10 ms·

"Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name

265 points by presbyterian 8mo ago

simonw 8mo ago
I know it's popular comparing coding agents to slot machines right now, but the comparison doesn't entirely hold for me. It's more like being hooked on a slot machine which pays out 95% of the time because you know how to trick it. (I saw "no actual evidence pointing to these improvements" with a footnote and didn't even need to click that footnote to know it was the METR thing. I wish AI holdouts would find a few more studies.) Steve Yegge of all people published something the other day that has similar conclusions to this piece - that the productivity boost for coding agents can lead to burnout, especially if companies use it to drive their employees to work in unsustainable ways: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampire-eda6e4f07163 https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampire-eda6e4f07163
- fdefitte 8mo ago
  That 95% payout only works if you already know what good looks like. The sketchy part is when you can't tell the diff between correct and almost-correct. That's where stuff goes sideways.
- mrbungie 8mo ago
  If you are really good and fast validating/fixing code output or you are actually not validating it more than just making sure it runs (no judging), I can see it paying out 95% of the time. But for what I've seen both validating my and others coding agents outputs I'd estimate a much lower percentage (Data Engineering/Science work). And, oh boy, some colleages are hooked to generating no matter the quality. Workslop is a very real phenomenon.
  - biophysboy 8mo ago
    This matches my experience using LLMs for science. Out of curiosity, I downloaded a randomized study and the CONSORT checklist, and asked Claude code to do a review using the checklist. I was really impressed with how it parsed the structured checklist. I was not at all impressed by how it digested the paper. Lots of disguised errors.
    - baq 8mo ago
      try codex 5.3. it's dry and very obviously AI; if you allow a bit of anthropomorphisation, it's kind of high-functioning autistic. it isn't an oracle, it'll still be wrong, but it's a powerful, completely different from claude tool.
      - biophysboy 8mo ago
        Does it get numbers right? One of the mistakes it made in reading the paper was swapping sets of numbers from the primary/secondary outcomes.
        baq 8mo ago
        it does get screenshots right for me, but obviously I haven't tried on your specific paper. I can only recommend trying it out, it's also has a much more generous limits in the $20 tier than opus.
        biophysboy 8mo ago
        I see. To clarify, it parsed numbers in the pdf correct, but assigned them the wrong meaning. I was wondering if codex is better at interpreting non text data
      - enraged_camel 8mo ago
        Every time someone suggests Codex I give it a shot. And every time it disappoints. After I read your comment, I gave Codex 5.3 the task of setting up an E2E testing skeleton for one of my repos, using Playwright. It worked for probably 45 minutes and in the end failed miserably: out of the five smoke tests it created, only two of them passed. It gave up on the other three and said they will need “further investigation”. I then stashed all do that code and gave the exact same task to Opus 4.5 (not even 4.6), with the same prompt. After 15 mins it was done. Then I popped Codex’s code from the stash and asked Opus to look at it to see why the three m of the five tests Codex wrote didn’t pass. It looked at them and found four critical issues that Codex had missed. For example, it had failed to detect that my localhost uses https, so the the E2E suite’s API calls from the Vue app kept failing. Opus also found that the two passing tests were actually invalid: they checked for the existence of a div with #app and simply assumed it meant the Vue app booted successfully. This is probably the dozenth comparison I’ve done between Codex and Opus. I think there was only one scenario where Codex performed equally well. Opus is just a much better model in my experience.
- Retr0id 8mo ago
  It's 95% if you're using it for the stuff it's good at. People inevitably try to push it further than that (which is only natural!), and if you're operating at/beyond the capability frontier then the success rate eventually drops.
- jrflowers 8mo ago
  > It's more like being hooked on a slot machine which pays out 95% of the time because you know how to trick it. “It’s not like a slot machine, it’s like… a slot machine… that I feel good using” That aside if a slot machine is doing your job correctly 95% of the time it seems like either you aren’t noticing when it’s doing your job poorly or you’ve shifted the way that you work to only allow yourself to do work that the slot machine is good at.
- Kiro 8mo ago
  Just need to point out that the payout is often above 95% at online casinos. As long as it's below 100 the house still wins.
  - mikkupikku 8mo ago
    He means a slot machine that pays you 95% of the time, not a slot machine that pays out 95% of what you put in. Claude Code wasting my time with nonsense output one in twenty times seems roughly correct. The rest of the time it's hitting jackpots.
- saulpw 8mo ago
  Yeah I'm finding that there's "clock time" (hours) and "calendar time" (days/weeks/months) and pushing people to work 'more' is based on the fallacy that our productivity is based on clock time (like it is in a factory pumping out widgets) rather than calendar time (like it is in art and other creative endeavors). I'm finding that even if the LLM can crank out my requested code in an hour, I'll still need a few days to process how it feels to use. The temptation is to pull the lever 10 times in a row because it was so easy, but now I'll need a few weeks to process the changes as a human. This is just for my own personal projects, and it makes sense that the business incentives would be even more intense. But you can't get around the fact that, no matter how brilliant your software or interface, customers are not going to start paying in a few hours.
  - simonw 8mo ago
    > The temptation is to pull the lever 10 times in a row because it was so easy, but now I'll need a few weeks to process the changes as a human Yeah I really feel that! I recently learned the term "cognitive debt" for this from https://margaretstorey.com/blog/2026/02/09/cognitive-debt/ https://margaretstorey.com/blog/2026/02/09/cognitive-debt/ and I think it's a great way to capture this effect. I can churn out features faster, but that means I don't get time to fully absorb each feature and think through its consequences and relationships to other existing or future features.
- fy20 8mo ago
  > It's more like being hooked on a slot machine which pays out 95% of the time because you know how to trick it Right but the <100% chance is actually why slot machines are addictive. If it pays out continuously the behaviour does not persist as long. It's called the partial reinforcement extinction effect.
- r00tanon 8mo ago
  I was going to mention Yegge's recent blog posts mirroring this phenomena. There's also this article on hbr.org https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it?ab=HP-latest-text-5 https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies... This is a real thing, and it looks like classic addiction.
- energy123 8mo ago
  Being on a $200 plan is a weird motivator. Seeing the unused weekly limit for codex and the clock ticking down, and knowing I can spam GPT 5.2 Pro "for free" because I already paid for it.
- zem 8mo ago
  thanks, that steve yegge piece was a very good read.
- globular-toast 8mo ago
  > It's more like being hooked on a slot machine which pays out 95% of the time because you know how to trick it. I think you are mistaken on what the "payout" is. There's only one reason someone is working all hours and during a party and whatnot: it's to become rich and powerful. The payout is not "more code", it's a big house, fast cars, beautiful women etc. Nobody can trick it into paying out even 1% of the time, let alone 95%.
htfu 8mo ago
Probably the best we can hope for at the moment is a reduction in the back-and-forth, increase in ability to one-shot stuff with a really good spec. The regular human work then becomes building that spec, in regular human (albeit AI-assisted) ways.
- ErroneousBosh 8mo ago
  Is the "back and forth" thing normal for AI stuff, then? Because every time I've attempted to use Claude or Copilot for coding stuff, it's been completely unable to do anything on its own, and I've ended up writing all of the code while it's just kind of introduced misspellings into it. Maybe someone can show me how you're supposed to do it, because I have seen no evidence that AI can write code at all.
  - htfu 8mo ago
    Very much normal yes. This is why I've been (so far) still mainly sticking to having it as an all-knowing oracle telling me what I need to know, which it mostly does successfully. When it works for pure generation it's beautiful, when it doesn't it's ruinous enough to make me take two steps back. I'll have another go at getting with all the pure agentic rage everyone's talking about soon enough.
