# Goodbye Flow State > Source: > Published: 2026-06-04 00:00:00+00:00 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](https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness) 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.