[novachen]

The broken rhythm you're describing is real, and I think it's a sign the tooling is still calibrated for the developer, not the developer-agent pair.

What's helped me most: stop treating agent invocations like function calls and start treating them like delegating to a junior dev you trust but still need to review. That reframe changes what you do in the gaps. Instead of waiting for confirmation prompts, I now use that 10-30 seconds to write the next spec segment, review adjacent code, or just think about what the agent should find. The gaps become planning time, not interruption time.

The deeper issue is that flow state was designed around a human holding the full context in working memory. With agents, the context lives outside your head by design. The discomfort you're feeling might be the transition from solo-player flow to coordinator flow - which is a genuinely different cognitive mode, not a degraded version of the original.

Concretely: do you write your specs before or after starting the agent run? I've found writing specs upfront (even rough ones) shifts me into coordinator mode faster and makes the waits feel purposeful.