  - jazzyjackson 8mo ago
    Step 1: deposit money into an Anthropic API account Step 2: download Zed and paste in your API Key Step 3: Give detailed instructions to the assistant, including writing ReadMe files on the goal of the project and the current state of the project Step 4: stop the robot when it's making a dumb decision Step 5: keep an eye on context size and start a new conversation every time you're half full. The more stuff in the context the dumber it gets. I spent about 500 dollars and 16 hours of conversation to get an MVP static marketplace [0], a ruby app that can be crawled into static (and js-free!) files, without writing a single line of code myself, because I don't know ruby. This included a rather convoluted data import process, loading the database from XML files of a couple different schemas. Only thing I had to figure out on my own was how to upload the 140,000 pages to cloudflare free tier. [0] https://motorcycledealer.com/ https://motorcycledealer.com/
symfrog 8mo ago
If you are trying to build something well represented in the training data, you could get a usable prototype. If you are unfamiliar with the various ways that naive code would fail in production, you could be fooled into thinking generated code is all you need. If you try to hold the hand of the coding agents to bring code to a point where it is production ready, be prepared for a frustrating cycle of models responding with ‘Fixed it!’ while only having introduced further issues.
dcre 8mo ago
How are we still citing the (excellent) METR study in support of conclusions about productivity that its authors rightly insist[0] it does not support? My paraphrase of their caveats: - experts on their own open source proj are not representative of most software dev - measuring time undervalues trading time for effort - tools are noticeably better than they were a year ago when the study was conducted - it really does take months of use to get the hang of it (or did then, less so now) Before you respond to these points, please look at the full study’s treatment of the caveats! It’s fantastic, and it’s clear almost no one citing the study actually read it. [0]: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
Shank 8mo ago
I think that in a world where code has zero marginal cost (or close to zero, for the right companies), we need to be incredibly cognizant of the fact that more code is not more profit, nor is it better code. Simpler is still better, and products with taste omit features that detract from vision. You can scaffold thousands of lines of code very easily, but this makes your codebase hard to reason about, maintain, and work in. It is like unleashing a horde of mid-level engineers with spec documents and coming back in a week with everything refactored wrong. Sure you have some new buttons but does anyone (or can any AI agent, for that matter) understand how it works? And to another point: work life balance is a huge challenge. Burnout happens in all departments, not just engineering. Managers can get burnout just as easily. If you manage AI agents, you'll just get burnout from that too.
Aurornis 8mo ago
After actually using LLM coding tools for a while, some of these anti-LLM thinkpieces feel very contrived. I don’t see the comparison to gambling addiction at all. I understand how someone might believe that if they only view LLMs through second hand Twitter hot takes and think that it’s a process of typing a prompt and hoping for the best. Some people do that, but the really effective coders work with the LLM and drive the coding, writing some or much of the code themselves. The social media version of vibe coding where you just prompt continuously and hope for the best is not going to work in any serious endeavor where details matter. We see claims of it in some high profile examples like OpenClaw, but even OpenClaw has maintainers and contributors who look at the code and make decisions. It’s also riddled with security problems as a result of the YOLO coding style.
ctoth 8mo ago
The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection. Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design — every element is optimized to maximize time on device. Social media optimizes for engagement, and compulsive behavior is the predictable output. The optimization target produces the addiction. What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible! The variability in agent output is working against that goal, not serving it. If they could make it right 100% of the time, they would — and the "slot machine" nonsense disappears entirely. On capped plans, both you and Anthropic are incentivized to minimize interactions, not maximize them. That's the opposite of a casino. It's ... alignment (of a sort) An unreliable tool that the manufacturer is actively trying to make more reliable is not a slot machine. It's a tool that isn't finished yet. I've been building a space simulator for longer than some of the people diagnosing me have been programming. I built things obsessively before LLMs. I'll build things obsessively after. The pathologizing of "person who likes making things chooses making things over Netflix" requires you to treat passive consumption as the healthy baseline, which is obviously a claim nobody in this conversation is bothering to defend.
- deleted 8mo ago
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- CGMthrowaway 8mo ago
  > The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection. Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design — every element is optimized to maximize time on device. Social media optimizes for engagement, and compulsive behavior is the predictable output. The optimization target produces the addiction. Intermittent variable rewards, whether produced by design or merely as a byproduct, will induce compulsive behavior, no matter the optimization target. This applies to Claude
  - ctoth 8mo ago
    Sometimes I will go out and I will plant a pepper plant and take care of it all summer long and obsessively ensure it has precisely the right amount of water and compost and so on... and ... for some reason (maybe I was on vacation and it got over 105 degrees?) I don't get a good crop. Does this mean I should not garden because it's a variable reward? Of course not. Sometimes I will go out fishing and I won't catch a damn thing. Should I stop fishing? Obviously no. So what's the difference? What is the precise mechanism here that you're pointing at? Because sometimes life is disappointing is a reason to do nothing. And yet.
shaokind 8mo ago
One of my recent thoughts is that Claude Code has become the most successful agent partially because it is more of a black box than previous implementations of the agent pattern: the actual code changes aren't shoved in your face like Cursor (used to be), they are hidden away. You focus more on the result rather than the code building up that result, and so you get into the "just one more feature" mindset a lot more, because you're never concerned that the code you're building is sloppy.
- mikkupikku 8mo ago
  It's because claude code will test its work and adjust the code accordingly. The old way, with the way Cursor used to be or the way I used to copy and paste code from ChatGPT doesn't work because to iterate in towards a working solution requires too much human effort, making the whole thing pointless.
  - shaokind 8mo ago
    Cursor & its various clones (Cline, Roo Cline/Code) did that too, before Claude Code was even released.
BoxFour 8mo ago
I wish the author had stuck to the salient point about work/life balance instead of drifting into the gambling tangent, because the core message is actually more unsettling. With the tech job market being rough and AI tools making it so frictionless to produce real output, the line between work time and personal time is basically disappearing. To the bluesky poster's point: Pulling out a laptop at a party feels awkward for most; pulling out your phone to respond to claude barely registers. That’s what makes it dangerous: It's so easy to feel some sense of progress now. Even when you’re tired and burned out, you can still make progress by just sending off a quick message. The quality will, of course, slip over time; but far less than it did previously. Add in a weak labor market and people feel pressure to stay working all the time. Partly because everyone else is (and nobody wants to be at the bottom of the stack ranking), and partly because it’s easier than ever to avoid hitting a wall by just "one more message". Steve Yegge's point about AI vampires rings true to me: A lot of coworkers I’ve talked to feel burned out after just a few months of going hard with AI tools. Those same people are the ones working nights and weekends because "I can just have a back-and-forth with Claude while I'm watching a show now". The likely result is the usual pattern for increases in labor productivity. People who can’t keep up get pushed out, people who can keep up stay stuck grinding, and companies get to claim the increase in productivity while reducing expenses. Steve's suggestion for shorter workdays sound nice in theory, but I would bet significant amounts of money the 40-hour work week remains the standard for a long time to come.
