeling of being inside something rather than next to it. That’s what programming and Phish gave me for thirty years. This is what supervision takes away.
What is flow in the agentic world? How do we get it back?
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