Finishing the App
On AI-fueled flow states, creative obsession, and remembering to eat dinner.
Editor’s Note: I’ve been on a bit of an AI-enabled bender lately—building apps, writing essays, accidentally outlining novels at 1 AM. I’m telling you this for two reasons: first, it’s why I’ve been AWOL from this newsletter for a while (that, and I way overcomitted to client work, as one does). And second, because it’ll probably inform a lot of the content you see here moving forward.
As always, thank you for reading The Curiosity Gap. I still (aspirationally) see this as my home base for all the ideas that don’t quite fit anywhere else—and to process whatever obsession has hijacked my brain.
I’d love to hear from you: Ever fallen into this kind of flow? What helps you protect it—without burning out?
Finishing the App
Starting on a hat
Finishing a hat...
Look, I made a hat...
Where there never was a hat
It was 1AM on a Thursday. I was deep in a vibe coding session, feverishly layering features into my latest obsession—an AI-powered “signature phrase generator” I named Concept Coiner—when the interface in front of me started becoming blurry at the edges and I realized I had completely forgotten to eat dinner.
It wasn’t the first time—three nights in a row, I'd found myself in this zone, fully immersed in creation, losing track of everything else. Texts went unanswered. My dog went un-petted. I started to lose sight of my desk under the layer of Starbucks and Dunkin cups scattered across it. I was literally working overtime—and I was falling intensely, passionately, perilously in love with the work.
There's something exhilarating about this new mode of creating. Powered by recent leaps in AI sophistication, even coding noobs like me can now transform vague ideas into functioning apps with little more than a prompt. Two hours, one website. Two weeks, four apps. Seeing your ideas spring to life almost as fast as you can imagine them is like magic—and you’ll do anything to keep the good vibes going.
It’s a new kind of digital addiction—one powered not by scrolling but by making. AI is doing for creation what earlier algorithms did for consumption: making it dangerously difficult to stop. It’s hijacked the dopamine center of my brain so completely, I felt like a lab rat spamming the treat dispenser. Every time a new feature works, every time a bug resolves, my brain floods with satisfaction—and I want more.
Finding my way back to flow
One upside to the hours I’ve spent in front of my laptop over the last few weeks is that I’ve spent a lot of that time listening to music. I’ve bounced around genres pretty promiscuously, from electronica to surf rock to Y2K pop to Severance beats. One afternoon, as I was tidying up some functionalities in my latest project, Swipe File, I found my way to showtunes. One song in particular managed to penetrate my code-induced haze: “Finishing the Hat.”
Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sunday in the Park with George revolves around Georges Seurat, the obsessive pointillist painter struggling to finish his masterpiece, “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” “Finishing the Hat” finds George consumed by his art, singing about the simultaneously exhilarating and lonely experience of creating something entirely new—of making a hat "where there never was a hat."
I’ve loved this song ever since I finally locked in and listened to Sunday around the time Sondheim passed away in 2021, but I wouldn’t have said that I related to it. The kind of compulsion George sings about—that you have to imagine Sondheim must have felt on some level himself—that wasn’t something I recognized in myself.
Well, that’s not entirely true—if I reach far enough back in my memories, I can conjure it: in college, pacing the stacks in the library waiting for the exactly right phrase to continue an essay to strike, sprinting back to my computer cubicle when it did. Farther back than that, hammering phrases into disciplined iambic pentameter for an English assignment in high school.
The psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi called this state of focused attention “flow.” He argued that it comes from the place where your abilities perfectly align with the challenge at hand, to the point that you're neither bored nor overwhelmed—just completely absorbed. The result is something between a high and a fugue state: You lose all sense of time, your awareness of physical discomfort fades, and even your sense of self dissolves. You become the activity.
Vibe coding (and vibe writing) have reconnected me with that sense of flow I'd almost forgotten existed, like a light coming on in a room I hadn't entered in years. AI removes just enough friction that ideas can flow freely. There's something uniquely satisfying about watching an idea materialize through your fingertips.
But there's also something unsettling about this new relationship with creation. Unlike Georges Seurat meticulously placing each dot of paint, I'm orchestrating rather than crafting. The AI handles the tedious parts while I direct traffic. I wonder if this is still art. And as amazing as channeling this tidal wave of creative energy feels, it would also be good if I remembered to eat dinner.
Creativity with the brakes cut
Csikszentmihalyi stressed the importance of regular feedback to flow—you need confirmation that your work is effective in order to keep the flow flowy. AI has taken the immediacy dial on that feedback loop and cranked it up to 1,000. Until now, creating anything substantial has involved resistance and friction—research, trial and error, inevitable frustration. AI-driven tools collapse these barriers, reducing the distance between idea and reality to almost zero. Want an app? Speak it into existence. Want an essay? Say five words and Sonnet 3.7 will give you 500 so specific and persuasive you could swear you wrote them yourself. (And indeed, you’ll start telling yourself you did.)