- nharada 8mo ago
  Another interesting thing here is that the gap between "burned out but just producing subpar work" and "so crispy I literally cannot work" is even wider with AI. The bar for just firing off prompts is low, but the mental effort required to know the right prompts to ask and then validate is much higher so you just skip that part. You can work for months doing terrible work and then eventually the entire codebase collapses.
- Aurornis 8mo ago
  > With the tech job market being rough and AI tools making it so frictionless to produce real output, the line between work time and personal time is basically disappearing. This isn't generally true at all. The "all tech companies are going to 996" meme comes up a lot here but all of the links and anecdotes go back to the same few sources. It is very true that the tech job market is competitive again after the post-COVID period where virtually nobody was getting fired and jobs were easy to find. I do not think it's true that the median or even 90th percentile tech job is becoming so overbearing that personal time is disappearing. If you're at a job where they're trying to normalize overwork as something everyone is doing, they're just lying to you to extract more work.
jauntywundrkind 8mo ago
Funemployed right now joyously spending way way more time than 996, pulling the slot machine arm to get tokens, having a ball. But that's for personal pleasure. This post is receeding from the concerns about "token anxiety," about the addiction to tokens. This post is about work culture & late capitalism anxiety, about possible pressures & systems society might impose. I reflect a lot on AI doesn't reduce the work, it intensifies it. https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies... The spirit of this really nails something core to me. We coders especially get help doing so much of menial now. Which means we spend a lot more time making intense analysis and critiques, are much more doing the hard thought work of 'is what we have here as good as it can be'. Finding new references or patterns to feed back into the AI to steer already working implementations towards better outcomes. And my heart tells me that corporations & work life as we know it are almost universally just really awful about supporting reflective contemplative work like this. Work wants output. It doesn't want you sit in a hammock and think about it. But increasingly I tell you the key to good successful software is Hammock Driven Development. It's time to use our brains more, in quiet reflection. https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hickey_Rich/HammockDrivenDev.md https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi... 996 sounds like garbage on its own, as a system of toil. But I also very much respect an idea of continuous work, one that also intersperses rest throughout the day. Doing some chores or going to the supermarket or playing with the kid can be an incredibly good way to let your preconscious sift through the big gnarly problems about. The response to the intensity of what we have, to me, speaks of a need to spread out the work, to de-concentrate it, to build in more than hammock time. I was on the fence about whether the traditional workday deserved to survive before AI hit, and my feels about it being a gross mismatch have massively intensified since. As I started my post with, I personally have a much more positive experience, with what yes feels like a token addiction. But it doesn't feel like an anxiety. It feels like the greatest most exciting adventure, far beyond what I had hoped for in life ever. This is wildly fun, going far far further out than I had ever hoped to get to see. I'm not "anxiously" pulling the lever arm on the token machine, I'm just thrilled to get to do it. To have time to reflect and decide, I have 3-8 things going at once (and probably double they back burnered but open, on Niri rows!) to let myself make slower decisions, to analyze, while keeping the things that can safely move forwards moving forwards. That also seems like something worker exploitative late capitalism is mostly hot garbage at too! Companies really try to reduce in flight activities. Sprint planning is about crafting deliberate work. But our freedom and agency here far outstrips these dusty old practices. It is anxiety inducing to be so powerful so capable & to have a bureaucracy that constraints and confines, that wants only narrow windows of our use. Also, shame on Tim Kellogg for not God damned linking the actual post he was citing. Garbagefire move. https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/token-anxiety https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/token-anxiety https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47021136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47021136
coldtea 8mo ago
Ironically the linked text by this Kellog guy is 100% AI slop itself
- verdverm 8mo ago
  what's ironic? The conversation under the post adds a lot of color to Tim's thoughts
  - coldtea 8mo ago
    It's ironic that the linked thoughts in the post (the black and white text screenshots) lamening AI overtaking our lives are themselves written by AI
deleted 8mo ago
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scuff3d 8mo ago
Simple fix for this. When the work day is done, close the laptop and walk away. Don't link notifications to personal devices. Whatever slop it produced will be waiting for you at 8am the next morning.
wormpilled 8mo ago
[flagged]
Havoc 8mo ago
And a related issue that if you have a coding plan with time based limits they there is pressure to make maximum use of it
throwthrowuknow 8mo ago
This is simply yet another outdated analogy from haters that are failing to keep pace with the current frontier because they are too busy getting high on the anti-hype. We’re well past the need to retry the same prompt multiple times in order to get working code. The models with their harnesses are properly agentic now, they can find the right context, make a plan, write the code, run the tests and fix the bugs with little to no intervention from a human. The hardest part now is keeping up with them when it comes to approving the deliverables and updating the architecture and spec as new things are discovered by using the software. Not new bugs but corrections to your own assumptions you had before the feature was built. The hard part is almost entirely management. That’s something to seriously think about.
- xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago
  > This is simply yet another outdated analogy from haters that are failing to keep pace with the current frontier because they are too busy getting high on the anti-hype. Touché.
TZubiri 8mo ago
Not sure if the original post is satire, but it reads like an alcoholic's submission to https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/
- mikemarsh 8mo ago
  Always interesting how this kind of snark never seems to go to bat for modern man's average patience and self-control, thus actually proving the naysayers wrong, but always just assumes that "everyone knows" modern times are best and those silly past naysayers are thus wrong.
cadamsdotcom 8mo ago
Rather than let results be random, iteratively and continuously add more and more guardrails and grounding. Tests, linting, guidance in response to key events (Claude Code hooks are great for this), automatically passing the agent’s code plan to another model invocation then passing back whatever feedback that model has on the plan so you don’t have to point out the same flaws in plans over and over.. custom scripts that iterate your codebase for antipatterns (they can walk the AST or be regex based - ask your agent to write them!) Codify everything you’re looping back to your agent about and make it a guardrail. Give your agent the tools it needs to give itself grounding. An agent without guardrails or grounding is like a person unconnected to their senses: disconnected from the world, all you do is dream - in a dream anything can happen, there’s nothing to ensure realism. When you look at it that way it’s a miracle coding agents produce anything useful at all :)
surrTurr 8mo ago
I wrote a similar blogpost just a few days ago: "The Vibe Coding Slot Machine" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47022282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47022282)
mh2266 8mo ago
what kind of lame parties is the bluesky poster going to? is this a San Francisco thing?
- deleted 8mo ago
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- Sharlin 8mo ago
  I certainly hope the Bsky post is satire, but I honestly can't tell anymore.
- mikkupikku 8mo ago
  Yeah, honestly seems like that guy is looking for a scapegoat to blame for himself being lame. If you can't put work down and let loose, that's a you problem, not a technology problem.
karel-3d 8mo ago
wait wait wait the BlueSky post is not a parody? It's actually serious??? I really cannot tell
delegate 8mo ago
