Flow state is dead. It’s not coming back.

(This post has originally been published on LinkedIn and has been cross-posted here for conservation and accessibility.)

Every agentic developer knows the feeling. You’re shipping features faster than ever. The code is materializing almost as quickly as you can think it. You feel locked in, productive, unstoppable. You’re in the zone, right?

No. You’re not. What you’re experiencing is real, but it’s not flow state.

Flow has a definition - we’ll come back to why that is important. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades studying it. It’s not just “feeling productive.” It requires specific preconditions, and the most critical one is the challenge-skill balance - you need to operate right at the edge of your ability. Full concentration on the task. Action and awareness merging until you stop observing yourself and just become the work. That’s flow. It’s a state rooted in craft, in the struggle of building a mental model so complex that it demands everything you have.

AI tooling removes much of that precondition. When you’re prompting, reviewing, accepting, steering, you’re not building the mental model yourself anymore. You’re orchestrating. That’s a fundamentally different cognitive posture. You’re not at the edge of your skill, you’re in a supervisory role. And by Csikszentmihalyi’s own framework, that means you can’t be in flow. The entry condition is gone.

Still, let’s be honest: something is happening. That feeling of velocity, of momentum, of things materializing around you and that’s not nothing. It’s just not flow. I think it’s something new, and I think we need a name for it.

Call it „surge”. Where flow is deep and calm, surge is fast and impetuous. Flow is defined by the quality of the experience. Surge is defined by the the momentum and volume of the output. Flow is about the craftsperson and the problem. Surge is about momentum and velocity. You’re not absorbed in the work; you’re riding it.

Importantly, that is not a value judgment. I’m not saying flow was better or surge is worse. What I am saying is that they’re structurally different, and conflating them means we can’t get good at either. I am not making that point to be pedantic.

We spent decades studying flow. We figured out how to design work environments, feedback loops, and challenges that help people reach it reliably. That research fundamentally changed how we think about productivity and satisfaction.

Now, we need to do the same for surge. What are its preconditions? What are its failure modes? What happens when you’re in it too long? How do you harness it instead of just being carried by it?

Because that will make all the difference. You don’t harness flow - you enter it. Surge is something with force. And right now, most of us are just along for the ride.