I learned to program the way a lot of people did: I locked myself in a room one summer and didn’t come out until I’d built a video game. It was a bad video game. But somewhere in those weeks I lost track of time for the first time in my life: debugging, reasoning, rethinking, discovering…
Psychologists call it flow. It was always rare for me. A few colleagues over the years seemed to drop into it at will, and I quietly envied their minds.
The coding agents are good. Great, even. I use them every day, and I can do more than I used to with a fraction of the toil. In the last year I watched myself let go of flow states more and more until now it’s totally gone.
The mind wants to engage with ideas at about the speed it can think them. A language model produces ideas, proxied through text, much faster than that; they are not always better ideas, just faster ones. So it takes the “long loop” (the slow circuit of trying and being wrong and trying again) and bulldozes it over with short ones.
Want a new abstraction? Done. Root cause? Done. A whole architecture? Done. Yes, the toil is gone… so is the part where my mind was doing the creation.
There is an obvious reply: you’re working on the wrong problems, or nobody’s making you use the things.
Fair. Astute, even. But I’d point at the internet. We told ourselves the same story: don’t visit the distracting sites… right up until the distraction stopped being a place you go and became the internet medium itself, with billions of dollars making sure of it. Losing your focus online is not only a failure of willpower, there are systems which make steer the internet towards being distracting.
Coding is starting to feel that way too. Flow state was always like capturing lightning in a bottle, but I could often decide to go there and enter into the slow loop. Now it feels like something I have to defend.
So I miss flow. I miss attention. I miss being plainly, usefully bored: putting my mind to something intellectually slow and laborious that pushes back.
I’m grateful for the step change. I resent the side effects, the same way I resent the internet I fell in love with in the early 2000s and now can’t live without.
For now, here’s the one thing I can actually do about it. I’m writing code by hand again. Getting lost, googling, reaching for the assistant only when I actually want it instead of by reflex. I like my mind. I’d rather not let those muscles soften.
*(written, slowly) - Jacob*
Whether your flow vanished the way mine did or you’ve found a way to keep it.