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AI coding is gambling
- xnx 8mo ago...and the payouts are fantastic.
- balinha_8864 8mo ago[dead]
- some_random 8mo agoHow often do you have to win before it's no longer gambling?
- Retr0id 8mo agoI don't know where I'd draw the line personally, but wherever you draw it there's a problem. If you give increasingly more advanced tasks to it, you will eventually cross the line.
- margalabargala 8mo agoHow is this any different from assigning increasingly more advanced tasks to an employee?
- Capricorn2481 8mo agoWell the line comes a lot sooner than my coworkers.
- tonymet 8mo agowe're winning so much we started complaining "I can't handle so much winning"
- flaterkk 8mo agoSuffering from Success - Studio album by DJ Khaled ‧ 2013 Applies here? :D
- operatingthetan 8mo agoExactly. It's not gambling if you win most of the time. This is like saying driving a car is gambling. I mean sure, I guess if you think any amount of risk equals gambling.
- apitman 8mo agoSee also https://www.fast.ai/posts/2026-01-28-dark-flow/ https://www.fast.ai/posts/2026-01-28-dark-flow/
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- minimaxir 8mo agoThe gambling metaphor often applied to vibecoding implies that the outcome cannot be fully controlled or influenced, such as a slot machine. Opus 4.5 and beyond show that it not only can be very much can be influenced, but also it can give better results more consistently with the proper checks and balances.
- Retr0id 8mo agoPoker is a skill-based game where your actions influence your success, but many people who play it are gambling.
- bensyverson 8mo agoAnd that's why poker is a poor metaphor for agentic coding.
- deepfriedrice 8mo agoIt's the perfect metaphor? Playing correctly/optimally is +EV. But nobody starts there, and many people don't ever get there. The main difference is that you're exploiting your own weaknesses, rather than others'. Limitations in typing speed, information gathering, pattern recognition.
- bensyverson 8mo agoIn that case, couldn't you substitute painting, horseback riding or knitting? Nothing about poker has anything to do with agentic coding except "it's something you can learn."
- deepfriedrice 8mo agoIn poker some people are gambling. Some may be self-ware, but many aren't and misunderstand why they win or lose. Poker inconsistently and unreliably rewards gambling, much like vibe-coding.
- samschooler 8mo agoI think there are levels to this. - One shot or "spray and pray" prompt only vibe coding: gambling. - Spec driven TDD AI vibe coding: more akin to poker. - Normal coding (maybe with tab auto complete): eating veggies/work. Notably though gambling has the massive downside of losing your entire life and life savings. Being in the "vibe coding" bucket's worse case is being insufferable to your friends and family, wasting your time, and spending $200/month on a max plan.
- parliament32 8mo agoYou remind me of those guys who swear they have a "system" at the casino.
- samschooler 8mo agoI'm not saying I have a system. I'm saying there are levels to this stuff. It's not a binary "gambling" or "not gambling".
- Retr0id 8mo ago> But now either the AI can handle it or it can pretend to handle it. Frankly it's pretending both times, but often it's enough to get the result we need. This has been how I think about it, too. The success rates are going up, but I still view the AI as an adversary that is trying to trick me into thinking it's being useful. Often the act is good enough to be actually useful, too.
- simonw 8mo agoAssigning work to an intern is gambling: they're inherently non-deterministic and it's a roll of the dice whether the work they do will be good enough or you'll have to give them feedback in order to get to what you need.
- Fellshard 8mo agoAn intern can be taught. If you try to 'teach' a craps table, they'll drag you out of the casino.
- skepticATX 8mo agoYou generally don’t assign work to an intern just for the output, though.
- sarchertech 8mo agoThat’s very true. But interns aren’t supposed to be doing useful work. The purpose of interns is training interns and identifying people who might become useful at a later date. I’ve never worked anywhere where the interns had net productivity on average.
- simonw 8mo agoReplace "intern" with "coworker" and my comment still holds.
- sarchertech 8mo agoIt worked with interns because interns are temporary workers. It doesn’t work with coworkers because you get to know them over time, you can teach them over time, and you can pick which ones you work with to some degree. To come up with an analogy that works at all for AI, it would have to be something like temporary workers who code fast, and read fast, but go home at the end of the day and never return. You can make a lot of valuable software managing a team like that working on the subset of problems that the team is a good fit for. But I wouldn’t work there.
- 8mo ago
- rvz 8mo agoIt is indeed gambling. You are spending more tokens hoping that the agent aligns with your desired output from your prompt. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Watching vibe gamblers hooked onto coding agents who can't solve fizz buzz in Rust are given promotional offers by Anthropic [0] for free token allowances that are the equivalent in the casino of free $20 bets or free spins at the casino to win until March 27, 2026. The house (Anthropic) always wins. [0] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14063676-claude-march-2026-usage-promotion https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14063676-claude-march...
