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Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?
#12Are you using multiple agents on the same project? If you are, use git worktrees.
I personally prefer 3-4 concurrent terminal sessions, working on different projects. Claude code usually runs around everywhere with agents, and sometimes takes 20 minutes to get shit done. During that time I'm shipping open source work, etc.
I use my own tools to help: Sugar and RemembrallMCP. Sugar is used for memory that's stored outside sessions. So I say store this in sugar memory. If I open a new claude session later, and ask it to lookup sugar memory, it's there.
RemembrallMCP is a AST and code graph that helps the agents understand change impact of your codebase. Instead of insane greps veritical and horizontal, it uses this to quickly understand impact with very high accuracy, time reduction and low token limits.
Game changers.
Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?
#13I have a skill called /devlog that will have it write down what we've been doing that session in a a file , like a captain's log, basically a tracker so i don't get lost in the mess. I have another skill I made called /makeblog where it does the same type of thing, but a blog post, not someting i publish or anythign, jsut for me that does an output of that sesssion.
Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?
#14The answer to your question has less to do with "vibe coding," "harness," and all the jargon and "productivity guru speak."
It is akin to asking, "How do you get a runner's high when running in the Nike Vaporfly?" You don't. What you _can_ do is improve your core strength, endurance, cardio, etc. Then, there will come a day, if you are consistent in your running, when, while running, you are less worried about tired legs and generally feel "open" and feel like flying. That day, you will push your pace and realise "oh shit" and bonk. That day you realise that your body and mind are not ready for sustaining a very high pace for a long time. You start doing interval training, hill repeats, and so on. A few months later you try to push the pace again on a good day and voila, you love it! Pure running bliss.
The same is true for engineering. If your "multitasking" muscle/mechanism is weak, if your orbital-prefrontal cortex is weak and you get distracted easily, then no amount of process hacking will get you to flow state. So first understand your mind, understand your body, understand your weaknesses. Work on them consciously, deliberately.
As for me, I can work on at most 2, maybe 3, projects at a time. I observed that my mind works well as a stack, and I am good at pushing context from one project onto the stack, loading the next project's context, then pushing it onto the stack and starting work on the next one. Finish it, then pop to the previous project, and keep going around. When my mind feels weak, I use digital sticky notes or just jot down notes somewhere to maintain context between projects, to just drop down t o focusing on 1 project a time.
Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?
#15have enough sessions going that you just cycled through them and by the time you get back that chat is ready to go again. Easier sometimes staying in same project, sometimes easier if you don't use worktrees to work on different projects.
Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?
#16I don't understand the appeal of parallel agent programming. Even Opus is often outputting wrong shit, or questionable code, I have to manually fix, refactor because it's quicker done that way. What do you get from parallel agents one can't do? Surely you can throw in a couple of extra cycles and "specialized agents" aka just different prompts, but I don't think the extra benefit is worth the token cost. I just throw…
Why are you working as the feedback mechanism? Automate it.
Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?
#17If I understand the research on flow state, you can’t. Not all tasks are compatible.
Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?
#18I get the best output when I work on a single project or 2 entirely different projects at the same time. Example: work + a side quest or prototype where agents cannot overwrite each other's code. I can add a third stream of real world productive tasks, example: do the dishes.
Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?
#19I build a bunch of tools[1] that give the agents means to communicate and coordinate between each other, with me mostly just deciding what goes into the backlog, and checking their summaries whenever they finish a task.
Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?
#20I get the best output when I work on a single project or 2 entirely different projects at the same time. Example: work + a side quest or prototype where agents cannot overwrite each other's code. I can add a third stream of real world productive tasks, example: do the dishes.
My dishes have never been cleaner and my laundry has never been more folded than since the advent of agentic AI.