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Comment by diavelguru | Hacker News Reader

This is a real thing. I spent all of January doing Greenfield development using Claude (I finished the requirements) and all I can say is thank goodness I had the Max 5x plan and not the 20x as I got breaks once the tokens were used up till the next cycle. I was forced to get up and do something else. That something else was biking, rowing, walking. My productivity had never been higher but at what cost? My health no thanks. So I'm glad I'm using the time till token reset for my health. I time it perfectly. I do a walk, row, bike for 1 hour then as I arrive back the tokens are reset. I get like 3 hours nonstop use per token batch with the 5x plan. I've been thinking about going 20x but am scared...

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I don’t get this tbh, I use Claude too and my issue is the opposite - too many small breaks. Every time I hit enter my brain wants to checkout because the agent just spins while it creates thousands of tokens and churns on the subject. Even if it’s only 2m, that’s 2m where my mind has nothing to work on.

Hard to stay in flow and engaged.

Feels weirdly similar to being interrupted over slack.

I have never been in a flow state with an agent running. I use agents, but that isn’t flow.

yes agreed. I'm running 3-5 parallel Claude at once with requirements as the input. My prompt is say work on section 5.1 or something very specific. Then I'm monitoring the work across all instances.

and flow state is a luxury in 2026 with AI swarm most likely to be found sparingly if all. Good luck all!

you are correct flow is not achieved as this is not programming more like system design, architecture, QA, Product Owner work. It's using the swarm as your own dev team.

But it's also programming as you have to study outputs to ensure they're correct. Some (it seems many) don't do this, and then their outputs usually aren't correct.

That’s what my teammates are for, I pipe slack and jira to Claude and the asker and teammates tell me if there’s a bug

Sounds more like code-level QA to me.

In my experience, QA is something like ensuring it responds correctly to input. This is similar, but not the same as code review. I would more liken QA to dynamic review rather than static. Note though that code review can still be a form of QA. (Formal proofing especially.)

That’s what QA departments in software companies do. In many other contexts they examine things produced by machines to ensure they meet the specs and functional requirements for that piece, and if not, either adjust it, have someone else adjust it, or have the adjusted machine spit out another one. They might design tests, fixtures to measure things, etc etc etc but they do not make the things directly.

To be fair, ensuring that machines produce the correct outputs (even by making someone else fix it) is still the kind of process I'm talking about. After all, that's also how it works in software.

It depends on what the machines are supposed to do. I’ve never worked in software QA, but worked as a developer for over a decade and currently work in manufacturing. Is mass-manufacturing totally different? Sure. QA engineers in small high-complexity single-run prototyping shops? It’s not much different.

> It's using the swarm as your own dev team. reply

Managing high performance dev/ops teams is it's own form of a state of flow. In fact for me, it's much more addicting than any other as the outcomes are usually many multiples of any IC role you could have. Even crazier when you have a "follow the sun" team involved so there the work just gets sequentially handed off and is always in constant motion.

I imagine AI coding is like this for a lot of folks.

Are you a single agent user?

At least in my case, flow is gone. It’s all context switching now.

Sounds like a recipe for burnout

I have similar problem but I have to switch contexts and it makes the work a lot more intense.

This. And another problem is that I feel not proud after completing the task. No sense of achievement.

I fix this by manually prompting many small changes (with a very fast model — smaller models are fine for simple changes / additions, and you can iterate fast).

So I can still work way faster than programming manually, but I stay in flow. And most importantly, my mental model stays synced the whole time. There's no catching up to do.

Hypothesis: limiting usage / tokens could have a positive effect on project quality, since it forces the developer to think more carefully about the problems they're working on. When you're forced to stop and slow down, you try to be more deliberate with token usage. But if you have unlimited tokens you can just keep generating infinite lines of code without thinking as hard about the problem.

I've seen people on social media bragging about how they're able to produce a mountain of code as if this was praiseworthy.

One might wonder if the trend holds when limiting token use to… zero?

Does a person review all the AI generated code?

Not at all unless they’re a) competently b) making something worth anything at all that c) isn’t a proof-of-concept or the like.

Yes, of course. I mean, is all production code reviewed?

Sorry, I wasn’t giving a serious answer. It’s just not as amusingly worded as in thought.

Seriously, though, your question is one of those “how long is a piece of string” sort of questions. Just like any other software quality question, it depends on context, competence, goals, market dynamics, organizational culture, project timelines, team expertise, etc.

Do people pay their bills on time? Do people wear seatbelts? Do people brush their teeth for the full two recommended minutes? Depends, depends, depends.

Sorry, I didn't realise you weren't the OP. I was really asking the OP as they said they had large productivity gains from using AI to code. But if you're a professional developer, the same question can be answered by you: do you specifically review all AI generated production code?

In my own case 100% of my code is reviewed by humans (generally me), and that IMO is the only sensible option, and has been the standard since I started coding commercially 33 years ago. I don't use AI to generate code though, other than a few experiments, as I don't really need to write much code these days.

Great shilling attempt )

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