Obsession: Returning to the Flow State of 2014

I spent the better part of two full days last week absolutely hammering on Claude Code, pushing it further than I ever have before. And something interesting happened. It felt like I had transported myself back to 2014-2015, the peak of my Ruby on Rails development. It was the first time in a long, long time that I felt truly obsessed with what I was doing.

The head-in-the-sand flow

You know that feeling of being head-in-the-sand, absolutely cranking, hitting walls, and getting frustrated because I want this thing to work and I want it to work right now, but it's not working. I know I needed to tear myself away from the screen, but it was hard to focus fully on anything else.

I found myself shirking other life responsibilities just to keep building. I woke up early on Saturday, knowing I needed to look at the family budget, but instead I spent three hours building.

There are trade-offs for me today that weren't there a decade ago. The obsession simply can't take over my life today. I have more responsibilities, and those responsibilities need to be protected. But the energy and the passion was electric, and it's hard to beat that feeling.

I've felt this electricity growing stronger over the last eight months, but this was on a whole new level.

AI as a time machine

Ten years ago, I was most productive when I was in a hole, shutting the world out for 3-4 hours at a time. The manual coding process demanded it. You needed those big chunks of time to minimize context switching. If you had to move between projects for just a minute ... Boom! It was gone. You lost the flow state. You lost the context.

Working on a single project feels slow

The dream with AI writing code for you is that it makes you faster. But for anybody just sitting there working with an agent on one project, it can feel slower, even if it's not. It's frustrating because you're having to coach this thing through lots of bugs, and it can feel like you're not actually doing the work. Up until last week, although it was still faster for me, it felt like a lot of downtime — a lot of sitting, waiting, correcting ... and repeat.

A new type of flow state

What was different last week was that I tried working on three or four projects in parallel. In flipping between them, I had to broaden my context and accept some context switching. But I was doing the same type of work on each project, moving them in the same direction. So, while one agent was working, I would go to another and keep that moving.

And it turns out that the flow state looks completely different today (for me). I really hadn't hit that flow state because I was always working on just one thing at a time. The waiting didn't feel like the context switching of yore. It felt like a slight shift while moving in the same direction — almost like working on multiple features in an app at the same time.

Maximizing effectiveness in working with AI

I had been forming the idea that people who could context-switch most effectively were the most productive with AI tools, but I don't think that's the case. It's at least not all about context switching. I think it's more of a combination of three things:

• Establishing a level of focus to determine what you want an agent to build
• Communicating clearly what you're trying to build
• Jumping to (a related) task while the agent is busy generating code

Reigniting the creator flame

The way I built last week is completely different from the way I built Rails applications a decade ago. I'm not writing any of the code anymore. This was a profound experience for me because it reminded me why I started writing code in the first place.

It wasn't actually about the code.

It was that I was creating something. Whether using AI or writing code manually, the love isn't necessarily in the process — it's in seeing what the output brings to life. That's what sparked that feeling of obsession — the drive to see something that didn't yet exist.

And while I have to keep that obsession more in check today than I did a decade ago, it's incredible to feel that spark again.