Nicole Forsgren: prediction

Transcript context

…I was going to get to this later, but I want to actually get to this right now, this idea of flow state for engineers. I was an engineer, actually, early in my career. I went to a school for computer science. I was an engineer for 10 years. The best part of the job for me was just this flow state you enter when you're coding and building, and just things feel like so fun. It feels like AI is making that harder in a lot of ways because there's all these agents you're working with now, there's all this code that's kind of being written for you. Talk about just the importance of flow state to a developer, happiness, developer productivity, and just what you've seen AI impacting. How you've seen AI impacting that? Well, there are lots of different ways to talk about DevEx. One way to talk about it is kind of three key things that have components that are important of themselves, and they also kind of reinforce each other. Flow state is one of them, cognitive load is another, and then feedback loops are another. I think when you touch on this... Your question about flow state is a really good one, and I'll admit we're just a few years into this. We're still figuring out what the best flow state and cognitive requirements are for people in this because, to your point, sometimes we're getting interrupted all the time. You don't just get in the flow and lock down, and write a whole bunch of code and do the typing of a whole bunch of code as much anymore. Instead, you're kind of creating a prompt, getting some code back and reviewing the code, trying to integrate what's happening in the system, and that can really interrupt. At the same time though, it can contribute to flow if... I've seen some senior engineers pull together some tool chains that are really incredible, where they figured out how to keep the flow going. The fast feedback loops really, really work well for them. They can kind of assign out different pieces to agents. It helps them keep in the flow in terms of... Instead of details and line-by-line writing, they're in the flow in terms of, "What's my goal? What are the pieces that I need to get there? How quickly can I get there? So then, I can step back and kind of evaluate everything, and then dive back in and fix some pieces." Is there anything more you could say about this engineer that figured out this really cool workflow, about just what that looks like?…

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