Ask HN: How do you get into a flow state when using AI to code?

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Why would you try?

Just give it a zillion linters - including ones you wrote yourself - and make it write its own tests (red/green) so it doesn’t need to stop until it’s made working software with nothing dumb in it.

Then get into a flow state when you write your weekly update emails and respond to customers.

I use the trust but verify method. Build in snippets, review what AI spits out and chive on if it meets my satisfaction. I cannot blindly write something with AI and utilize it.

Keeping build in steps keeps me as well as AI focused.

> I feel like I'm missing a mode that works more like a pair programmer. Perhaps a multimodal model that can talk to you about what you're writing, as you write it, and offer suggestions rather than trying to take over and do everything for you.

This is exactly what I have also been thinking and wanting for a while now. A realtime agent that I can share a screen and mouse / keyboard with. and we can just work together at times. I think it will probably come at some point but we might be a few years away from it.

Assuming you're like me and flow means learning interesting things and being engaged with the results...

Run tons of experiments. Turn yourself into a researcher. If you don't have a constant interface to the latest interesting experiment results to engage with/learn novel things/see novel solutions, you aren't running enough experiments.

Running an experiment means you don't already know the result, and you've looked at the prior art so you are doing genuinely new things. Establishing this prerequisite is completely trivial with modern agents.

Hopefully the answer is interesting and impactful enough that it will be useful in your work. This is honestly easier than it sounds; if you're a smart person working in a field where people are willing to pay money for impactful results, you can do this.

Anything that's not running experiments -- including debugging -- is grunt work that you should automate away, and you increasingly can if you set up your harnesses correctly. Make a pipeline so that the novel results of your experiments are polished, packaged, and shipped by your agents. How to do this obviously varies by domain but it's increasingly possible for most things.

And if your job is not doing the above, I have bad news for you: your job is going away fast. So you might want to set up a day on the weekend to give this approach a try; it'll be good for your flow and your career.