I think it’s just different than flow state you experience with traditional coding. I agree that if you’re just entering a single prompt at a time and waiting for it to finish, there’s no way you can enter flow state. However, if you are orchestrating multiple agents and using spare mental bandwidth to debug and plan next steps, then you have the ingredients for flow state. It’s a continual flow of strategizing, evaluating, going in deep to manually handle a hard issue, and then returning to high-level thinking.

I’m 16 years into my career, build some fairly complex production systems, and definitely enjoyed flow state in normal coding. I’m still figuring out a rhythm with Claude Code, but flow state is certainly achievable.