I totally agree with this hands-on take. The gas-town stuff is super cool experimentally, but it seems to ignore the the more fundamental challenge of getting the human idea into software form. I think is part of the reason we keep seeing Kanban boards show up: as a human, I still want to be able to specify, prioritize, and track what is getting built. I have been experimenting with this with Overlord (https://github.com/cooperativ-labs/Overlord), I keep running into this same boundary between automating and specifying, and increasingly, just being able to keep track of what got done.
I would describe the flow-state challenge as: Needing a way to make the agentic coding process continuous rather than intermittent. It used to be that I could let a semi-visual map of the code build in my head, then work based on that map (continuously) for a few days. Now I have to basically load a whole new map into my brain for one task, write a detailed prompt, hit enter, then dump all that "context" to go work on a prompt for some other part of the code. I have been experimenting with tools and processes that let me reduce the amount of context switching between each task so I can keep more of my mind at a higher "architectural" level, which feels more continuous.
This is actually a great idea. I build a whole thing into my agent management platform that basically treats tickets (kinda like Jira, but not) as a store of shared context, then lets me launch prompts into the terminal with all the ticket history as context (all the file changes and prompt history, etc). I find that just having that context improves consistency quite a bit without pulling in a whole chat.
Hot take: this is actual a symptom of power demand being too low, not too high. Bitcoin mining didn't draw enough energy to drive a real structural transition, so minors made up the gap with diesel. If NY had Virgina or Texas levels of datacenters, they could provide enough spend and power offtake to justify investments in nuclear.
I agree with this in part. Funneling some of these massive investments into clean power, reduced water use, and noise mitigation, should certainly be a big policy priority, but I think actually achieving those things requires a lot of other policy flexibility. For example, if we want data center builders to use clean power, we also need to clear the way for them to actually build nuclear power plants. I suspect the water problem will solve it self as closed loop cooling systems come down in cost (and besides, 80% of data centers' net water use happens at the power generation stage).
Also, I am a big fan of data centers profit-sharing directly with communities.