Hand-coding is going away. There will be a long tail of hand-wringing and denial (mostly from folks of my vintage), but the reality is crystal clear. It’ll be interesting to see what becomes of the craft that is so much a part of my identity — I mean, there are still bespoke cabinet makers, blacksmiths and tailors, so it probably won’t go away entirely. But at best it’ll be a nostalgic or specialized niche, not part of the economic mainstream. Maybe I can land a spot on The Repair Shop.
Anyways, at least for the moment I’m going to ignore the good or bad of it all. It’s happening, and the best thing individuals can do is find a way to move through the transition successfully and with a modicum of happiness and satisfaction.
Which brings me to Flow, or as I prefer to call it….
The Crystal Method
Flow State is a common pop-psych concept. The idea is that certain tasks can draw us into a state of hyper-concentration and intense, focused productivity. Stealing directly from Wikipedia, six key things contribute to Flow:
- Intense and focused concentration on the present moment
- Merging of action and awareness
- A loss of reflective self-consciousness
- A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
- A distortion of temporal experience, as one’s subjective experience of time is altered
- Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding
Every one of the best coders I know will tell you about Flow, even if they don’t use that word. It’s why we work weird, long hours. It’s why electronic / atmospheric / trance music is so ubiquitous. It’s why office doors matter and why pair programming is stupid. When you’re in the zone, you don’t want it to stop.
Coding is the process of developing complex, multi-layered models in your mind and then translating them into a working machine. You have to hold a lot in your head at once — I talk about “top-down design” — these are the three top-level things I need to do; the first is composed of four subtasks; each of those breaks down further, and so on … holding your place in that tree while implementing each leaf is all-consuming. In a good way.
I recognize that this might seem a bit obsessive and unhealthy, but I guarantee you that it is not — it’s productive meditation. In Flow you don’t worry about your relationships, or what idiocy is happening in Washington DC, or that your allergies are bugging you. It’s calming and centering. It’s been awhile since I was in a twelve-hour flow, but even in retirement I can catch a few hours now and again.
Managers and Agents
There is no Flow in management. Managers don’t build; their job is to create and maintain an environment in which their team can succeed. Done well this is important and difficult work, don’t get me wrong. But it’s interrupt-driven, meeting-heavy and absolutely antithetical to Flow. If you’ve ever wondered why so many great engineers never transition (by choice or aptitude) into leadership, this is why — the two jobs are completely different.
Coding by agent, at least in its current incarnation, is really management. You divvy up work between one or more AI agents and let them loose. They come back with progress; you reinforce what worked and correct what didn’t, and loop again. Agent B might ask for attention while you’re working with Agent A, so you prioritize.
To be sure, these manager-agent conversations can be rewarding and super productive. You share knowledge, learn from each other, make discoveries, build awesome things. But it’s not Flow and it never will be — simply because of the cycle time involved. More than a half-century ago, researchers identified three “response time” thresholds (this Jakob Nielsen piece has a great summary):
- If something responds in 0.1 seconds, it feels “instantaneous.”
- Up to 1 second, the delay is noticeable but it’s OK.
- At 10 seconds, your mind is out, and onto other stuff.
Coding agents never take 0.1 seconds, and usually it’s more like a few minutes. That’s tantalizingly quick for the amount accomplished, but it is way way too long for humans to keep paying attention. No continuous attention, no Flow.
More things in Heaven and Earth
Economics doesn’t care about Flow; it cares about productivity. And the reality is that AI agents, pretty much now and inevitably soon, will write more code with fewer bugs than humans ever could. And no matter what our egos want to believe, human “review” will be symbolic at best.
That’s a good thing, not a bad thing. But where does it leave me (us), those humans who love the craft and have derived so much personal satisfaction from a career of Flow?
Well first of all, nobody is stopping you from hand-writing code on your own time, so put on some techno and party on. But it also turns out that, shockingly, coding ain’t the only game in town. When I quit the corporate world a few years ago, I started working down a list of skills and crafts that has proven just as rewarding.
Top amongst these is woodturning on my JET lathe. Shaping driftwood into a bowl, box, plate or vase is a guaranteed afternoon of Flow. It’s just like coding — a multi-step process, adjustment and discovery along the way, intense focus, and noise-cancelling headphones with a Reggaeton playlist (amusingly, my lack of Spanish competency helps here).
The Future is Craeft
My daughter and I have a serious weakness for the experiential archaeology shows created by Ruth Goodman, Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn (we don’t talk about Tom). Langlands has written a beautiful book called Craeft, in which he looks at traditional crafts and how they connect us to history, culture and nature. Highly recommended; here’s a little intro from the man himself:
These things aren’t just hobbies or nostalgia— I honestly believe they’re the future of our species. As an AI-optimist I am constantly challenged with “if people don’t need to work, what will they do?” The implication being that we’ll all just lay around doing drugs and having sex.
To which my first response is, well, that sounds kind of OK. But secondly, I believe that — freed of the need to drive an Uber or drill machine parts or answer customer service calls or, yes, manage a bunch of coding agents — we’ll be able to dedicate our time to crafts and activities that give us meaning and connect us to the world. Not because they’re jobs that need to get done, but because they Flow.
And that, my friends, will be pretty cool. So don’t despair — just keep swimming.