- halotrope 8mo agoidk it works for me it build stuff that would have taken weeks in hours ymmv
- dwa3592 8mo agofew thoughts on this- it's not gambling if the most expected outcome actually occurs. It also depends on what you're coding with; - If you're coding with opus4.6, then it's not gambling for a while. - If you'r coding with gemini3-flash, then yeah. One thing I have noticed though is- you have to spend a lot of tokens to keep the error/hallucination rate low as your codebase increases in size. The math of this problem makes sense; as the code base has increased, there's physically more surface where something could go wrong. To avoid that you have to consistently and efficiently make the surface and all it's features visible to the model. If you have coded with a model for a week and it has produced some code, the model is not more intelligent after that week- it still has the same layers and parameters, so keeping the context relevant is a moving target as the codebase increases (and that's why it probably feels like gambling to some people).
- Planktonne 8mo ago> it's not gambling if the most expected outcome actually occurs. > you have to spend a lot of tokens to keep the error/hallucination rate low Ironically, I find your comment more effective at convincing me AI coding is gambling than the original article. You're talking about it the exact same way that gamblers do about their games.
- dwa3592 8mo agolol that's interesting. care to explain why?
- dminik 8mo agoI mean, the most expected outcome does mostly happen. When gambling, you are expected to lose money and you do. I'm not quite convinced that the same isn't true for vibecoding.
- dwa3592 8mo agoso your whole argument is that you are convinced that ai coding is gambling because according to you i am talking about it like gamblers talk about gambling? - Was there anymore intelligence that you wanted to add to your argument?
- bensyverson 8mo agoThis "slot machine" metaphor is played out. If you're just entering a coin's worth of information and nudging it over and over in the hopes of getting something good, that's a you problem, not a Claude problem. If, on the other hand, you treat it like a hyper-competent collaborator, and follow good project management and development practices, you're golden.
- rustyhancock 8mo agoLife is full of variable reward schemes. Probably why we evolved to be so enamoured by them. In a healthy environment. We are harmed more by being totally risk adverse. Than by accepting risk as part of life and work.
- james2doyle 8mo ago_hyper-competent collaborator who may completely make things up occasionally and will sometimes give different answers to the same question*_
- bensyverson 8mo agoSo, indistinguishable from a human then
- bigstrat2003 8mo agoNo. A competent human doesn't make things up, he admits ignorance. He also only very rarely changes answers he previously gave.
- ctoth 8mo ago> If, on the other hand, you treat it like a hyper-competent collaborator, and follow good project management and development practices, you're golden. I am consistently using 100% of my weekly $200 max plan. I know how this thing works, I know how to get value out of it, and I wish what you said were true. If you do all of these things? You are in a better spot. You are in a far better spot than if you hadn't! Setting up hooks to ensure notes get written? Massive win! Red-green TDD? Yes, please! But in terms of just ... well, being able to rely on the damn thing? https://github.com/ctoth/claude-failures https://github.com/ctoth/claude-failures
- rustyhancock 8mo agoLife is full of variable reward schemes. Probably why we evolved to be so enamoured by them. Sometimes I think we put the Carr before the horse. We gamble because evolution promotes that approach. Yes I could go for the reliable option. But taking a punt is worth a shot if the cost is low. The cost of AI is low. What is a problem is people getting wrapped up in just one more pull of the slot machine handle. I use AI often. But fairly often I simply bin its reponse and get to work on my own. A decent amount of the time I can work with the response given to make a decent result. Sometimes, rarely, it gives me what I need right off the bat.
- hirako2000 8mo agoI doubt gambling is in nature. Investments based on reason pay off. Evolution shapes for sensical moves. Humans invented gambling as a rigged game that mimics what's in nature, perversed for profit.
- glial 8mo agoBroadly speaking, gambling is just making decisions without knowing the future. It's everywhere.
- hirako2000 8mo agoGambling is taking a bet without any clue about the future. Nothing is done with certainty what the future will be. Yet we don't say we are constantly gambling, without some people do.
- rustyhancock 8mo agoThe "natural" form of gambling is this. You need to collect food, do you go to where you know there are berries (low value but high likelihood of finding), or scout off to find a herd of deer? (High value but low likelihood of finding). Looking for deer wouldnt be walking off in a random direction. You check water holes, known clearings, known fields. Each of these is an operation (walk to X and look), each has a low probability of meeting a deer. This is a variable reward scheme. The result is optmize foraging practices - you mostly hunt for deer then fall back to berries. In larger groups some will gather berries some will hunt. Contrary to popular thought hunter and gatherer were not separate occupations.
- jsLavaGoat 8mo agoEverything is "fast, cheap, good--pick two." This is no different.