It's very tempting to agree to the 'gambling' part, given that both a jackpot and progress towards the goal in your project will give you a hit of dopamine. The difference is that in gambling 'the house always wins', but in our case we do make progress towards our goal of conquering the world with our newly minted apps. The situation where this comparison holds is when vibe coding leads nowhere and you don't accomplish anything but just burn through tokens.
- xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago
  > The difference is that in gambling 'the house always wins', but in our case we do make progress towards our goal of conquering the world with our newly minted apps. What? Your vibe coded slop is just going to be competing with someone else's vibe coded slop.
  - mikkupikku 8mo ago
    The motivations for wanting to make the slop could be commercial profit, or it could be simply you trying to solve a problem for yourself. In either case, the slop is the goal and, if the agent isn't giving you complete trash, you should be converging towards your goal. The gambling analogy doesn't work.
- squeefers 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - mikkupikku 8mo ago
    Sounds like you've had too much TV. It really does rot your brain, this is obvious to anybody who doesn't watch TV, but completely imperceptible to those who do.
    - squeefers 8mo ago
      > It really does rot your brain, this is obvious to anybody who doesn't watch TV, but completely imperceptible to those who do. how do you block video on your PC? or do you literally mean audiovisual information broadcast onto actual television sets is the evil?
nl 8mo ago
I don't think gambling is the right analogy at all. I do think it can be addictive, but there are many things that are addictive that aren't gambling. I think a better analogy is something like extreme sport, where people can get addicted to the point it can be harmful.
- askl 8mo ago
  At least with gambling, there's the chance of hitting a jackpot.
squeefers 8mo ago
why arent books accused of addictive engineering? simply move the printed words from paper to digital and it becomes addictive somehow.
bb123 8mo ago
What's with the lack of capitalisation at the start of sentences? It makes it hard to parse where one sentence ends and the next begins.
aljarry 8mo ago
This does seem like a person getting hooked on idle games, or mobile/online games with artificially limited progress (that you can pay to lift). It's a type of delayed gratification that makes you anxious to get next one. Not everyone gets hooked on those, but I do. I've played a bunch of those long-winded idle games, and it looks like a slight addiction. I would get impatient that it takes so long to progress, and it would add anxiety to e.g. run this during breaks at work, or just before going to sleep. "Just one more click". And to be perfectly honest, it seems like the artificial limits of Anthropic (5 hour session limits) dig into similar mechanism. I do less non-programming hobbies since I've got myself a subscription.
- sph 8mo ago
  I’d rather grind Runescape at this point, than become addicted at trying to automate away my job.
HolyLampshade 8mo ago
I know I'm running a bit late to the party here, but maybe someone can provide some color that I (on the slightly older end of the spectrum when it comes to this) don't fully understand. When people talk about leaving their agents to run overnight, what are those agents actually doing? The limited utility I've had using agent-supported software development requires a significant amount of hand holding, maybe because I'm in an industry with limited externally available examples to build am model off of (though all of the specifications are public, I've yet to see an agent build an appropriate implementation). So it's much more transactional...I ask, it does something (usually within seconds), I correct, it iterates again... What sort of tasks are people putting these agents to? How are people running 'multiple' of these agents? What am I missing here?
- mikrotikker 8mo ago
  I wrote a program to classify thousands of images but that was using a model running on my gaming PC. Took about 3 days to classify them all. Only cost me the power right?
  - irishcoffee 8mo ago
    Power, gaming rig, internet, somewhere to store the rig, probably pay property taxes too. You can draw the line wherever you want. :) Personally, I wish I'd built a new gaming rig a year ago so I could mess with local models and pay all these same costs.
- flerchin 8mo ago
  This is my experience of it too. Perhaps if it was chunking through a large task like upgrading all of our repos to the latest engine supported by our cloud provider, I could leave it overnight. Even then it would just result in a large daylight backlog of "not quite right" to review and redo.
  - HolyLampshade 8mo ago
    I think that's the issue I have with using these tools so far (definitely professionally, but even in pet projects for embedded systems). The mental load of having to go back through and make sure all of the lines of code do what the agent claims they do, even with tests, is significantly more than it would take to learn the implementation myself. I can see the utility in creating very simple web-based tools where there's a monstrous wealth of public resources to build a model off of, but even the most recent models provided by Anthro, OpenAI, or MSFT seem prone to not quite perfection. And every time I find an error I'm left wondering what other bugs I'm not catching.
yayitswei 8mo ago
How ironic that agents were supposed to free us from labor, but instead they're ushering in 996 culture.
- chasd00 8mo ago
  It’s like how adding a lane to a highway doesn’t decrease traffic, traffic will just increase to consume the additional capacity. Efficiency gains at work just mean more work haha
- globular-toast 8mo ago
  No technology so far has reduced the amount of time we spend working. If anything it's increased. A few decades ago it was common for a household to have only one adult in the labour market, now it's common to have two. The work around the house hasn't gone away, of course. People are already at the point they could be working a fraction of the time they do, but they continue to work full time, producing shit they don't need, like ever growing vehicles and incremental smartphone upgrades etc.
  - notrustincloud 8mo ago
    consuming things they dont need or working double time to cover basic housing, food, and healthcare ?
    - globular-toast 8mo ago
      Most people in developed countries are well above poverty. According to one study[0], 99% of Americans have at least one streaming subscription. In Europe most people get healthcare free at the point of use. We easily produce what we need and could probably go completely sustainable if people weren't addicted to working and making more stuff. How do we make sustainability as satisfying as building? [0] https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/internet/streaming-stats/ https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/internet/streaming-s...
squeefers 8mo ago
shame on him for linking his ditzy wife's article where she thinks shes the first to notice lootboxes are gambling
- rexpop 8mo ago
  Oh my god! Don't call women "ditzy" you cretin. It's misogynistic as hell.
  - squeefers 8mo ago
    i could use "airheaded" instead, "vacuous" maybe? dim, dizzy, duncey or daft if we want to stick with the D's
dxxmxnd 8mo ago
> is it really work if all you're doing is telling the computer what to do and then reviewing it to make sure it didn't do anything wrong and also babysitting it all hours of the day? It’s funny because this is what we do already at many jobs but now its just telling a computer to tell a computer what to do. A higher level of abstraction.
andix 8mo ago
I don't get it. I have a ton of minutes and data volume included in my cell phone plans. Most of the months I only use up less than 10% of the included quota. Doesn't make me anxious at all.
zvqcMMV6Zcr 8mo ago
Please tell me this is some kind of satire because people checking on agents makes as much sense as people waking up early only to checking progress on Gentoo rebuilding itself from sources. Which definitely happened but as a niche not something common enough to observe.
estimator7292 8mo ago
It seems like some of us treat tokens as the level of fuel in the code machine. When it runs out, you simply go do something else. What's wild to me is that there's a whole other segment of people that treat tokens as, I dunno, some kind of malicious gatekeeping to the magical program generator. Some kind of endorphin rush of extracting functional code from a naive and poorly formed idea. To the former group, the gambling metaphor is flatly ridiculous. The AI is a tool and tokens are your allocation for tool time. To the latter, someone is trying to stifle you and strangle your creativity behind arbitrary limits. I don't know how to feel about this other than uneasy and worried.
- co_king_5 8mo ago
  [dead]
lifeline82 8mo ago
[dead]
kledru 8mo ago
well, the most interesting part of this post was ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86

