Yeah, I tend to agree with you. I can code when not in The Zone, but there's NOTHING like the productivity you get when you're cranking out code.

He claims you'll be revisiting that code. So what? Maybe HIS code, written in The Zone, comes out as crap, but mine is as solid as my "normal" code. It's certainly better than my "stay up all night until the bug is fixed" code; THAT is something that I've stopped doing, thankfully, because when that happens I typically have to clean up a mess no matter how much of a slog the code was to write.

In fact, his comment that you'll come back to code written in The Zone more often is tautological if you end up writing most of your code that way, since bugs typically correlate to lines of code. You could have half as many bugs per line in your Zone code as the rest, and if 80% of your code is written in the Zone, it will still seem like you spend most of your time debugging it.

To be fair, I've also managed a Zen coding state that's not quite Zone, but not as painful as the state you describe. Code gets written at a relatively calm pace, and I keep going until I either fall out of the state or achieve The Zone. The advantage is that I can transition in and out of the Zen state more quickly, so I can manage interruptions.

That's interesting - can you summarise his objections here briefly? I haven't read this book (yet) but I find it hard to see how anyone could make a coherent argument against flow for programmers. In fact, there's all sorts of literature showing that concentration is incredibly important (c.f. Peopleware).

From page 62: "[The Zone] is the highly focused, tunnel-vision state of consciousness that programmers can get into while they write code. In this state they feel productive. In this stat they feel infallible... Let me be clear about this. You will write more code in the Zone. If you are practicing TDD, you will go around the red/green/refactor loop more quickly. And you will feel a mild euphoria or a sense of conquest. The problem is that you lose some of the big picture while you are in the Zone, so you will likely make decisions that you will later have to go back and reverse. Code written in the Zone may come out faster, but you'll be going back to visit it more."