- smlacy 8mo agoI like the analogy but which 2 is AI coding? Fast & Cheap (but not Good?) - I wouldn't really say that AI coding is "cheap" Cheap & Good (but not Fast) - Again, not really "cheap" Fast & Good (but not Cheap) - This seems like maybe where we're at? Is this a bad place?
- ambicapter 8mo agoThe proper idiom is "You can only pick two". It doesn't say that everything is two of them, or even one.
- bigstrat2003 8mo agoIt's not cheap or good, it's just fast.
- jsLavaGoat 8mo agoIt's fast. It's cheap compared to employees. It's really the latter that people are upset about. As for good. Well, how much software is really good? A lot of it is sewn together APIs and electron-like runtimes and 5,000 dependencies someone else wrote. Not exactly hand-crafted and artisanal. I'm sure everyone here's projects are the exception, but engineering is always about meeting the design requirements. Either it does or it doesn't.
- flaterkk 8mo agoIt's hitting all three, right _now_. Eventually, it will be just Fast and Good. It won't be cheap, as companies start moving towards profitability. Remember when Uber was super cheap? I do. They're fast and good though.
- CraftingLinks 8mo agoI see whole teams pushed by c- level going full in with spec driven + tdd development. The devs hate it because they are literally forbidden to touch a single line if code. but the results speak for themselves, it just works and the pressure has shifted to the product people to keep up. The whole tooling to enable this had to be worked out first. All Cursor and extreme use of a tool called Speckit, connected to Notion to pump documentation and Jira.
- RealityVoid 8mo ago> literally forbidden to touch a single line if code. That is extremely stupid. What does that ban get you? I reqct to this because a friend mentioned exactly this. And I was dumbfounded.
- comboy 8mo ago> That is extremely stupid. What does that ban get you? confidence in firing coders I presume..
- CraftingLinks 8mo agoThey are hiring "architects", or do we call them analysts. The impression is we're going back to analysts drawing those pld school UML-like diagrams etc. Also, a lot of the devs are on the brink of just quitting, because it's "not programming" anymore. So, not only will you still need devs, or people massaging those specs, you'll also need enough "product" people to keep that engine fed! If your management isn't lazy, I can see the need for growing people count will continue to rise within such companies. That doesn't mean the work will be ...satisfying for devs.
- ryandrake 8mo agoIt seems like just a CxO dick measuring exercise. CEO1: "We allow our engineers to use AI for all work." CEO2: "Oh yea? We mandate our engineers use AI for at least N% of their work!" CEO3: "You think that's good? We mandate our engineers use AI for all code!!" CEO4: "Pfff, amateurs. We don't even allow our engineers to open source code editors or even look at the LLM output..."
- CodingJeebus 8mo agoFor me, the feedback loop accelerating the way that AI now permits is so addictive in my day-to-day flows. I've had a really hard time stepping away from work at a reasonable hour because I get dopamine hits seeing Claude build things so fast. Addiction and recovery is part of my story, so I've done quite a bit of work around that part of my life. I don't gamble, but I can confidently say that using LLMs has been an incredible boost in my productivity while completely destroying my good habits around setting boundaries, not working until 2AM, etc. In that sense, it feels very much like gambling.
- aderix 8mo agoSometimes I feel that subsidising these packages (vs cost via API) is meant to make more and more people increasingly addicted
- Terr_ 8mo agoI'd emphasize that prompting LLMs to generate code isn't just metaphorical gambling in the sense of "taking a risk", the scary part is the more-literal gambling involving addictive behaviors and how those affect the way the user interacts with the machine and the world. Heck, this technology also offers a parasocial relationship at the same time! Plopping tokens into a slot-machine which also projects a holographic "best friend" that gives you "encouragement" would fit fine in any cyberpunk dystopia.
- interestpiqued 8mo agoI think AI literally makes even being wrong feel like getting something done. And that is the addictive part for people.
- Terr_ 8mo ago[dead]
- rsoto2 8mo agoLook at all this text I have! It can't be worthless right?!
- Terr_ 8mo ago"If it were me and some coworker that made all that text in an afternoon, it would represent a lot of real labor and thought and billable-hours, so it must be valuable!"
- cyanydeez 8mo ago"Near-Miss" effect: https://harprehab.com/blogs/the-psychology-of-risk-why-gambling-hooks-the-brain-faster-than-other-addictions/ https://harprehab.com/blogs/the-psychology-of-risk-why-gambl... I believe that's the strongest pattern in LLM gambling. Was listening the Syntax and they described that "Even though theLLM did it wrong 4 times, that 5th time could be right, so why not just go!"; paraphrased of course. It also explains the meta-LLM business, where all these CEO types put in some question and because the LLM just knows all these words, they believe it's valuable because it's "almost" correct, even when that last correction might be forever elusive because these machines arn't thinking, they're patterning a highly regularized language beneath the more loose descriptions. There'll definitely be a winner in the AI bubble, but it'll be seen after it pops.
