I’m glad you mentioned flow state because that’s exactly the high I’m trying to chase with AI and why I like it despite programming since elementary school as well.

I realized I most enjoy higher level problem solving but don’t really enjoy implementation. Like I enjoy algorithms, data structures, memory allocation strategies, SIMD optimization, etc. But writing the code, and debugging it is tedious and takes me out of flow.

And if I’m really interested in the project itself then the algorithms take a back seat and I enjoy the even higher level problem solving of building a cool project.

I don’t think it makes you lesser to enjoy these things more than literally banging out code, and hunting down bugs. Perhaps I’ve written enough code that I don’t find the same joy in that. Who knows.