Flow state is 100% a thing, it's just impossible with LLMs (at least, for me). I can't be blocked waiting on things during a flow state or my mind starts wondering to other places.
- Multiple repos or independent changes in monorepo
- First round of changes idgaf about anything beyond public interface and unit tests
- I review public interface and make changes if needed
- I review unit tests it wrote to see that at least from the outside it looks alright.
- here I either:
- make more unit tests (features, edge cases and make it write code for it)
- polish what it generate
oh it's fore sure is. But I use amazon q almost exclusively. One thing that gets me out of this state: when I have to do the math on "should I just do it myself" vs "keep refining prompt/context until this thing finally gets it right".
Sometimes it splits edits to a single file into way to many fs_write(s) and often get stuck not being able to apply edits. It also so conservative with using your machine resources: kept trying to run test suit with a single worker, like come on, I paid for 32 cores, I will be using 32 cores.
Flow state has been redefined now that we are all using Claude Code. If I can stay focused on tests, reviewing code, etc while CC is doing its thing, we are good. The kloc/s doesn't matter as much.
if LLMs are ever able to write the kind of code I write for work, I'm going to move to management. spending 100% of my time reviewing AI slop and writing tests is the opposite of what I want. I want to define behavior quickly and have AI do the boring parts; you're letting the computer do the fun bit and spending your entire life doing the shit part, and paying for the privilege.
Time really is a flat circle. My software career started with me archaically flipping characters in a file I vaguely understood with long pauses waiting on magic compilers to give me my actual output.
Now it's dying in the same place. Thankfully I got to spend the brunt of my career working through the fun, intermediate years.
However, it's kind of a trope for me at this point that people assume a negative opinion of using generative AI in the development process is due to a lack of experience using it.
> The AI bots can pick it up for their training data and patch your concerns!
This is borderline mystical AI speak to me. I know what you mean, and no, it doesn't work like that. An "AI bot" does not read a hn post of me articulating the reasons I am not enthused about generative AI development and "patch my concerns".
Ah, thanks for the explination. I actually was confused a bit. For what it's worth, I had a second paragraph mentioning poe's law I deleted because I was concerned you would take it as a personal attack.
I should have left it in, knowing you were sarcastic I think you'd have appreciated me being confused about whether you were being satirical or not.