- lasgawe 8mo agohaha.. I agree with the points mentioned in the article. Literally every model does this. It feels like this even with skills and other buzzword files
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- amw-zero 8mo agoSo is human coding.
- thisisbrians 8mo agoIt is and will always be about: 1) properly defining the spec 2) ensuring the implementation satisfies said spec
- rawgabbit 8mo agoI had a CIO tell me 15 years ago with Agile I was wasting my time with specs and design documents.
- vidarh 8mo agoI was in a call just today where specs were presented as a new thing.
- ambicapter 8mo agoThen pulling the lever until it works! You can also code up a little helper to continuously pull the lever until it works!
- SV_BubbleTime 8mo agoWe have a monkeys and typewriters thing for this already. Just instead of hitting keys, they’re hitting words, and the words have probability links to each other. Who the hell thinks this is ready to make important decisions?
- stitched2gethr 8mo agoIt's not ready to make important decisions. But that's not the same as making important contributions.
- raizer88 8mo agoAI: "Yes, the specs are perfectly clear and architectural standards are fully respected." [Imports the completely fabricated library docker_quantum_telepathy.js and calls the resolve_all_bugs_and_make_coffee() method, magically compiling the code on an unplugged Raspberry Pi] AI: "Done! The production deployment was successful, zero errors in the logs, and the app works flawlessly on the first try!"
- rob_c 8mo agoSo. Is. Life. You've discovered probability, there was an 80% change of that. Roll a dice and do not pass go. Again. The output from llm is a probable solution, not right, not wrong.
- cindyllm 8mo ago[dead]
- yoyohello13 8mo agoI was just thinking about this. I was reading those tweets about the SV party were people were going home early to “check on their agents” or the “token anxiety” people are having over whether they are optimizing their agent usage. This is all giving me addiction vibes. Especially at the end of the day it seems like there is not much to show for it.
- ryandrake 8mo agoAddiction for the mere purpose of satisfying a compulsion, rather than to achieve a reward or physical "high."
- duskdozer 8mo agoMaybe they just wanted to leave early, and everyone's now required to maintain the AI hype-up so that's a nice excuse. Surely they'd be able to ssh in on their phone for a couple minutes if needed?
- LetsGetTechnicl 8mo agoYes, that's literally how LLM's work, they're probabilistic.
- copypaper 8mo agoYou got to know when to Ship it, Know when to Re-prompt, Know when to Clear the Context, And know when to RLHF. You never trust the Output, When you’re staring at the diff view, There’ll (not) be time enough for Fixing, When the Tokens are all spent.
- sedawkgrep 8mo agoYou're a gamblin' man, I see...
- niccl 8mo agothank you. I knew there was something I was missing
- koolba 8mo ago> When you’re staring at the diff view, Bold assumption that people are looking at the diffs at all. They leave that for their coworkers agents.
- zephen 8mo agoWill the diffs be small enough for people to even usefully wade through them?
- krupan 8mo agoI really hope that was your creativity and not AI
- copypaper 8mo agoIndeed it was (I was listening to it while stumbling across this post). Also, fun fact: The Gambler was written by Don Schlitz while working as a Computer Operator in 76' which makes it all the more relevant [1]. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230130060050/https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/flashback-hear-johnny-cashs-rare-take-on-kenny-rogers-the-gambler-204667/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230130060050/https://www.rolli...
- tonymet 8mo agoAs always, scope the changes to no larger than you can verify. AI changes the scale, but not the strategy. Now you have more resources to test, reduce permissions scope, to build a test bench & procedure. All of the excuses you once had for not doing the job right are now gone. You can write 10k + lines of test code in a few minutes. What is the gamble? The old world was a bigger gamble.
- __MatrixMan__ 8mo agoInductive reasoning of any kind (e.g. the scientific method) is gambling.
- wagwang 8mo ago> I divide my tasks into good for the soul and bad for it. Coding generally goes into good for the soul, even when I do it poorly. Lmk how you feel when you're constantly build integrations with legacy software by hand.
- webagent255 8mo ago[dead]
- comboy 8mo agoFascinating how HN is torn about vibe coding still. Everybody pretty much agrees that it works for some use cases, yet there is a flamewar (I mean, cultured, HN-type one) every time. People seem to be more comfortable in a binary mindset.
- pgwhalen 8mo agoIt’s just how discussion on the internet works, for basically anything at all worth discussing. It’s exhausting, but I can hardly blame HN specifically.
- zer00eyz 8mo agoVIM vs Emacs vs IDE vs..., Tabs vs Spaces, Procedural vs OOP vs Functional. We love a good holy war for sure. The nuance is lost, and the conversations we should be having never happen (requirements, hiring/skills, developer experience).