265 points by presbyterian 8mo ago

I know it's popular comparing coding agents to slot machines right now, but the comparison doesn't entirely hold for me. It's more like being hooked on a slot machine which pays out 95% of the time because you know how to trick it. (I saw "no actual evidence pointing to these improvements" with a footnote and didn't even need to click that footnote to know it was the METR thing. I wish AI holdouts would find a few more studies.) Steve Yegge of all people published something the other day that has similar conclusions to this piece - that the productivity boost for coding agents can lead to burnout, especially if companies use it to drive their employees to work in unsustainable ways: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampire-eda6e4f07163 https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-ai-vampire-eda6e4f07163

fdefitte 8mo ago
That 95% payout only works if you already know what good looks like. The sketchy part is when you can't tell the diff between correct and almost-correct. That's where stuff goes sideways.
mrbungie 8mo ago
If you are really good and fast validating/fixing code output or you are actually not validating it more than just making sure it runs (no judging), I can see it paying out 95% of the time. But for what I've seen both validating my and others coding agents outputs I'd estimate a much lower percentage (Data Engineering/Science work). And, oh boy, some colleages are hooked to generating no matter the quality. Workslop is a very real phenomenon.
- biophysboy 8mo ago
  This matches my experience using LLMs for science. Out of curiosity, I downloaded a randomized study and the CONSORT checklist, and asked Claude code to do a review using the checklist. I was really impressed with how it parsed the structured checklist. I was not at all impressed by how it digested the paper. Lots of disguised errors.
  - baq 8mo ago
    try codex 5.3. it's dry and very obviously AI; if you allow a bit of anthropomorphisation, it's kind of high-functioning autistic. it isn't an oracle, it'll still be wrong, but it's a powerful, completely different from claude tool.
    - biophysboy 8mo ago
      Does it get numbers right? One of the mistakes it made in reading the paper was swapping sets of numbers from the primary/secondary outcomes.
      - baq 8mo ago
        it does get screenshots right for me, but obviously I haven't tried on your specific paper. I can only recommend trying it out, it's also has a much more generous limits in the $20 tier than opus.
        biophysboy 8mo ago
        I see. To clarify, it parsed numbers in the pdf correct, but assigned them the wrong meaning. I was wondering if codex is better at interpreting non text data
    - enraged_camel 8mo ago
      Every time someone suggests Codex I give it a shot. And every time it disappoints. After I read your comment, I gave Codex 5.3 the task of setting up an E2E testing skeleton for one of my repos, using Playwright. It worked for probably 45 minutes and in the end failed miserably: out of the five smoke tests it created, only two of them passed. It gave up on the other three and said they will need “further investigation”. I then stashed all do that code and gave the exact same task to Opus 4.5 (not even 4.6), with the same prompt. After 15 mins it was done. Then I popped Codex’s code from the stash and asked Opus to look at it to see why the three m of the five tests Codex wrote didn’t pass. It looked at them and found four critical issues that Codex had missed. For example, it had failed to detect that my localhost uses https, so the the E2E suite’s API calls from the Vue app kept failing. Opus also found that the two passing tests were actually invalid: they checked for the existence of a div with #app and simply assumed it meant the Vue app booted successfully. This is probably the dozenth comparison I’ve done between Codex and Opus. I think there was only one scenario where Codex performed equally well. Opus is just a much better model in my experience.
Retr0id 8mo ago
It's 95% if you're using it for the stuff it's good at. People inevitably try to push it further than that (which is only natural!), and if you're operating at/beyond the capability frontier then the success rate eventually drops.
jrflowers 8mo ago
> It's more like being hooked on a slot machine which pays out 95% of the time because you know how to trick it. “It’s not like a slot machine, it’s like… a slot machine… that I feel good using” That aside if a slot machine is doing your job correctly 95% of the time it seems like either you aren’t noticing when it’s doing your job poorly or you’ve shifted the way that you work to only allow yourself to do work that the slot machine is good at.
Kiro 8mo ago
Just need to point out that the payout is often above 95% at online casinos. As long as it's below 100 the house still wins.
- mikkupikku 8mo ago
  He means a slot machine that pays you 95% of the time, not a slot machine that pays out 95% of what you put in. Claude Code wasting my time with nonsense output one in twenty times seems roughly correct. The rest of the time it's hitting jackpots.
saulpw 8mo ago
Yeah I'm finding that there's "clock time" (hours) and "calendar time" (days/weeks/months) and pushing people to work 'more' is based on the fallacy that our productivity is based on clock time (like it is in a factory pumping out widgets) rather than calendar time (like it is in art and other creative endeavors). I'm finding that even if the LLM can crank out my requested code in an hour, I'll still need a few days to process how it feels to use. The temptation is to pull the lever 10 times in a row because it was so easy, but now I'll need a few weeks to process the changes as a human. This is just for my own personal projects, and it makes sense that the business incentives would be even more intense. But you can't get around the fact that, no matter how brilliant your software or interface, customers are not going to start paying in a few hours.
- simonw 8mo ago
  > The temptation is to pull the lever 10 times in a row because it was so easy, but now I'll need a few weeks to process the changes as a human Yeah I really feel that! I recently learned the term "cognitive debt" for this from https://margaretstorey.com/blog/2026/02/09/cognitive-debt/ https://margaretstorey.com/blog/2026/02/09/cognitive-debt/ and I think it's a great way to capture this effect. I can churn out features faster, but that means I don't get time to fully absorb each feature and think through its consequences and relationships to other existing or future features.
fy20 8mo ago
> It's more like being hooked on a slot machine which pays out 95% of the time because you know how to trick it Right but the <100% chance is actually why slot machines are addictive. If it pays out continuously the behaviour does not persist as long. It's called the partial reinforcement extinction effect.
r00tanon 8mo ago
I was going to mention Yegge's recent blog posts mirroring this phenomena. There's also this article on hbr.org https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it?ab=HP-latest-text-5 https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies... This is a real thing, and it looks like classic addiction.
energy123 8mo ago
Being on a $200 plan is a weird motivator. Seeing the unused weekly limit for codex and the clock ticking down, and knowing I can spam GPT 5.2 Pro "for free" because I already paid for it.
zem 8mo ago
thanks, that steve yegge piece was a very good read.
globular-toast 8mo ago
> It's more like being hooked on a slot machine which pays out 95% of the time because you know how to trick it. I think you are mistaken on what the "payout" is. There's only one reason someone is working all hours and during a party and whatnot: it's to become rich and powerful. The payout is not "more code", it's a big house, fast cars, beautiful women etc. Nobody can trick it into paying out even 1% of the time, let alone 95%.

htfu 8mo ago

Probably the best we can hope for at the moment is a reduction in the back-and-forth, increase in ability to one-shot stuff with a really good spec. The regular human work then becomes building that spec, in regular human (albeit AI-assisted) ways.

