> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Sounds like you’ve become a manager.

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