AI and Flow
What happened to protecting a developer’s flow state in the AI era?
For as long as I can remember, being able to get into the “zone” or be in a flow state when writing code was not only highly coveted but seen as essential.
Scrum masters protected their teams from unnecessary interruptions like guardians at the palace gates. Or maybe prison wardens feels more apt depending on where you worked. Articles like Paul Graham’s Manager vs Maker Schedule were routinely shared as justifications for this. Even before the widespread adoption of agile (or should that be Agile) good managers shielded their engineers from unnecessary “noise” from higher levels of management or even customers all in an attempt to preserve “the zone”.
We optimized our IDEs to ensure that we don’t drop out of the flow state. We wrote faster tests to make sure we stayed focused in the time they took to run. We broke our code down into smaller units so they compiled more quickly.
Then AI code tools came along.
They’re slow. Easily slow enough for me to wander off and put a couple of kids through college while I wait for the LLM to generate a bunch of code. Flow state? What flow state?
But no one talks about this. No one seems to mind or care.
Are we so happy with the improvements in productivity that these tools have brought us that we no longer worry about being in that flow state anymore?
Have we all adopted the Manager Schedule now as we just direct a team of AI agents to do our work for us?
I doubt it.
Certainly, the DORA report on AI usage amongst a few others seem to throw some shade on the productivity gains shown by AI usage
So what gives? Maybe I just don’t write enough code anymore to have a good answer to this, but it certainly feels to me that remaining in a flow state and using any kind of code generation beyond GitHub Copilot for autocomplete is… challenging… to put it politely. The constant frustration with correcting the hallucinating brat of an LLM doesn’t help either to be honest. And quite frankly even the “Copilot Pause” can be frustrating enough.
Anyone fancy educating me?
