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Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?

#21

Post by thot_experiment »

I've basically stopped using agentic AI completely as I've found the easy wins it gets me almost always come with tons of debt I have to pay down later. I specifically find the loss of situational awareness that comes with agentic development to cost far more than the utility I get from the code it writes.

As a result of this I've switched almost entirely to using qwen-coder3 locally in FIM autocomplete mode, and that's been pretty fantastic. Since I'm still doing most of the programming myself I keep the codebase loaded up in my brain the way I'm used to but so much of the tedium of programming is accelerated by the mind-reading autocomplete with 300ms latency (to useful completion, not first token).

Agents are neat but fundamentally it's a hack on top of the best autocomplete you could imagine, I find using it to do the thing it actually does gives me by far the best UX.

Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?

#23

Post by j_bum »

maebert wrote: post #8

We have asked ourselves that question repeatedly over the past year. While I don’t have a simple solution, I have some mental models that may help. Overall, there are two knobs to tune, each with a few strategies: 1. reducing the number of times you have to switch context 2. reducing the cost of switching Let’s start 1. - The easiest of course is to have less agents in parallel. - Clustering interventions. When start…

Claude code hides thoughts - which used to be how I’d stay engaged. Now they’ve got it all hidden.

Otherwise, I love your advice. Thanks.

It’s ok for the mind to wander a bit, and we are lucky to be in a time during engineering where the ability to think has become a priority.

Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?

#24

Post by nja »

maebert wrote: post #8

We have asked ourselves that question repeatedly over the past year. While I don’t have a simple solution, I have some mental models that may help. Overall, there are two knobs to tune, each with a few strategies: 1. reducing the number of times you have to switch context 2. reducing the cost of switching Let’s start 1. - The easiest of course is to have less agents in parallel. - Clustering interventions. When start…

What is the latest way to show thoughts in Claude Code? I had to pin 2.1.68 since that seemed to be the last one with thinking shown (even though there wasn't anything about it in the following changelog), but I keep hearing that people using newer versions are still able to see it with some flag(s)?

Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?

#25

Post by Bridged7756 »

cluckindan wrote: post #16
Bridged7756 wrote: post #9

I 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.

A slot machine isn't valid criteria for determining code's correctness.

Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?

#27

Post by bicepjai »

Same boat. 5 agents is my hard limit, past that I lose the thread and it stops being guided coding, turns into vibe coding. I lean into the context switch instead of fighting it. Plan a large task, kick the agents off, walk away. My rule is whatever I switch to has to be little productive than watching tokens stream or shorts. usually a workout or a research video. Reframes the wait for me. For review I go in other direction: spin up 50 to 100 review agents to audit everything and rank issues by severity. I work through the blockers manually and read the actual diffs. Handles most of the bug compounding problem you mentioned. It’s a kind of flow. Definitely not the same as writing the code ourself, nothing is. Just the closest substitute I’ve found in this era

Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?

#28

Post by dnnddidiej »

One task at a time. Zero your inbox while waiting for the agent. Or read / do a course. Etc.

Reading about the problem you are solving with the agent is good. Less of a switch. E.g. it implenents calling an API. you read the API docs end to end so you can review better.

Re: Ask HN: How do you maintain flow when vibe coding?

#30

Post by embedding-shape »

Bridged7756 wrote: post #25
cluckindan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you working as the feedback mechanism? Automate it.

A slot machine isn't valid criteria for determining code's correctness.

Right, don't use "random.int() === random.int()" as the assertions then?

Say you have one test that checks if Y works properly. The point of the agent harnesses is that you can throw them at that problem, and they'll return once Y works properly according to that test. How the test is structured, or how the agent triggers it, or what the agent is willing to do to pass that test, is all up to you.

But if you manage to set things up like that, you're not longer relying on any "slot machine behaviour", at least as we commonly understand what that is.

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