- minimaxir 8mo ago> Everybody pretty much agrees that it works for some use cases That isn't true, which is the exact reason why people have a binary mindset. More than once on Hacker News I've had people accuse me of being an AI booster just because I said I had success with agents and they did not.
- mpalmer 8mo agoFor my part at least, I get the most riled up against the binary thinkers!
- szatkus 8mo agoThis. A lot of people on HN acts as you can only write code manually (almost, generators and snippets are allowed, because we are used to them) or vibe coding the whole project through a WhatsApp conversation. As if there was nothing in between and the same approach should work for all kinds of projects. Personally I use coding agents for boring parts (I really don't enjoy putting the same piece of string to 20 different classes just to register a new component) and they work quite well, I'm going to use them for foreseeable future, because they make coding much more enjoyable for me. On the other hand I don't have an OpenClaw box burning billions of tokens weekly for me, because I usually don't have ideas that could be clearly specified.
- artursapek 8mo ago“hiring people is gambling”
- 1234letshaveatw 8mo agoIs using a calculator gambling?
- himata4113 8mo agoI really hate when people write about the AI of the past, opus 4.6 and gpt 5.4 [not as much imo, it's really boring and uncreative] have increased in capabilities so much that it's honestly mind numbing compared to what we had LESS than a year ago. Opus specifically from 4.1 to 4.5 was such a major leap that some take it for granted, it went from getting stuck in loops, generally getting lost constantly, needing so so much attention to keep it going to being able to get a prompt, understand it from minimal context and produce what you wanted it to do. Opus 4.6 was a slight downgrade since it has issues with respecting what the user has to say.
- extr 8mo agoI mean, this completely falls apart when you're trying to do something "real". I am building a trading engine right now with Claude/Codex. I have not written a line of code myself. However I care deeply about making sure everything works well because it's my money on the line. I have to weight carefully the prospect of landing a change that I don't fully understand. Sometimes I can get away with 3K LoC PRs, sometimes I take a really long time on a +80 -25 change. You have to be intellectually honest with yourself about where to spend your time.
- Gagarin1917 8mo agoTrying to decide whether to refinance now or not feels like gambling too. Yet it’s financially beneficial to make some bet. Defining “Gambling” like isn’t really helpful.
- gs17 8mo agoIf I said I had a machine where I put in "tokens", watch it spin, and either get nothing or something valuable (with which I get being largely chance), you'd presume it's some kind of slot machine. The important things IMO are the random chance of getting something and being able to keep retrying so rapidly. You can't keep paying to play the "refinancing game" until you get a good rate (at least not like pulling the lever again and again, you have to wait a long time, you won't call the same bank again and again, and suddenly they have an amazing rate), it's a different experience and the psychology is different.
- Gagarin1917 8mo agoIf the definition of slot machine is so vague that it includes LLMs then it’s not really meaningful. If someone only ever paid $20 a month on slot machines AND typically came out ahead, that wouldn’t be any kind of gambling issue. Playing real slot machines is only really a problem if you regularly put in too much because the odds are literally set against you. Not true with LLMs, both you and the AI company would become more successful the more helpful their tool is.
- 1970-01-01 8mo ago"60% of the time, it works every time"
- nativeit 8mo agoI have had very similar experiences. I am not a professional software developer, but have been a Linux sysadmin for over a decade, a web developer for much longer than that, and generally know enough to hack on other people’s projects to make them suit my own purposes. When I have Claude create something from scratch, it all appears very competent, even impressive, and it usually will build/function successfully…on the surface. I have noticed on several occasions that Claude has effectively coded the aesthetics of what I want, but left the substance out. A feature will appear to have been implemented exactly as I asked, but when I dig into the details, it’s a lot of very brittle logic that will almost certainly become a problem in future. This is why I refuse to release anything it makes for me. I know that it’s not good enough, that I won’t be able to properly maintain it, and that such a product would likely harm my reputation, sooner or later. What frightens me is there are a LOT of people who either don’t know enough to recognize this, or who simply don’t care and are looking for a quick buck. It’s already getting significantly more difficult to search for software projects without getting miles of slop. I don’t know how this will ultimately shake out, but if it’s this bad at the thing it’s supposedly good at, I can only imagine the kinds of military applications being leveraged right now…
- cmiles8 8mo agoIt’s like any powerful tool. If you use it right it’s amazing. If you get careless or don’t watch it closely you’ll get hurt really badly. Overall I’m a fan, but yes there are things to watch for. It doesn’t replace skilled humans but it does help skilled humans work faster if used right. The labor replacement story is bullshit mostly, but that doesn’t mean it’s all bad.
