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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

AI ruins your flow. That's the biggest problem. I sit here and wait for Claude to do something. Then I get distracted by social media.

No these things don't actually work if you study human psychology:

* Switching to another work task (what for like a minute?)

* Playing chess or something (sure its better than social media, but still a distraction)

But I do like AI tools that don't interfere with my flow like Github Copilot, or even chatting with Claude / ChatGPT about a task I'm doing.

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I started doing pushups between claude code responses. I started with 10 but now I rip ~50 like nothing. I'm getting a pull up bar and trying to do the same. Pull ups until it completes then prompt and again, squats, pushups, ect. I'm getting stronger and better at code.

You are getting stronger. I very much doubt you are getting better at code.

stare out the window. look at clouds. wonder how they take the shapes they do. think about water and how it moves through time and space. how those water molecules were once in a bowl of rice or loaf of bread. how many other things has this water been in? what about the water in my body, right now? holy shit, i’ve been a cloud before…

oh, claude’s done now. how does this thing work?

E-e-e-xactly. It took an embarrassing long time for me to come to this conclusion also. There’s something hypnotising about seeing it work which is also distracting.

I wonder if I’ve actually saved time overall or, if I was in an uninterrupted flow state I would have done not just a better but also quicker job.

"allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19%--AI tooling slowed developers down."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089

I just ask right now Cursor-GPT about where a service was being called from, its has over 10 minutes and it hasn't come up with an answer. Just constant grepping and reading and planning next moves

So aggravating

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