It's a matter of definition, a flow state is hitting peak performance without attending to the details of your actions, fluidly and without delays, at a task that in any normal situation would be considered complex and difficult.
If you know the feeling from performance or from trance-like coding sessions, there's no mapping of that to the use of agents as described in this article. It's not that I don't achieve it, it's that using agents doesn't have the depth of technique or immediacy of reaction needed to be worthy of anyone reaching a proper flow state with it.
I feel like we've already corrupted the meaning of vibe now, do we have to corrupt the meaning of flow state too?
I think it’s just different than flow state you experience with traditional coding. I agree that if you’re just entering a single prompt at a time and waiting for it to finish, there’s no way you can enter flow state. However, if you are orchestrating multiple agents and using spare mental bandwidth to debug and plan next steps, then you have the ingredients for flow state. It’s a continual flow of strategizing, evaluating, going in deep to manually handle a hard issue, and then returning to high-level thinking.
I’m 16 years into my career, build some fairly complex production systems, and definitely enjoyed flow state in normal coding. I’m still figuring out a rhythm with Claude Code, but flow state is certainly achievable.
If you know the feeling from performance or from trance-like coding sessions, there's no mapping of that to the use of agents as described in this article. It's not that I don't achieve it, it's that using agents doesn't have the depth of technique or immediacy of reaction needed to be worthy of anyone reaching a proper flow state with it.
I feel like we've already corrupted the meaning of vibe now, do we have to corrupt the meaning of flow state too?