ErroneousBosh 8mo ago
Is the "back and forth" thing normal for AI stuff, then? Because every time I've attempted to use Claude or Copilot for coding stuff, it's been completely unable to do anything on its own, and I've ended up writing all of the code while it's just kind of introduced misspellings into it. Maybe someone can show me how you're supposed to do it, because I have seen no evidence that AI can write code at all.
- htfu 8mo ago
  Very much normal yes. This is why I've been (so far) still mainly sticking to having it as an all-knowing oracle telling me what I need to know, which it mostly does successfully. When it works for pure generation it's beautiful, when it doesn't it's ruinous enough to make me take two steps back. I'll have another go at getting with all the pure agentic rage everyone's talking about soon enough.
- jazzyjackson 8mo ago
  Step 1: deposit money into an Anthropic API account Step 2: download Zed and paste in your API Key Step 3: Give detailed instructions to the assistant, including writing ReadMe files on the goal of the project and the current state of the project Step 4: stop the robot when it's making a dumb decision Step 5: keep an eye on context size and start a new conversation every time you're half full. The more stuff in the context the dumber it gets. I spent about 500 dollars and 16 hours of conversation to get an MVP static marketplace [0], a ruby app that can be crawled into static (and js-free!) files, without writing a single line of code myself, because I don't know ruby. This included a rather convoluted data import process, loading the database from XML files of a couple different schemas. Only thing I had to figure out on my own was how to upload the 140,000 pages to cloudflare free tier. [0] https://motorcycledealer.com/ https://motorcycledealer.com/

symfrog 8mo ago

If you are trying to build something well represented in the training data, you could get a usable prototype. If you are unfamiliar with the various ways that naive code would fail in production, you could be fooled into thinking generated code is all you need. If you try to hold the hand of the coding agents to bring code to a point where it is production ready, be prepared for a frustrating cycle of models responding with ‘Fixed it!’ while only having introduced further issues.

dcre 8mo ago

How are we still citing the (excellent) METR study in support of conclusions about productivity that its authors rightly insist[0] it does not support? My paraphrase of their caveats: - experts on their own open source proj are not representative of most software dev - measuring time undervalues trading time for effort - tools are noticeably better than they were a year ago when the study was conducted - it really does take months of use to get the hang of it (or did then, less so now) Before you respond to these points, please look at the full study’s treatment of the caveats! It’s fantastic, and it’s clear almost no one citing the study actually read it. [0]: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

Shank 8mo ago

I think that in a world where code has zero marginal cost (or close to zero, for the right companies), we need to be incredibly cognizant of the fact that more code is not more profit, nor is it better code. Simpler is still better, and products with taste omit features that detract from vision. You can scaffold thousands of lines of code very easily, but this makes your codebase hard to reason about, maintain, and work in. It is like unleashing a horde of mid-level engineers with spec documents and coming back in a week with everything refactored wrong. Sure you have some new buttons but does anyone (or can any AI agent, for that matter) understand how it works? And to another point: work life balance is a huge challenge. Burnout happens in all departments, not just engineering. Managers can get burnout just as easily. If you manage AI agents, you'll just get burnout from that too.

Aurornis 8mo ago

After actually using LLM coding tools for a while, some of these anti-LLM thinkpieces feel very contrived. I don’t see the comparison to gambling addiction at all. I understand how someone might believe that if they only view LLMs through second hand Twitter hot takes and think that it’s a process of typing a prompt and hoping for the best. Some people do that, but the really effective coders work with the LLM and drive the coding, writing some or much of the code themselves. The social media version of vibe coding where you just prompt continuously and hope for the best is not going to work in any serious endeavor where details matter. We see claims of it in some high profile examples like OpenClaw, but even OpenClaw has maintainers and contributors who look at the code and make decisions. It’s also riddled with security problems as a result of the YOLO coding style.

ctoth 8mo ago

The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection. Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design — every element is optimized to maximize time on device. Social media optimizes for engagement, and compulsive behavior is the predictable output. The optimization target produces the addiction. What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible! The variability in agent output is working against that goal, not serving it. If they could make it right 100% of the time, they would — and the "slot machine" nonsense disappears entirely. On capped plans, both you and Anthropic are incentivized to minimize interactions, not maximize them. That's the opposite of a casino. It's ... alignment (of a sort) An unreliable tool that the manufacturer is actively trying to make more reliable is not a slot machine. It's a tool that isn't finished yet. I've been building a space simulator for longer than some of the people diagnosing me have been programming. I built things obsessively before LLMs. I'll build things obsessively after. The pathologizing of "person who likes making things chooses making things over Netflix" requires you to treat passive consumption as the healthy baseline, which is obviously a claim nobody in this conversation is bothering to defend.

deleted 8mo ago
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CGMthrowaway 8mo ago
> The gambling analogy completely falls apart on inspection. Slot machines have variable reward schedules by design — every element is optimized to maximize time on device. Social media optimizes for engagement, and compulsive behavior is the predictable output. The optimization target produces the addiction. Intermittent variable rewards, whether produced by design or merely as a byproduct, will induce compulsive behavior, no matter the optimization target. This applies to Claude
- ctoth 8mo ago
  Sometimes I will go out and I will plant a pepper plant and take care of it all summer long and obsessively ensure it has precisely the right amount of water and compost and so on... and ... for some reason (maybe I was on vacation and it got over 105 degrees?) I don't get a good crop. Does this mean I should not garden because it's a variable reward? Of course not. Sometimes I will go out fishing and I won't catch a damn thing. Should I stop fishing? Obviously no. So what's the difference? What is the precise mechanism here that you're pointing at? Because sometimes life is disappointing is a reason to do nothing. And yet.

shaokind 8mo ago

One of my recent thoughts is that Claude Code has become the most successful agent partially because it is more of a black box than previous implementations of the agent pattern: the actual code changes aren't shoved in your face like Cursor (used to be), they are hidden away. You focus more on the result rather than the code building up that result, and so you get into the "just one more feature" mindset a lot more, because you're never concerned that the code you're building is sloppy.

mikkupikku 8mo ago
It's because claude code will test its work and adjust the code accordingly. The old way, with the way Cursor used to be or the way I used to copy and paste code from ChatGPT doesn't work because to iterate in towards a working solution requires too much human effort, making the whole thing pointless.
- shaokind 8mo ago
  Cursor & its various clones (Cline, Roo Cline/Code) did that too, before Claude Code was even released.

BoxFour 8mo ago

I wish the author had stuck to the salient point about work/life balance instead of drifting into the gambling tangent, because the core message is actually more unsettling. With the tech job market being rough and AI tools making it so frictionless to produce real output, the line between work time and personal time is basically disappearing. To the bluesky poster's point: Pulling out a laptop at a party feels awkward for most; pulling out your phone to respond to claude barely registers. That’s what makes it dangerous: It's so easy to feel some sense of progress now. Even when you’re tired and burned out, you can still make progress by just sending off a quick message. The quality will, of course, slip over time; but far less than it did previously. Add in a weak labor market and people feel pressure to stay working all the time. Partly because everyone else is (and nobody wants to be at the bottom of the stack ranking), and partly because it’s easier than ever to avoid hitting a wall by just "one more message". Steve Yegge's point about AI vampires rings true to me: A lot of coworkers I’ve talked to feel burned out after just a few months of going hard with AI tools. Those same people are the ones working nights and weekends because "I can just have a back-and-forth with Claude while I'm watching a show now". The likely result is the usual pattern for increases in labor productivity. People who can’t keep up get pushed out, people who can keep up stay stuck grinding, and companies get to claim the increase in productivity while reducing expenses. Steve's suggestion for shorter workdays sound nice in theory, but I would bet significant amounts of money the 40-hour work week remains the standard for a long time to come.

