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I’m not making any psychiatric diagnoses based on GitHub repos or YouTube videos. But. Sometimes when I see someone talking about cranking out hundreds of thou

I’m not making any psychiatric diagnoses based on GitHub repos or YouTube videos. But. Sometimes when I see someone talking about cranking out hundreds of thousands of lines of vibe coded apps, I go watch their YouTube videos, or checkout their dozens of unconnected, half finished repos. Every single time I get a serious manic vibe.

cruffle_duffle 1y ago
The overlap between crypto hustlers and AI hustlers is pretty interesting. Not strictly “hustle both” type overlap but it’s a similar type of energy. Bully the non-believers and hype the hype regardless of reality. I dunno. People say these tools trigger the gambling part of your brain. I think there is a lot of merit to that. When these tools work (which they absolutely do) it’s incredible and your brain gets a nice hit of dopamine but holy cow can these tools fail. But if you just keep pulling that lever, keep adding “the right” context and keep casting the right “spells” the AI will perform its magic again and you’ll get your next fix. Just keep at it. Eventually you’ll get it. Surely somebody somewhere is doing brain imagery when using these tools. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same parts of the brain light up as when you play something like Candy Crush. Dig deep into the sunk cost fallacy, pepper with an illusion of control and that glorious “I’m on a roll” feeling (how many agents did this dude have active at once?) and boom… I mean read the post. The dude spends $1000/mo plugging tokens into a grid of 8 parallel agents. They have a term for this in the gaming industry. It’s a whale.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  Layer on the parasocial angle and it gets even worse: You're gambling and you have a "friend."
- handfuloflight 1y ago
  You're describing the classic developer dopamine loop, just faster now. Spinning up test after test, tweaking parameters, chasing that "it works!" high, that's what debugging has always been. You're doing the exact same thing with your code that you're criticizing him for doing with AI. Same sunk cost fallacy ("I've already spent 3 hours, might as well get it working"), same illusion of control, same "I'm on a roll" feeling when the tests finally pass. The only difference is speed. He gets micro-hits every 10 seconds watching tokens stream. You get them every time you re-run your test suite. Same gambling structure, same reward circuit lighting up, you've just normalized yours because it happened slowly enough to not look like a slot machine. And you're the one reducing it to "gambling" unless you're claiming human developers experience zero dopamine and write code with omniscient correctness the first time. If they don't, if there's iteration, failure, reward, then you're describing the same neurochemistry. You've just decided it only counts as "gambling" when it makes you uncomfortable.
  - hitarpetar 1y ago
    running and slots are both addictive, so they must be equally bad for you right?
  - joshribakoff 1y ago
    Counter argument: one is actually capable of reasoning, the other is predicting the next token and brute forcing until checks pass.
- rightbyte 1y ago
  > pepper with an illusion of control Did you lose an 'r' or did you mean the ghost glass thing?
stocksinsmocks 1y ago
Well, to be fair there were a lot of guys doing exactly this sort of thing except they were writing their hobby projects by hand. I don’t take any technical blogs about someone’s secret sauce seriously at all. Programmer blogs are marketing pieces.
- steipete 1y ago
  Marketing for what? I didn't even link to what I'm building because I wanna ship it when it's ready.
darkwater 1y ago
In this post they mentioned "blast radius" and said "I didn't invent the term but I like it though". Maybe it's just because I'm very well used to the term in our industry, but that sentence felt so off for me. Cringe vibes.

cruffle_duffle 1y ago

The overlap between crypto hustlers and AI hustlers is pretty interesting. Not strictly “hustle both” type overlap but it’s a similar type of energy. Bully the non-believers and hype the hype regardless of reality. I dunno. People say these tools trigger the gambling part of your brain. I think there is a lot of merit to that. When these tools work (which they absolutely do) it’s incredible and your brain gets a nice hit of dopamine but holy cow can these tools fail. But if you just keep pulling that lever, keep adding “the right” context and keep casting the right “spells” the AI will perform its magic again and you’ll get your next fix. Just keep at it. Eventually you’ll get it. Surely somebody somewhere is doing brain imagery when using these tools. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same parts of the brain light up as when you play something like Candy Crush. Dig deep into the sunk cost fallacy, pepper with an illusion of control and that glorious “I’m on a roll” feeling (how many agents did this dude have active at once?) and boom… I mean read the post. The dude spends $1000/mo plugging tokens into a grid of 8 parallel agents. They have a term for this in the gaming industry. It’s a whale.

Terr_ 1y ago
Layer on the parasocial angle and it gets even worse: You're gambling and you have a "friend."
handfuloflight 1y ago
You're describing the classic developer dopamine loop, just faster now. Spinning up test after test, tweaking parameters, chasing that "it works!" high, that's what debugging has always been. You're doing the exact same thing with your code that you're criticizing him for doing with AI. Same sunk cost fallacy ("I've already spent 3 hours, might as well get it working"), same illusion of control, same "I'm on a roll" feeling when the tests finally pass. The only difference is speed. He gets micro-hits every 10 seconds watching tokens stream. You get them every time you re-run your test suite. Same gambling structure, same reward circuit lighting up, you've just normalized yours because it happened slowly enough to not look like a slot machine. And you're the one reducing it to "gambling" unless you're claiming human developers experience zero dopamine and write code with omniscient correctness the first time. If they don't, if there's iteration, failure, reward, then you're describing the same neurochemistry. You've just decided it only counts as "gambling" when it makes you uncomfortable.
- hitarpetar 1y ago
  running and slots are both addictive, so they must be equally bad for you right?
- joshribakoff 1y ago
  Counter argument: one is actually capable of reasoning, the other is predicting the next token and brute forcing until checks pass.
rightbyte 1y ago
> pepper with an illusion of control Did you lose an 'r' or did you mean the ghost glass thing?

stocksinsmocks 1y ago

Well, to be fair there were a lot of guys doing exactly this sort of thing except they were writing their hobby projects by hand. I don’t take any technical blogs about someone’s secret sauce seriously at all. Programmer blogs are marketing pieces.

steipete 1y ago
Marketing for what? I didn't even link to what I'm building because I wanna ship it when it's ready.

darkwater 1y ago

In this post they mentioned "blast radius" and said "I didn't invent the term but I like it though". Maybe it's just because I'm very well used to the term in our industry, but that sentence felt so off for me. Cringe vibes.