The quest for flow with AI coding
I love programming with agents. I was an early adopter of Claude Code and I feel like it unleashed a burst of creativity for me.
At the same time, I’ve been puzzled to find that as I use agents more, I get this distinct sense that they’re slow.
I’ve spent the past 6 months trying to root cause this feeling by building. At first I built my own cloud agents.
My reasoning went: if agents are slow, I’ll write up a decent plan and then kick it to a cloud agent to finish while I move on to other things.
Building the cloud agents was fun, in particular I enjoyed refining the interface and keyboard shortcuts for the cloud agents.
At the same time, I found that the bottleneck then became twofold:
- Testing the results of the cloud agents
- Iterating on a detailed enough plan for the cloud agents
Testing the results is a hard problem. Codex and cto.new both attempt to solve this with loading a web app and screenshotting the results. That’s great for web apps but as any experienced software engineer knows, iterating on UI is only half the battle.
So, setting aside that can of worms, I took inspiration from Repo Prompt and built my own code/chat interface.
For a relatively small codebase, I could drop entire folders of code directly into the model’s context and ask for a plan to build the next feature I was working on.
The plans I generated with this approach were great and I built an affordance to kick a finished plan into my cloud agents.
So far so good.
Except, not quite.
The model often took a long time to formulate a plan. When you’re waiting 5 minutes for the plan, you can’t stay in flow. You no longer feel like you’re pairing with the model, you’re just waiting on it.
Enter, GPT-5-Codex.
Using this model felt like a revelation. It’s designed for coding and it strikes the right balance of being smart and fast to respond.
I decided to transform my chat interface into a Codex driver and so far I’m very pleased with the results. It’s quite fun to use a chat UI to code.
At the same time, I haven’t quite answered my original question.
How do I stay in flow while coding with AI?
Do I lay out all my tasks up front and kick off simultaneous planning sessions? Do I spend more time writing elaborate RFCs for the agents to follow? Do I use beads?
I suspect we’ll be asking this question for a long time to come.