[jmatthews]

To paraphrase the Bhagavad_Gita "you are not guaranteed the fruits of your labor, but you are guaranteed your labor."

For me flow is achieved most effortlessly when the problem is interesting and I have the tools necessary to attack it.

Extrinsic motivation is simply a non - factor in this case. To the degree that it may or may not exist and is immaterial to the labor at hand.

On the purpose of a tight feedback loop. The magic of the repl is a perfect implementation of a flow like feedback loop. Unfortunately my language of choice doesn't utilize it.