- dzink 8mo agoIt’s variable rewards and even with large models the same question can lead to dramatically different answers. Possibly because they route your request through different models. Possibly because the model has more time to dig through the problem. Nonetheless we have some illusion of control over the output (you we wouldn’t be playing it) but it is just the quality of the model itself that leads to better outcomes - not your input. If you can’t let go of the feeling thought, it’s definitely addictive. And as I look back, it’s a fast iteration on the building cycle we had before AI. But the brain really likes low latency - it is addicted to the fast reward for its actions. So AI, if it gets fast enough (sub 400ms) it will likely become irreversibly addictive to humans in general, as the brain will see is at part of itself. Hope it has our interest at heart by then.
- krupan 8mo agoWell said! My only qualm with this is saying you hope "it" has our interests at heart. "It" is a machine made by humans that work for corporations. I would correct your hope to, "I hope they have our interest at heart by then."
- zephen 8mo agoThis is being overlooked, downplayed, or simply not understood, by many commenters. It is exactly like the proverbial monkey or rat pressing a bar for a food pellet to come out. If the pellet unerringly drops, and is always tasty and nutritious, the rat stops when it's no longer hungry. Otherwise, an inordinate amount of time is spent pressing the bar.
- markhahn 8mo agoThis (variable rewards -> gambling, illusion of control) is really important. I'm not an expert in the psych/neuro literature on addiction, but I suspect latency isn't that critical. But is that just because it's things like fruit-machines that have been studied? Gambling (poker, racehorses) are quite long-latency. OTOH, scrolling is closer to 400ms, and that's certainly the modern addition...
- itsgrimetime 8mo agoAll of this new capability has made me realize that the reason i love programming _isn't_ the same as the OP. I used to think (and tell others) that I loved understanding something deeply, wading through the details to figure out a tough problem. but actually, being able to will anything I can think of into existence is what I love about programming. I do feel for the people who were able to make careers out of falling in love w/ and getting good at picking problems & systems apart, breaking them down, and understanding them fully. I respect the discipline, curiosity, and intellect they have. but I also am elated w/ where things are at/going. this feels absurd to say, but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane, because I literally haven't written a line of code myself in months, but having tools that can finally match the speed my ideas come to me is intoxicating
- bluefirebrand 8mo ago> but I finally feel like I'm _good_ at programming, which is insane, because I literally haven't written a line of code myself in months This is exactly the sort of mentality that makes me hate this technology You finally feel good at programming despite admitting that you aren't actually doing it Please explain why anyone should take this seriously?
- pdntspa 8mo agoBecause the programming is and was always a means to an end. Obsessing over the specific mechanical act of programming is taking the forest for the trees. I agree with gp that the speed in which I am able to execute my vision is exhilarating. It is making me love programming again. My side projects, which have been hanging on the wall for years, are actually getting done. And quickly! The actual act of keying in code is drudgery for me. I've written so much code in so many languages that it is hard not to hate them all. Why the fuck is it a hash in ruby but a dict in python? How the hell do I get the current unixtime in this language again?!? Why the fuck do I need to learn yet another stupid vocabulary for what is essentially databinding? Who cares, let the AI handle it
- 8mo ago
- ratrace 8mo ago[dead]
- DiscourseFan 8mo agoWhen a code doesn't compile, it doesn't kill anyone. But if a Waymo suddenly veers off the road, it creates a real threat. Waymos had to be safer than real human drivers for people to begin to trust them. Coding tools did not have to be better than humans for them to be adopted first. Its entirely possible for a human to make a catastrophic error. I imagine in the future, it will be more likely that a human makes such errors, just like its more likely that a human will make more errors driving a car.
- Verdex 8mo agoMy understanding is that waymo has gone on the record to say that they have human operators that remotely drive the vehicle in scenarios where their automated system is confused. Which I assert is semantically equivalent to saying: Human drivers (even when operating at the diminished capacity of not even being present in the car) are less likely to make errors driving a car than AIs.
- krupan 8mo agoThis is getting off topic but they did not say the remote humans drive the cars. The cars always drive themselves, the remote humans provide guidance when the car is not confident in any of the decisions it could make. The humans define a new route or tell the car it's ok to proceed forward
- post-it 8mo ago> But this doesn't really resemble coding. An act that requires a lot of thinking and writing long detailed code. Does it? It did in the past. Now it doesn't. Maybe "add a button to display a colour selector" really is the canonical way to code that feature, and the 100+ lines of generated code are just a machine language artifact like binary. > But it robs me of the part that’s best for the soul. Figuring out how this works for me, finding the clever fix or conversion and getting it working. My job went from connecting these two things being the hard and reward part, to just mopping up how poorly they’ve been connected. Skill issue. Two nights ago, I used Claude to write an iOS app to convert Live Photos into gifs. No other app does it well. I'm going to publish it as my first app. I wouldn't have bothered to do it without AI, and my soul feels a lot better with it.
- watzon 8mo agoI think this article makes a valid point. However, if AI coding is considered gambling, then being a project manager overseeing multiple developers could also be seen as a form of gambling to a certain degree. In reality, there isn't much difference between the two. AI models are non-deterministic, and humans are also non-deterministic. You could assign the same task to two different developers and end up with entirely different results.
