[imiric]

That's not the same flow state experienced by programmers.

While programming, it's possible to get into a trance-like state where the program's logic is fully loaded and visible in your mind, and your fingers become an extension of your mind that wire you directly to the machine. This allows you to modify the program essentially at the speed of thought, with practically zero chance of producing buggy code. The programmer effectively becomes a self-correcting human interpreter.

Interrupting someone in this state is incredibly disruptive, since all the context and momentum is lost, and getting back into the state takes time and focus.

What you're describing is a general workflow. You can be focused on what you're doing, but there's no state loaded into memory that makes you more efficient. Interruptions are not disruptive, and you can pick up exactly where you left off with ease. In fact, you're constantly being interrupted by those agents running in the background, when they finish and you give them more work. This is a multitasking state, not flow.

So the article is correct. It's not possible to get into a flow state while working with ML tools. This is because it is an entirely different activity from programming that triggers different neural pathways.

[ai_assisted_dev]

Nice way of gatekeeping "flow state of programmers", considering I have been a software engineer for the past 2 decades. So I have experienced quite some flow states in my life, and this is no different.

[imiric]

Not gatekeeping, just pointing out that they're different activities with very different experiences. What you're talking about and what the article is talking about are different things.

When using ML tools you have no deep understanding of the behavior of the program, since you don't understand the generated code. If you bother to review the code, that is a huge context switch from anything you were doing previously. This doesn't happen during deeply focused programming sessions.

You may have been a software engineer for decades without ever experiencing the programming flow state. I'm not passing judgement.