Flow

September 23, 2026September 23, 2026 ~ Sean Nolan

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

A rustic wooden bowl with a dark finish, accompanied by a light-colored wooden bowl and a small wooden container with a lid.

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.

Inside-Out Christmas Ornament

December 14, 2023December 14, 2023 ~ Sean Nolan

Since getting my lathe three years ago I’ve started a tradition of turning an ornament using the trunk of our family Christmas tree. Year one was a pretty but simple blobby thing. Year two was a bell, complete with a second little brass bell hanging inside. This year I wanted to try “inside-out” turning, a new technique I saw (of course) on the web. I quite like the way it came out, and the steps were interesting enough to warrant a quick post.

Christmas tree wood is pretty wet even after a month of sitting in the house, so I typically cut a few pieces and let them dry in the garage into the Fall at least. This is one of the hazards of being a collector of natural wood — my garage is packed so full of drying driftwood and winterfall that you can barely walk around in there.

Milling the blank

Anyways, step one was to mill out a rectangular blank just over 2×2” and long enough to give me plenty of room to work. It’s harder than you’d think to mill logs and branches into square lumber, because there’s no first straight edge to work from.

When the piece is small enough, my approach is to secure the piece to a straight board lengthwise with an edge sticking out, like the diagram here (looking end-on to the log). After getting a clean first cut I remove the screws, rotate the log so the flat part sits against the board, and do it again to end up with two flat edges in a right angle. At this point we’re golden and can just ride the existing straight edges to create square, parallel cuts. This all gets much harder when the piece doesn’t fit into my modest band saw, but that’s not an issue for a Christmas tree trunk, even a Grizwold-sized one.

First glue-up

I marked the blank end in four equal segments, adding notations so I could remember how they fit together. Then I cut the segments lengthwise on the table saw, and glued them back together with single ply of newspaper along the joints. This is a neat trick — after the first turning step we’ll have to break these glue joints apart. They have to be strong enough to hold firm during turning, but weak enough that they separate cleanly when we’re done. The layer of newspaper absorbs some of the wood glue and tears apart when we need it to.

It’s pretty important to do this glue-up accurately — the four pieces need to come together to a perfect point in the middle, or the edges won’t match up when you put them back together. You seriously can’t have too many clamps in a shop for this kind of job! Subtle hint: clamps make great stocking stuffers.

Turning the inside

Finally I was read to actually turn something! In this first step you’re hollowing out what will become the inside of the ornament, so it’s a bit of a mind-twist to visualize the right shape. I was trying for a pretty simple teardrop, so not too bad. The cuts can get pretty close to the middle, just leave enough meat that the piece isn’t unstable when reassembled.

Any finishing on the inside has to happen during this stage as well, because the surfaces will be pretty inaccessible once you flip them around. These ornaments are meant to help us remember past Christmas trees, so I like to leave at least some of the pine surface relatively natural. I sanded down to about 600 grit, did a bit of polishing with Yorkshire paste (love this stuff), and we were ready for the next step.

Second glue-up and turning the outside

OK, after breaking the sections apart with a wide chisel, I flipped them all around and re-glued them (no newspaper this time, it’s for keeps!) and clamped them up. Precision was even more important this time; I unfortunately had one edge slip and gap a bit — sawdust and glue and the final stain covered it up ok, but super-annoying nonetheless.

Back in the lathe, things went pretty well, shaping the outside to line up with the inside. I was a little worried there wouldn’t be enough space for the bottom taper I wanted, but as you can see below I just barely made it! (Another wood turning lesson — you never can have too much extra material.) I did this work at pretty high speed (about 1300rpm) to keep the open edges from catching and ripping; even so I had to be pretty light with the cuts to keep it all together.

Finishing, a near disaster, but then not

I really wanted a contrasting inside/outside for this piece, and thought a dark stain would look nice. Unfortunately, I chose walnut after looking at samples online — big, big mistake. Apparently “walnut” in this context means “clearly poop.” Such a bummer when things go south at the very last minute.

But it was OK. Took awhile, but I was able to sand off the ugly finish and redo it with my ever-trusty Unicorn Spit (check out their story, so awesome) and a few coats of spray enamel — a nice blue color that lets the grain come through in the sunlight. Woo hoo! The final result looks great on the Whidbey tree, and now I just have to figure out what to do next year. A fun tradition, although it might be a bit difficult to maintain if we follow through on the annual threat of a fake tree to save our allergies … we will see!

Every Mistake

April 24, 2023April 24, 2023 ~ Sean Nolan

I’ve been working on myself for fifty-four years; software for about forty; kids for almost thirty; and (as Jim says) sawdust for six or so. Whatever the domain, sometimes projects go great and sometimes they, well, don’t. But it’s hard for me to think of anything I’ve tried — even the worst of them — that didn’t have some useful lesson hiding in there. That’s pretty cool.

Case in point, this little pine bowl. It actually looks ok with a little distance and soft focus:

But if you zoom in, it’s a freaking disaster in pretty much every way. First of all, there’s a ton of “tearout,” which happens when the tool catches and rips the wood fibers instead of cutting cleanly. I still have pretty lousy sharpening skills, and between that and a preference for carbide scraping tools it’s something I’m always having to watch for. I ended up with a few really rough spots, especially on the inside of the piece — it’s so tempting to think you can sand these out, but that really only goes so far. Ah well.

Next, I didn’t dry the wood well enough for the orientation and shape I wanted to create. I thought I did, but clearly not. You can see in the picture that I included the pith, and that it runs horizontally through the piece. Which looks cool, but with those straight, thin walls it cracked less than an hour after bringing it in from the garage. The big one shown in the picture and then a hairline exactly on the opposite side. Whooooops!

When I first got my lathe I had no concept of how much wood moves as it dries, and how much time it can take to stabilize. Of course this isn’t the case when you buy kiln-dried stuff at the store, but most of my material comes off of the beach and it’s hard to know how long it’s been cut and/or in the water. The most reliable method is sealing the ends with a wax or glue and waiting a year or two for it to dry naturally (the wax helps the moisture evaporate more evenly), but the oven works “ok” in a pinch.

Anyways, I often reinforce blanks before turning them, using epoxy or CA glue or a wood glue / sawdust paste. And generally that’s actually a positive for the work — like the beautiful clear epoxy voids in this bowl, one of my favorites. But once something has been turned to final shape it’s a lot harder. My next mistake was doing that repair poorly. The plan was to block off the crack using metal tape and hot glue, pour in just enough epoxy to fill the crack, and then sand it flat. Which sort of worked, except (1) the tape leaked, so there’s staining around the repair, and (2) rather than being either clear or opaque, I put in just enough black pigment to make it kind of a muddy grey. Mmmmm.

The hits keep coming! I almost exclusively use oils and waxes to finish, because the whole point of what I make is to show off the great wood that floats up on the beach (if I want a hard coat I will use epoxy coats sometimes). But for this one I wanted to experiment with traditional shellac just to broaden my arsenal a bit. Sanding sealer is a pretty typical undercoat for shellac, and I was still hoping I could hide some of those tears, so I put on a couple of coats. All good, except that when I actually sanded the sealer I left a ton of marks that I didn’t notice before locking them in with the shellac coats. Awesome.

At least that was about it. Oh, except for the drips I left in the shellac, but at least I was able to buff those out with a little work.

Not my finest hour. And yet, I’ll still put this little guy up on the shelf and in the gallery. And be happy when I see it. And even post it here for everyone to see! Next time I’ll sharpen things up better, dry the wood a little more and be more patient with the sanding. All good things.