- The article discusses how AI coding assistants disrupt the flow state in programming, contrasting it with the traditional flow experience.
- Flow, as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, requires clear goals, immediate feedback, and a challenge matching one's skill, which programming often provides.
- AI-assisted coding introduces a 'prompt-wait-evaluate' cycle that breaks flow by making goals unclear, feedback delayed, and challenge mismatched with skill.
- Interruptions from AI, unlike external ones like meetings or Slack, are self-generated and insidious, leading to context-switching and mental rebuilding.
- Research shows that interruptions significantly delay resumption of deep work, with AI cycles causing frequent shallow work bursts instead of sustained focus.
- The author suggests mitigating this by separating tasks into AI-suitable ones (e.g., boilerplate) and flow-valuable ones (e.g., architecture design), and batching AI interactions.
- The impact is not just on productivity but on job satisfaction and personal growth, emphasizing the need to recognize and manage AI as an interruption pattern.