[egonschiele]

> The human is left doing whatever the machine can't, often a narrower slice of the original role

I haven't seen anyone talk about AI and its impact on flow yet. It's pretty easy for me to achieve a flow state while coding without AI, but with AI, I'm not so sure. I spend my time managing multiple Claude instances as they work on different tasks, and there's no time to go really deep into anything.

Flow was such a productivity boost for me. Even though Claude definitely helps me finish tasks quicker, I've started wondering how much quicker it actually is, vs getting into flow.

[whateveracct]

MBAs don't want to rely on people's flow. Let alone their skills. The fungible cog is their ideal.

[supermdguy]

I’ve tried having one “big” task that I’m focusing on with active back and forth while letting other Claude instances handle easier back-burner type tasks that it can effectively one-shot. But I’ve noticed that often turns into me spending more time/focus than I’d want on tasks that aren’t actually that impactful. I still think I get more done than I would otherwise, but I still haven’t found the best management strategy.

[tartoran]

I’ve seen people share the same experience here on HN. Im also in the same boat while I find LLMs uncomfortably useful but quite tiring to work with. To maintain flow I spend more time on crafting a complete and clear promot, akin to programming in natural language and avoid the back and forth when possible.

[QuercusMax]

I feel like you can get into a different sort of flow - a low-key flow where you're managing a bunch of different streams as interrupts come in. Different kind of focus, much more big-picture, kinda like playing an RTS.

[david_allison]

IMO: That's just due to the speed of responses.

Hardware will continue to improve, and eventually you'll have the choice of reaching a flow state with 2026 models, or using frontier models at our current level of performance.

[iugtmkbdfil834]

In a sense, that is almost exactly the vision of the future shown in accellerando. User can and does send tons of specialized agents into the world. I am still not certain if I buy the premise of the article, but then my company is too cheap to let me play with Claude.

[aarjaneiro]

At this point if I see "Made with {whatever_service_you_outsourced_thinking_to}" on a PR description and you didn't even feel like putting the effort to remove it, I'm going in with the assumption that you didn't bother to do or check a lot of things.

[roxolotl]

This is a piece I liked a lot about how to make coding agents better for flow state: https://haskellforall.com/2026/02/beyond-agentic-coding

[toomuchtodo]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46930565 - February 2026 (90 comments)

[auggierose]

Some people think that flow is a negative. You do what you feel like doing, not what you should be doing.

[ssss11]

Sounds like you’ve become a manager.

[guiambros]

Very soon all software engineers will be managers. And no, not sarcasm.

[shostack]

I get into the same flow state as any fast paced strategy game like StarCraft.