Without the natural pauses provided by research, learning curves, or even the limitations of skill, there’s nothing to slow you down or force you to step away and reflect. The dopamine rush becomes constant and relentless. As a result, the very thing that feels like progress—making something new—can easily slip into compulsion. And compulsion can tilt all too easily into something even more destructive.
The counterpoint to “the hat” in George’s life is his lover, Dot, who represents connection, warmth, and the tangible, human realities he sacrifices to fulfill his creative vision. As George meticulously places each tiny dot of paint onto his canvas, he distances himself from the relationships and daily realities around him—losing Dot in the process. The line between devotion to craft and unhealthy fixation becomes perilously thin.
When I said I had to reach back to college to find this kind of creative mania, I was conveniently skipping over the summer of 2020. I published one high-performing piece and chased the rush for weeks—article after article, message after message, Slack pinging like a slot machine. “Katie, when do you sleep?” my manager asked after a 3AM timestamp. The answer: I didn’t.
I was chasing something that felt more vital than rest. My body was just an inconvenience, a vehicle that needed occasional refueling to keep the mind working. I'd discovered a new drug, and like any addict, I couldn't stop. I posted threads on Twitter at dawn, drafted LinkedIn screeds in front of the TV, and sketched article outlines while brushing my teeth (if I remembered to brush my teeth).
But I wasn't really creating—I was consuming myself. The feverish productivity came at a cost: strained relationships, neglected health, and eventually, a psychotic break so catastrophic it sent me running into the wilderness. I sacrificed my “Dots” on the altar of output—and all I got was this lousy mood stabilizer prescription.
Flash forward five years. As I sat coding into the late hours of the night and the early ones of the morning, I started recognizing familiar tells: the forgotten meals, the skipped showers, the attempts to do literally anything else aborted in favor of just one more feature.
This is the paradox of unfettered creativity: without resistance, without friction, the creative impulse doesn't find its natural rhythm—it accelerates until it derails. What makes AI-assisted creation so seductive is precisely what makes it dangerous: it removes the natural constraints that have always forced creators to pause, reflect, and return to the world around them. The hat gets finished, but at what cost?
Clocking out of the dopamine factory
As I sat in my apartment that Thursday night, surrounded by empty coffee cups and a neglected dog, I realized I needed guardrails. The creative high was real, but sustainability mattered more than the next feature.
Here's what's working for me—strategies I've adopted to protect my flow, keep my creativity sustainable, and ensure that I remember to feed myself and pet my dog:
Schedule hard stops. I now set a non-negotiable shutdown time and stick an actual alarm clock (not my phone) across the room. When it rings, I close the laptop—mid-feature if necessary.
Create physical transitions. After coding sessions, I touch something tangible, sometimes literal grass. I wash dishes. I read books. I take my dog for a walk. The physical world provides a digital “detox,” preventing my circuits from getting fried.
Separate creation from consumption. I no longer keep my phone near my workspace. The dopamine from making shouldn't mix with the dopamine from scrolling—it's a dangerous cocktail.
Embrace imperfection. I'm learning to ship things that are 80% done rather than chasing the high of perfection. The art is knowing when good enough is actually enough.
In a world where creation becomes increasingly frictionless, we need to consciously reintroduce just enough resistance to keep ourselves grounded. The tech world has latched onto the concept of “agency” as the trait that distinguishes top performers from normies—but it takes just as much agency to know when to stop as how to start.
Leaving the canvas
“Finishing the Hat” isn't just about creative obsession—it's about the cost of that obsession. The real mastery isn't just making something where nothing was before, but knowing when to step away from the canvas, to reconnect with the world beyond the hat, beyond the app, beyond the screen.
This weekend, I spent a whole Saturday away from my keyboard. I took my dog to the park. I played board games with a friend. I spent a leisurely Sunday morning with Judith Shulevitz’s The Sabbath World—itself a meditation on drawing clear boundaries between productivity and rest. When I felt the keyboard calling, a new code concept begging to be built, I didn’t run to my desk, I walked. I made an app where there never was an app—but I left the app unfinished.
News and Errata
New website, who this?
I vibe-coded myself a new website: katieparrott.com
This site has everything:
- Subtle animations and a color palette that conveys trust and expertise (Lovable’s words, not mine)
- An unorthodox take on an About page
– A home for all my AI experiments (if you're into that sort of thing)
In case you missed it:
My latest for Every is about AI detectors, effort, and what we think “real work” looks like: AI Phobia Is Just Fear That ‘Easier’ Equals ‘Cheating’
Speaking of Ava:
I celebrated her 4th Gotcha Day at the start of the month. She remains a very good girl—and surprisingly tolerant of my vibe-coded fugue states. While everybody else was Ghiblifying everything they could think of following ChatGPT’s recent image generation update, I had it turn her into a Disney character:
Stay curious (and remember to eat dinner),
Katie P.