- MeetingsBrowser 8mo agoYou (in theory) have more control over the quality of the team you are managing, than the quality of the models you are using. And the quality of code models puts out is, in general, well below the average output of a professional developer. It is however much faster, which makes the gambling loop feel better. Buying and holding a stock for a few months doesn't feel the same as playing a slot machine.
- PaulHoule 8mo agoOne difference is those developers are moral subjects who feel bad if they screw up whereas a computer is not a moral subject and can never be held accountable. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be-held-accountable/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be...
- ponector 8mo agoRight, you need to hire a scapegoat. Usually tester has that role: little impact but huge responsibility for quality.
- est31 8mo agoYou have a lot of control over LLM quality. There is different models available. Even with different effort settings of those models you have different outcomes. E.g. look at the "SWE-Bench Pro (public)" heading in this page: https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-4/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-4/ , showing reasoning efforts from none to high. Of course, they don't learn like humans so you can't do the trick of hiring someone less senior but with great potential and then mentor them. Instead it's more of an up front price you have to pay. The top models at the highest settings obviously form a ceiling though.
- ryoshu 8mo agoLike video gaming, but similar.
- PaulHoule 8mo agoI think somebody like Nate Silver might say “everything is gambling” if you really pressed them. A big theme of software development for me has been finishing things other people couldn’t finish and the key to that is “control variance and the mean will take care of itself” Alternately the junior dev thinks he has a mean of 5 min but the variance is really 5 weeks. The senior dev has mean of 5 hours and a variance of 5 hours.
- zzzeek 8mo agocoding with an LLM works if the model you are following is: you have the role of architect and/or senior developer, and you have the smartest junior programmer in the world working for you. You watch everything it does, check its conclusions, challenge it, call it out on things it didnt get quite right it's really extremely similar to working with a junior programmer so in this post, where does this go wrong? > I am not your average developer. I’ve never worked on large teams and I’ve barely started a project from scratch. The internet is filled with code and ideas, most of it freely available for you to fork and change. Because this describes a cut-and-paster, not a software architect. Hence the LLM is a gambling machine for someone like this since they lack the wisdom to really know how to do things. There's of course a huge issue which is that how are we going to get more senior/architect programmers in the pipeline if everyone junior is also doing everything with LLMs now. I can't answer that and this might be the asteroid that wipes out the dinosaurs....but in the meantime, if you DO know how to write from scratch and have some experience managing teams of programmers, the LLMs are super useful.
- bigstrat2003 8mo ago> it's really extremely similar to working with a junior programmer Right, which is why LLMs aren't useful if you actually know what you're doing. It's a drain on your time to have to carefully check everything a junior writes, but you do it because he will learn and eventually return on that investment. With an LLM, there is no such long term payoff.
- zzzeek 8mo agoIt's nuclear powered autocomplete . You can have it spit out pages of boilerplate chainsaw tests for kunernetes , fix sql queries the way you tell it to, it's enormously helpful for automating all kinds of things you previously have typed by hand 4000 times. I've put many changes from LLMs into production and there is no issue. An actual junior programmer makes way more mistakes in my experience.
- lokimoon 8mo ago[dead]
- luckydata 8mo agoit's gambling until you learn how to set up proper harnesses then it just becomes normal administration. It's no different than running a team, humans make mistakes too, that's why we have CI pipelines, automated testing etc... AI assisted coding "JUST" requires you to be extra good at that part of the job.
- NickNaraghi 8mo agoIt's only "gambling" for now... The odds of success feel like gambling. 60%, or 40%, or worse. This is downstream of model quality. Soon, 80%, 95%, 99%, 99.99%. Then, it won't be "gambling" anymore.
- krupan 8mo agoHave you ever heard of an extrapolation like that being incorrect?
- 7777332215 8mo agoThe problem with AI coding is that you no longer own the foundational tools.
- rsoto2 8mo agoWhat?? Surely once these companies have locked in their Claude workflows claude wouldn't somehow raise the price. Or steal inventions like Amazon does. Surely.
- quikoa 8mo agoSurely they aren't selling subscriptions at a loss to gain market share either.
- spacechild1 8mo agoActually, this is one of my biggest concerns about agentic coding because I don't really feel comfortable putting myself in the hands of a few big companies. After all, that's why I'm mostly using open source tools! The idea that I would only be able to work with an internet connection and a subscription to a big LLM provider is not very appealing to me. And I'm not even talking about the ethical concerns...
- anal_reactor 8mo agoAn idea just occurred to me: why not tell AI to code in Coq? AFAIK the selling point of that language is that if it compiles, then it's guaranteed to work. It's just that it's PITA to write code in Coq, but AI won't get annoyed and quit.
