Last night I noticed something that made me sad. Flow state is gone.
A bit about my background. I am a DevOps guy with 10+ years of hands-on experience. Now I'm more into the operational side, I run the consulting firm (AppRecode), but I still build a lot myself, for my own projects and for the team, mostly with Claude and some local models. So this is not a "manager who stopped coding", I am still in the terminal most days.
When was the last time you felt real flow? Remember that? Even when AI was only autocomplete, we got there often. You are so focused on the problem that you get tunnel vision. Favorite music on, hands dancing on the keyboard, and you enjoy the process itself. Not the result. The process.
That feeling is gone now.
Today the loop looks like this. Describe the task, send it, wait 15, 20, 30 minutes while the agent works, and stare at the monitor. Or switch to another task and stare at that one. Give a task, switch. Give a parallel task, switch. Give one more, switch. You end up with 3 to 7 things running, and after five hours your brain feels like it worked three shifts. ADHD development, basically.
There is no flow in this, because you are always waiting for something. It is like being close to the end, and someone stops or changes the subject. We stopped building and became operators who keep the model busy.
1. Flow was never only about writing code. As a DevOps guy I had it a lot, and almost never while typing. It came from holding the whole system in my head and untangling it. I do not need to write every line myself for that.
2. We still work in "one task, one context." I think this is the real problem. If you stop thinking in single tickets and start thinking in groups of related tasks that share one context, then waiting is not empty time anymore. You put a few processes in the background and work on nearby problems inside the same mental model, instead of switching to something completely different. Maybe flow is possible on the orchestration level. We just did not learn how to work there yet.
3. Flow always came from caring about the thing. Every time I had it, it was because I was excited about an idea, not because the tools were good. Build the side project or the small SaaS you really want to exist, and I think the flow comes back, with or without agents.
So is it only me? Do you still get flow with agents in the loop? If yes, how does it look for you now?
And did you even think about this before, or is this the first time you are reading it?
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