The Braided River

A few weeks ago a designer told me they were missing the feeling of being in the flow. The days when they could just be in their canvas in Figma all day, call it a day, and not think about work. They missed that rhythm in their life. I had a harder time relating, because I can lose hours and days with these new tools.

It made me think a lot about what flow actually is.

Flow needs three things: a clear goal, instant feedback on it, and a challenge just above your skill level. Those three are boiled down from Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. There were more points in that book, but those were the three I took the most.

The more I've read about flow, the more I realize working with AI barely breaks it. The goals are still clear. The feedback is faster than it has ever been. The challenge is arguably higher, because the work has moved up a level. On paper, this new way of working should be a wide river of steady flow.

And yet almost everyone I talk to feels more productive than ever and more tired than ever. Both at once. I don't think that's a paradox.

In Csikszentmihalyi's book, he states that flow gives energy back. Deep work in the creative channel is restorative. You surface from hours in the canvas tired and full at the same time. I think the exhaustion we're feeling is that the channels don't feel that deep in this new river. The water still moves, more than ever. It just never gets deep enough to give that energy back to us.

We feel fragmented, torn between streams. As if we are meant to jump around as often as possible because any lingering time an agent isn't working is time wasted.

If an agent takes five minutes to do something, you have this weird itch to fill the space. Five minutes is too long to sit still and too short to start anything real. It feels like a rush to spin up another agent, another braid in the river of our own making. We jump from braid to braid, from message to message during our perceived "dead time" waiting.

Which is why I've stopped picturing creative flow as a steady stream, a singular river. It's a braided river. It isn't smooth. It winds and turns. It splits into paths that can take you in different directions, and you feel like you're not in the main braid anymore, not moving toward your goal.

And a side channel is still the river. You can go deep in any of them. Flow lives in depth. Pick a braid, any braid, and stay long enough for the water to rise around you.

I don't think flow and working with AI are mutually exclusive. Fragmentation is a choice: the choice to run all these agents, to keep all these threads open at once. That is a choice. Every agent, every path you take is an added braid in the river. And you can choose not to jump streams.

There's a deeper type of the exhaustion I've felt and I'm not alone: I've never shipped more, but I never feel finished. I'm making progress, I can see it, but I haven't arrived at the end of the river. Maybe that was always true of creative work. We just used to reach the bank at the end of the day, step out of the water, and know where we stood.

I can now have Claude run overnight on an idea. I feel fragmented. Heraclitus once said, "You never step in the same river twice" feels even more real to me in this new era of creativity. If Claude/Codex can run while we're sleeping, where do I re-enter the flow?

Flow is a choice too. The choice to focus, the choice to embrace the work you're doing, to know you have a clear goal. To let the creative currents take you into new braids of the river. In practice, for me, it looks like picking one channel and having the discipline to be okay with the silence of waiting. The best thing I made this year took 31 revisions on a single concept, back and forth in one stream until I was in love with the work, and I never once felt fragmented doing it. Tired, sure. The good tired. The flow-state full of life, tired.

We're longing for a flow state in this new AI world. The fragmentation we feel now is just accentuated by the speed AI can create. But both flow and fragmentation are choices. They always were. It feels like AI just sped up the river's current.

I didn't have great advice for the designer wanting flow in this new world. It felt less like an AI problem, and more like a longing for a world that I wonder if it ever existed.

I think all of our creative work, if we let it, moves towards a singular direction. Either we can fight that current, or let it guide us in new and unexpected ways.

All creative flows lead to the same source. The braids, the inlets, the little side streams of the creative river are all moving toward the same open water. Are you okay letting go? Are you okay seeing where it takes you? Are you willing to find flow in the fragmentation?