Week 1001

Matt Kirkland

It's week 1001!

Interesting topic of discussion around the BNB water cooler this week: what have AI tools done to our flow state?

I think this is part of a broader conversation about ‘what does working with AI feeeeel like?’ That’s something lots of people are talking about. But specifically flow state is an interesting segment of this.

Developers have a very refined sense of flow, but designers and really everybody experiences this. You’re sunk into your problem, you lose track of time, you aren’t distracted. But working with new coding tools disrupt this! You give your agent a task, and it'll be done in a couple of minutes, but you have to give it that time. So you... have to just wait. Do you check your email? Do you think about something else? This naturally pulls your focus out of the problem you're working on.

Working with AI coding agents like this becomes more like "managing." Maybe it fundamentally makes us swap between Paul Graham's idea of 'Makers Schedule' and 'Managers Schedule' ? We can get a lot done this way, but it's a shift in what 'getting things done' feels like.