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Comment by tombot | Hacker News Reader

"I haven't been able to enter flow state like I can when I hand write code." new flow state is having 10 terminal tabs in diff worktrees and trying to remember what each bit is

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It hits the exact same endorphin system as “one more turn” style games like Civ. You can manage a few cities and keep them healthy, but the rest of your empire eventually regresses into a set of chores. Any time you encounter one of your zero growth cities you just queue some thoughtless production automation to keep it out of your “next turn” cycle as long as possible.

Yeah, I see this as a design flaw in Civ. Better to limit the player's moves per turn to keep things moving. There's a game called "Ozymandius" that I quite like, or for a simple online game try Compact Conflict:

https://wasyl.eu/games/compact-conflict/play.html

Hopefully the LLM's will get fast enough so we won't need to multitask, or least we can juggle fewer tasks.

Yeah I've used Opus fast mode a few times and it's incredible for staying in a flow state.

But it is crazy expensive so, not a feasible daily driver yet.

It sounds silly but lately I've been able to hit flow states doing exactly this.

While it can be productive, I never feel like I'm in a flow state doing this. The general context switching can actually be a bit draining to me.

Quite draining, I hope this is not what the future holds.

It’s a good reflection of my energy leve.

Sometimes I’m working within 5 projects all with 1-3 agents running. Other times I’m maxed out on one agent running in a single project.

Here's hoping someone starts to pull these things together into an app or Web frontend so the rest of us can configure these setups more easily.

(I was wondering yesterday, for example, if LMStudio might roll in speech-to-text capability without everyone instead having to jury-rig some custom install/config.)

one option Ive liked for entering flow state for this is running a small 3b param model and using it as an alternative to stackoverflow or websearch while I code.

I don't often do this, mostly bc I don't care too much about most of the code I write and just want it to work, and then I skip over it and see what's missing and tell the LLM to fix it

i hate that there are so many worktrees now that its a real pain to find the actual file and modify it by hand.

there are so many stupid little changes (e.g., rewording or deleting their numerous comments) that would be done better and faster by me but it's usually just less cumbersome to keep asking the machine to tweak it instead.

exactly, it's like Bobby Fischer playing 10 games of chess simultaneously

so Step 1: Be Bobby Fischer? super helpful for us mortals...

Give yourself more credit. Bobby Fischer didn't wake up one morning the chess wiz that he is now, it took years of practice and failing. And we're not talking about chess either. Start prompting one agent on one task in one worktree. Spin up a second agent on a second task in a second work tree. Repeat until you hit flow state for you. It might be at three agents or thirteen. Who cares how many other people are on, get to however many is just under too many for you to manage.

Try intimidating the LLM as it writes your code.

That Claude Code regex for curse words? Turns out Anthropic was just looking for the next coding Bobby Fisher ...

But it feels more exhausting and stressful.

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