That's pretty funny because LLM's actually help me achieve flow state easier because they help me automate away the dumb shit that normally kind of blocks me. Flow state for me is not (just) churning out lines of code but having that flow of thought in my head that eventually flows to a solved problem without being interrupted. Interesting that for you the flow state actually means your mind shutting up lol. For me it means shutting up about random shit that doesn't matter to the task at hand and being focused only on solving the current problem.

It helps that I don't outsource huge tasks to the LLM, because then I lose track of what's happening and what needs to be done. I just code the fun part, then ask the LLM to do the parts that I find boring (like updating all 2000 usages of a certain function I just changed).

As someone with no inner monologue, I think I could just as easily "flow" about a non-verbal task like spatial reasoning or a verbal task like reading, writing, or even engaging in a particularly technical or abstract conversation. Unlike you, my resting state is non-verbal and I would not be able to correlate verbal content with flow like that.

To me, flow is a mental analogue to the physical experience of peak athletic output. E.g. when you are are at or near your maximum cardiovascular throughput and everything is going to training and plan. It's not a perfect dichotomy. After all, athletics also involve a lot of mental effort, and they have more metabolic side-effects. I've never heard of anybody hitting their lactate threshold from intense thinking...

My point is that the peak mental output could be applied to many different modes of thought, just as your cardiovascular capacity can be applied to many different sports activities. A lot of analogies I hear seem too narrow, like they only accept one thinking task as flow state.

I also don't think it is easy to describe flow in terms of attention or focus. I think one can be in a flow state with a task that involves breadth or depth of attention. But, I do suspect there is some kind of fixed sum aspect to it. Being at peak flow is a kind of prioritization and tradeoff, where irrelevant cognitive tasks get excluded to devote more resources to the main task.

A person flowing on a deep task may seem to have a blindness to things outside their narrow focus. But I think others can flow in a way that lets them juggle many things, but instead having a blindness to the depth of some issues. Sometimes, I think many contemporary tech debates, including experience of AI tech, are due to different dispositions on this spectrum...

Interesting that for some people flow state is non-verbal. I personally have sort of a constant dialogue in my head (or sometimes muttered out loud under my breath) that I have to buffer or spool into various notes/diagrams/code. The process of prompting winds up being complementary to this—typing out that stream of consciousness into a prompt and editing it becomes a more effective form of reflection and ideation than my own process had been before. Sometimes I don’t even send the prompt—the act of structuring my thinking while writing it having made me rethink my approach altogether.

This really goes to show that everyone's 'flow state' is different.

My inner dialogue is always chatty; that doesn't stop when I enter a flow state. It just becomes far more laser focused and far less distracted. LLMs help to maintain the flow because I'm able to use it to automate anything I don't care about (e.g. config files) and troubleshoot with me quickly to keep the flow going.