Ask HN: Do you struggle with flow state when using AI assisted coding tools?

Interestingly I feel quite the opposite but it depends on the job.

Bootstrapping things like a new project ? Yeah, things can be too fast for me to stay in the flow.

But my day to day is about working with already existing code which I have to modify and here, AI is exactly the opposite : it helps me drill down boring and legacy code. I helps me stay in the flow because I can ask questions about the code. I can ask it where is the code that does X, I can ask it how it currently works. I can describe my issue, let it analyze the code and ask it to make proposals to solve my issue. Then I discuss the options, then I let it implement the one "we" agreed upon, then I review and I discuss the solution.

In fact I stay in flow because I don't feel alone with my issues and my questions. Maybe it says more about my work environment where I cannot pair as much as I wanted to but at least I have Cursor/Claude/Whatever.

However not having that continuous interaction and hoping the AI to solve your Jira ticket in one prompt is going to be a disaster for your focus and you will not trust the result enough.

Overall, it makes my job less miserable when I'm doing boring things.

I totally relate to this. Sometimes I think I can do my ideas quicker but when I try to do that it ends up taking more time. So I learned waiting for AI to respond is a better use of my time.

I keep a notepad open with my ideas and thoughts as AI working and reading the code. Writing down my thoughts and use that for my next prompt.

Unrelated but I also noticed that using a lot of AI for coding often leads to over-engineered solutions. Instead of fixing the backend to return a proper audio format it suggests bringing FFMPEG to the browser and transcode for instance. It's important to be aware of this and keep asking AI if there are better ways to do things

Instead of developing, I'm code reviewing. Hard to get into a flow state when claude is the one flowing, not me.

I think you need to let go of wanting to achieve a flow state if you're outsourcing the coding; you're a manager, product owner and code reviewer now, not a programmer yourself. Context switching and waiting for things are normal in those roles, flow state is not.

Development experience of AI tools is becoming the biggest blocker. And a large part of that is performance (in time, not qualitatively).

Most of us are doing relatively simple things like using with the largest/slowest models possible instead of downgrading to a smaller model. Reason: our tools lack the ability to escalate to more expensive models as needed and switching models manually is tedious. Ideally, a cheap locally running model would be first in line and respond quickly for quick things.

And then there's the whole asynchronous vs. synchronous thing. With Codex, it runs in a browser and it allows you to create a pull request whenever it is done. You can work on multiple pull requests with it even and it might work in parallel.

What's good about the Codex experience is that your input is only needed at the end. What's bad is that it takes ages. Even for simple stuff. Like a simple follow up question results in it boiling the oceans to startup the container again.

Slow AI is exactly like slow builds: frustrating and likely to distract you. If it's going to take a minute you are going to do something else. And that might not be work related. So it breaks your flow because you are sitting on your hands and filling your short term memory with garbage. Context switches are expensive (and break flow). Our brains don't do that well. And then you forget to switch back so you lose time.

I don't use reasoning models that much for this reason. It's easier and faster for me to manually patch up my code with whatever the LLM says I should fix. And on larger repositories the chance of a good PR drops sharply. So, even if it takes more context micromanagement to feed it all the detail it needs, this can be faster and more effective. And I get an answer in a few seconds instead of in a few minutes.

Tangentially, I would be curious to know what the impact is when it comes to developing novel solutions to problems. Is it letting you focus on coming up with such solutions by making more room to focus on them? To me, it feels more discouraging because the LLM came up with something right, it may not be great but tinkering with it and improving upon it might just be a red-herring, so why bother?

I wrote about this in "Too Fast to Think: The Hidden Fatigue of AI Vibe Coding" recently,

https://www.tabulamag.com/p/too-fast-to-think-the-hidden-fat...

I guess I'm just not asking it big enough things. I'm asking it things on the level of an individual function or component. To be honest I really haven't had much success at all with IDE integrations and giving it access to the whole codebase. I get far better results by asking very focused questions, which means I'm only waiting a few seconds for a response.

This is Claude Sonnet 4

Very, very much agree with this. The nuggets of wait time are just long enough to get distracted, but not long enough to accomplish anything worthwhile.

My best "hack" for this has been to use Freedom[1] to create a blocklist of all my go-to time sucks (including, sadly, HN). This at least stops me from getting pulled in too deeply.

[1] http://freedom.to/

Yeah, when using AI assistants it often happens that I end up in a dull/low-energy/lethargic state.

Then it costs me a lot of energy to get back working on the problem and fix all the mistakes that the AI made.

If you're intent on using agents, try having them work by themselves on one feature branch while you work normally on another. It feels like hiring a fast intern...

Highly opinionated: Regarding using agents for a main project or feature, as some do, I don't think there is such a thing as a "flow state." If you adhere to that working strategy, your hypothesis is that the agent is so much faster than you that you can get more done even without a flow state, even if the quality is a little worse, and your job has fundamentally changed from programmer to code reviewer. That will have its own set of skills for you to develop, such as efficiently reading their changes, managing costs and context, writing good prompts, etc.

If your problem is to keep the focus while the agent is doing his work, then try the app called Black Screen. It has a nice attention refresh feature that allows you to see random photos for a few seconds. It makes waiting less boring and does not suck your attention into itself as social media does.