nharada 8mo ago
Another interesting thing here is that the gap between "burned out but just producing subpar work" and "so crispy I literally cannot work" is even wider with AI. The bar for just firing off prompts is low, but the mental effort required to know the right prompts to ask and then validate is much higher so you just skip that part. You can work for months doing terrible work and then eventually the entire codebase collapses.
Aurornis 8mo ago
> With the tech job market being rough and AI tools making it so frictionless to produce real output, the line between work time and personal time is basically disappearing. This isn't generally true at all. The "all tech companies are going to 996" meme comes up a lot here but all of the links and anecdotes go back to the same few sources. It is very true that the tech job market is competitive again after the post-COVID period where virtually nobody was getting fired and jobs were easy to find. I do not think it's true that the median or even 90th percentile tech job is becoming so overbearing that personal time is disappearing. If you're at a job where they're trying to normalize overwork as something everyone is doing, they're just lying to you to extract more work.

jauntywundrkind 8mo ago

Funemployed right now joyously spending way way more time than 996, pulling the slot machine arm to get tokens, having a ball. But that's for personal pleasure. This post is receeding from the concerns about "token anxiety," about the addiction to tokens. This post is about work culture & late capitalism anxiety, about possible pressures & systems society might impose. I reflect a lot on AI doesn't reduce the work, it intensifies it. https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies... The spirit of this really nails something core to me. We coders especially get help doing so much of menial now. Which means we spend a lot more time making intense analysis and critiques, are much more doing the hard thought work of 'is what we have here as good as it can be'. Finding new references or patterns to feed back into the AI to steer already working implementations towards better outcomes. And my heart tells me that corporations & work life as we know it are almost universally just really awful about supporting reflective contemplative work like this. Work wants output. It doesn't want you sit in a hammock and think about it. But increasingly I tell you the key to good successful software is Hammock Driven Development. It's time to use our brains more, in quiet reflection. https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hickey_Rich/HammockDrivenDev.md https://github.com/matthiasn/talk-transcripts/blob/master/Hi... 996 sounds like garbage on its own, as a system of toil. But I also very much respect an idea of continuous work, one that also intersperses rest throughout the day. Doing some chores or going to the supermarket or playing with the kid can be an incredibly good way to let your preconscious sift through the big gnarly problems about. The response to the intensity of what we have, to me, speaks of a need to spread out the work, to de-concentrate it, to build in more than hammock time. I was on the fence about whether the traditional workday deserved to survive before AI hit, and my feels about it being a gross mismatch have massively intensified since. As I started my post with, I personally have a much more positive experience, with what yes feels like a token addiction. But it doesn't feel like an anxiety. It feels like the greatest most exciting adventure, far beyond what I had hoped for in life ever. This is wildly fun, going far far further out than I had ever hoped to get to see. I'm not "anxiously" pulling the lever arm on the token machine, I'm just thrilled to get to do it. To have time to reflect and decide, I have 3-8 things going at once (and probably double they back burnered but open, on Niri rows!) to let myself make slower decisions, to analyze, while keeping the things that can safely move forwards moving forwards. That also seems like something worker exploitative late capitalism is mostly hot garbage at too! Companies really try to reduce in flight activities. Sprint planning is about crafting deliberate work. But our freedom and agency here far outstrips these dusty old practices. It is anxiety inducing to be so powerful so capable & to have a bureaucracy that constraints and confines, that wants only narrow windows of our use. Also, shame on Tim Kellogg for not God damned linking the actual post he was citing. Garbagefire move. https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/token-anxiety https://writing.nikunjk.com/p/token-anxiety https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47021136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47021136

coldtea 8mo ago

Ironically the linked text by this Kellog guy is 100% AI slop itself

verdverm 8mo ago
what's ironic? The conversation under the post adds a lot of color to Tim's thoughts
- coldtea 8mo ago
  It's ironic that the linked thoughts in the post (the black and white text screenshots) lamening AI overtaking our lives are themselves written by AI

deleted 8mo ago

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scuff3d 8mo ago

Simple fix for this. When the work day is done, close the laptop and walk away. Don't link notifications to personal devices. Whatever slop it produced will be waiting for you at 8am the next morning.

wormpilled 8mo ago

[flagged]

Havoc 8mo ago

And a related issue that if you have a coding plan with time based limits they there is pressure to make maximum use of it

throwthrowuknow 8mo ago

This is simply yet another outdated analogy from haters that are failing to keep pace with the current frontier because they are too busy getting high on the anti-hype. We’re well past the need to retry the same prompt multiple times in order to get working code. The models with their harnesses are properly agentic now, they can find the right context, make a plan, write the code, run the tests and fix the bugs with little to no intervention from a human. The hardest part now is keeping up with them when it comes to approving the deliverables and updating the architecture and spec as new things are discovered by using the software. Not new bugs but corrections to your own assumptions you had before the feature was built. The hard part is almost entirely management. That’s something to seriously think about.

xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago
> This is simply yet another outdated analogy from haters that are failing to keep pace with the current frontier because they are too busy getting high on the anti-hype. Touché.

TZubiri 8mo ago

Not sure if the original post is satire, but it reads like an alcoholic's submission to https://xkcd.com/1227/ https://xkcd.com/1227/

mikemarsh 8mo ago
Always interesting how this kind of snark never seems to go to bat for modern man's average patience and self-control, thus actually proving the naysayers wrong, but always just assumes that "everyone knows" modern times are best and those silly past naysayers are thus wrong.

cadamsdotcom 8mo ago

Rather than let results be random, iteratively and continuously add more and more guardrails and grounding. Tests, linting, guidance in response to key events (Claude Code hooks are great for this), automatically passing the agent’s code plan to another model invocation then passing back whatever feedback that model has on the plan so you don’t have to point out the same flaws in plans over and over.. custom scripts that iterate your codebase for antipatterns (they can walk the AST or be regex based - ask your agent to write them!) Codify everything you’re looping back to your agent about and make it a guardrail. Give your agent the tools it needs to give itself grounding. An agent without guardrails or grounding is like a person unconnected to their senses: disconnected from the world, all you do is dream - in a dream anything can happen, there’s nothing to ensure realism. When you look at it that way it’s a miracle coding agents produce anything useful at all :)

surrTurr 8mo ago

I wrote a similar blogpost just a few days ago: "The Vibe Coding Slot Machine" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47022282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47022282)

mh2266 8mo ago

what kind of lame parties is the bluesky poster going to? is this a San Francisco thing?

deleted 8mo ago
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Sharlin 8mo ago
I certainly hope the Bsky post is satire, but I honestly can't tell anymore.
mikkupikku 8mo ago
Yeah, honestly seems like that guy is looking for a scapegoat to blame for himself being lame. If you can't put work down and let loose, that's a you problem, not a technology problem.

karel-3d 8mo ago

wait wait wait the BlueSky post is not a parody? It's actually serious??? I really cannot tell

delegate 8mo ago

It's very tempting to agree to the 'gambling' part, given that both a jackpot and progress towards the goal in your project will give you a hit of dopamine. The difference is that in gambling 'the house always wins', but in our case we do make progress towards our goal of conquering the world with our newly minted apps. The situation where this comparison holds is when vibe coding leads nowhere and you don't accomplish anything but just burn through tokens.

xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago
> The difference is that in gambling 'the house always wins', but in our case we do make progress towards our goal of conquering the world with our newly minted apps. What? Your vibe coded slop is just going to be competing with someone else's vibe coded slop.
- mikkupikku 8mo ago
  The motivations for wanting to make the slop could be commercial profit, or it could be simply you trying to solve a problem for yourself. In either case, the slop is the goal and, if the agent isn't giving you complete trash, you should be converging towards your goal. The gambling analogy doesn't work.
squeefers 8mo ago
[flagged]
- mikkupikku 8mo ago
  Sounds like you've had too much TV. It really does rot your brain, this is obvious to anybody who doesn't watch TV, but completely imperceptible to those who do.
  - squeefers 8mo ago
    > It really does rot your brain, this is obvious to anybody who doesn't watch TV, but completely imperceptible to those who do. how do you block video on your PC? or do you literally mean audiovisual information broadcast onto actual television sets is the evil?

nl 8mo ago

I don't think gambling is the right analogy at all. I do think it can be addictive, but there are many things that are addictive that aren't gambling. I think a better analogy is something like extreme sport, where people can get addicted to the point it can be harmful.

askl 8mo ago
At least with gambling, there's the chance of hitting a jackpot.

squeefers 8mo ago

why arent books accused of addictive engineering? simply move the printed words from paper to digital and it becomes addictive somehow.

bb123 8mo ago

What's with the lack of capitalisation at the start of sentences? It makes it hard to parse where one sentence ends and the next begins.

aljarry 8mo ago

This does seem like a person getting hooked on idle games, or mobile/online games with artificially limited progress (that you can pay to lift). It's a type of delayed gratification that makes you anxious to get next one. Not everyone gets hooked on those, but I do. I've played a bunch of those long-winded idle games, and it looks like a slight addiction. I would get impatient that it takes so long to progress, and it would add anxiety to e.g. run this during breaks at work, or just before going to sleep. "Just one more click". And to be perfectly honest, it seems like the artificial limits of Anthropic (5 hour session limits) dig into similar mechanism. I do less non-programming hobbies since I've got myself a subscription.

sph 8mo ago
I’d rather grind Runescape at this point, than become addicted at trying to automate away my job.

HolyLampshade 8mo ago

I know I'm running a bit late to the party here, but maybe someone can provide some color that I (on the slightly older end of the spectrum when it comes to this) don't fully understand. When people talk about leaving their agents to run overnight, what are those agents actually doing? The limited utility I've had using agent-supported software development requires a significant amount of hand holding, maybe because I'm in an industry with limited externally available examples to build am model off of (though all of the specifications are public, I've yet to see an agent build an appropriate implementation). So it's much more transactional...I ask, it does something (usually within seconds), I correct, it iterates again... What sort of tasks are people putting these agents to? How are people running 'multiple' of these agents? What am I missing here?

mikrotikker 8mo ago
I wrote a program to classify thousands of images but that was using a model running on my gaming PC. Took about 3 days to classify them all. Only cost me the power right?
- irishcoffee 8mo ago
  Power, gaming rig, internet, somewhere to store the rig, probably pay property taxes too. You can draw the line wherever you want. :) Personally, I wish I'd built a new gaming rig a year ago so I could mess with local models and pay all these same costs.
flerchin 8mo ago
This is my experience of it too. Perhaps if it was chunking through a large task like upgrading all of our repos to the latest engine supported by our cloud provider, I could leave it overnight. Even then it would just result in a large daylight backlog of "not quite right" to review and redo.
- HolyLampshade 8mo ago
  I think that's the issue I have with using these tools so far (definitely professionally, but even in pet projects for embedded systems). The mental load of having to go back through and make sure all of the lines of code do what the agent claims they do, even with tests, is significantly more than it would take to learn the implementation myself. I can see the utility in creating very simple web-based tools where there's a monstrous wealth of public resources to build a model off of, but even the most recent models provided by Anthro, OpenAI, or MSFT seem prone to not quite perfection. And every time I find an error I'm left wondering what other bugs I'm not catching.

yayitswei 8mo ago

How ironic that agents were supposed to free us from labor, but instead they're ushering in 996 culture.

chasd00 8mo ago
It’s like how adding a lane to a highway doesn’t decrease traffic, traffic will just increase to consume the additional capacity. Efficiency gains at work just mean more work haha
globular-toast 8mo ago
No technology so far has reduced the amount of time we spend working. If anything it's increased. A few decades ago it was common for a household to have only one adult in the labour market, now it's common to have two. The work around the house hasn't gone away, of course. People are already at the point they could be working a fraction of the time they do, but they continue to work full time, producing shit they don't need, like ever growing vehicles and incremental smartphone upgrades etc.
- notrustincloud 8mo ago
  consuming things they dont need or working double time to cover basic housing, food, and healthcare ?
  - globular-toast 8mo ago
    Most people in developed countries are well above poverty. According to one study[0], 99% of Americans have at least one streaming subscription. In Europe most people get healthcare free at the point of use. We easily produce what we need and could probably go completely sustainable if people weren't addicted to working and making more stuff. How do we make sustainability as satisfying as building? [0] https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/internet/streaming-stats/ https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/internet/streaming-s...

squeefers 8mo ago

shame on him for linking his ditzy wife's article where she thinks shes the first to notice lootboxes are gambling

rexpop 8mo ago
Oh my god! Don't call women "ditzy" you cretin. It's misogynistic as hell.
- squeefers 8mo ago
  i could use "airheaded" instead, "vacuous" maybe? dim, dizzy, duncey or daft if we want to stick with the D's

dxxmxnd 8mo ago

> is it really work if all you're doing is telling the computer what to do and then reviewing it to make sure it didn't do anything wrong and also babysitting it all hours of the day? It’s funny because this is what we do already at many jobs but now its just telling a computer to tell a computer what to do. A higher level of abstraction.

andix 8mo ago

I don't get it. I have a ton of minutes and data volume included in my cell phone plans. Most of the months I only use up less than 10% of the included quota. Doesn't make me anxious at all.

zvqcMMV6Zcr 8mo ago

Please tell me this is some kind of satire because people checking on agents makes as much sense as people waking up early only to checking progress on Gentoo rebuilding itself from sources. Which definitely happened but as a niche not something common enough to observe.

estimator7292 8mo ago

It seems like some of us treat tokens as the level of fuel in the code machine. When it runs out, you simply go do something else. What's wild to me is that there's a whole other segment of people that treat tokens as, I dunno, some kind of malicious gatekeeping to the magical program generator. Some kind of endorphin rush of extracting functional code from a naive and poorly formed idea. To the former group, the gambling metaphor is flatly ridiculous. The AI is a tool and tokens are your allocation for tool time. To the latter, someone is trying to stifle you and strangle your creativity behind arbitrary limits. I don't know how to feel about this other than uneasy and worried.

co_king_5 8mo ago
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lifeline82 8mo ago

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kledru 8mo ago

well, the most interesting part of this post was ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86