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

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.