My two sons are programmers, like me. We also went through a similar process after Claude Code and Codex became good enough, sometime around November 2025.

The key is, in my view: "I have several agents running in parallel [...] None of them needs me all the time. Every one of them needs me sometimes." This is what kills flow. Constant context switching plus having to understand the detail is really hard, and leads to exhaustion and burnout.

The solution for us has been to scale up. These days we can each manage on the order of 100 agents, working in different projects. I only talk to five or so coordinators, and to the ones that are implementing particularly tricky features.

Which means that I get to think, and pause, and focus again. It is not the same state of mind I had when actually crafting code, but it is fun again.