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Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

We’re a long way from figuring out how to get flow state with agents. Maybe some sort of less stonerish upper-based master of the universe overseeing 100s of agents manic state.

I think there’d be a lot of demand from long time engineers that loved working in flow state to build tooling that encouraged flow. I think tokens/s needs to get like 10x faster first, because you’re going to be heading into a world where you are receiving very soft and non-distracting suggestions, probably at the periphery of your consciousness. Most will be thrown away.

I can kind of imagine a UI for this. I might experiment a little building something, but it will be by telling some agents to build it.. :)

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The thing about flow state is that it is about being deeply focused on one thing. I’m not sure that orchestrating hundreds of agents will help—it’s not really about “CPU load”, at least, not for me.

I HAVE found another way to achieve flow state. Hand tool woodworking. Especially planing. There’s something about the rhythm of the tool, combined with the awareness of what the tool is doing, that makes the rest of the world evaporate, just like when coding. I could see myself doing that instead. Sadly there is even less call for slow woodworking than there is for slow coding.

> We’re a long way from figuring out how to get flow state with agents

its been the opposite for me. being able to create things with almost zero friction has lead me to have to slow down for my own sanity at times. I've had to setup "handcoding time" as a way to keep me touching virtual grass lest I completely lose myself building stuff at all hours.

literally thinking of taking up Haskell just to have a language that forces me to slow down and think in my off hours.

Yeah I agree — I don’t think I said what I’ve experienced very well — there is a different sort of state you can get in during a large multiagent session. But to me it’s more manic, not ‘smooth’ or peaceful. On a good day hand coding I will often feel groggy coming out of it, possibly subverbal, like I’ve recruited most of my brain to doing one thing for some time. I’ve never had a job that I could do that in, but I imagine the subset of engineers that do are pretty happy.

Tokens don’t matter if you have any slow deterministic processes. The bottleneck is already on testing infrastructure in the work I do. Screenshot tests are slow. Enormous codebases are slow. We have whole teams devoted to speeding these things up, so all I can do is get the agent to call the minimum set of commands necessary to check their latest iteration. This of course flies right in the face of the mountains of slow commands the harness tells it to use, resulting in chaos.

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