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- FL4TLiN3 8mo agoIn my corner of the world, average software developers at Tokyo companies, not that many people are actually using Claude Code for their day-to-day work yet. Their employers have rolled it out and actively encourage adoption, but nobody wants to change how they work. This probably won't surprise anyone familiar with Japanese corporate culture: external pressure to boost productivity just doesn't land the same way here. People nod, and then keep doing what they've always done. It's a strange scene to witness, but honestly, I'm grateful for it. I've also been watching plenty of developers elsewhere get their spirits genuinely crushed by coding agents, burning out chasing the slot machine the author describes. So for now, I'm thankful I still get to see this pastoral little landscape where people just... write their own code.
- cyanydeez 8mo agoy/eah, I here all the podcasters describing how they're building things; and when it comes to something like translating a package from one language to another and that package has tests, it's a meandering but fruitful adventure. Because, of course, when you can sane tests you can always loop through. I did this with a package dependency I had, and it got 90% of the way there, but then one of the tests I expanded upon just refused. It ended up seeming like it was just a failed dependency. But where there are no tests, and you're the one defining whats correct, you're definitely encroaching on the slot machine hoping it'll spit out something faster than you could do it yourself. Then there's some vague unease in whether spending the time to prompt will actuall result in a properly integrated software in a large existing code base with idiosyncratic code use. Overall, I don't see the ROI business gets from forcing people into these tools; however, as an individual, it's definitely worth understanding what they can do. Mostly, I see the efficient copy/past/find/replace of existing code to be very good.
- hodder 8mo agoDepending on anyone for anything is gambling.
- wolandomny 8mo agoObviously the following isn't a completely original take, but it's worth stating that AI coding is just a fundamentally different job than "traditional" or "manual" coding. The previous job was to spec something out to a comfortable degree without spending all of your time on a spec when there are so many unknowns that will come up during the engineering stage. Then, the job was to engineer at a snail's pace (compared to today) and adjust the spec. Now, the job is to nail the spec and test HARD against that spec. Let the AI develop it and question it along the way to make sure it's not repeating itself all over the place (even this I'm sure is super necessary anymore...). Find a process that helps you feel comfortable doing this and you can get the engineering part done at lightning speed. Both jobs are scary in different ways. I find this way more fun, however.
- dragonwriter 8mo agoI don’t know that that's true. Iterating on the spec and development together as in traditional agile development seems to work well with AI. The pace is different (an iteration might be hours instead of weeks) and the human role is mostly as a combined architect/analyst/lead dev/product owner, but the issue that real requirements are rarely clear before software hits the hands of users doesn't go away just because an AI wiped more of the code.
- vermilingua 8mo agoNot only is it gambling, it has the full force of the industry that built the attention market behind it. I find it extremely hard to believe that these tools have not been optimised to keep developers prompting the same way tiktok keeps people scrolling.
- leontloveless 8mo ago[dead]
- mpalmer 8mo agoI do not think "AI coding" - as distinct from the human who drives it - is gambling. More like a delayed footgun for the uneducated. I don't mean that disparagingly, but I do mean it literally. I’ve certainly been spending more time coding. But is it because it’s making me more efficient and smarter or is it because I’m just gambling on what I want to see? Is this really a difficult question to answer for oneself? If you can't tell if you're learning anything, or getting more confident describing what you want, I would suggest that you cannot be thinking that deeply about the code you're producing. Am I just pulling the lever until I reach jackpot? And even then, will you know you've won? At the very least, a gambler knows when they have hit jackpot. Here, you start off assuming you've won the jackpot every time, and maybe there'll be an unpleasant surprise down the line. Maybe that's still gambling, but it's pretty backwards.
- darrinm 8mo agoI hear it a lot but this gambling analogy breaks when you look at actual outcomes. If you went to Vegas and after a few pulls on a one-armed bandit could _reliably_ walk away with the jackpot we wouldn’t even call it gambling anymore.
- cjlm 8mo agoTotally agree, wrote something similar last year: https://cjlm.ca/posts/it-feels-like-gambling/ https://cjlm.ca/posts/it-feels-like-gambling/
- mika-el 8mo ago[flagged]
- cadamsdotcom 8mo ago> My job went from connecting these two things being the hard and reward part, to just mopping up how poorly they’ve been connected. That’s only half of the transition. The other half - and when you know you’ve made it through the “AI sux” phase - is when you learn to automate the mopping up. Give the agent the info it needs to know if it did good work - and if it didn’t do good work, give it information so it knows what to fix. Trust that it wants to fix those things. Automate how that info is provided (using code!) and suddenly you are out of the loop. The amount of code needed is surprisingly small and your agent can write it! Hook a few hundred lines of script up to your harness at key moments, and you will never see dumb AI mistakes again (because it fixed them before presenting the work to you, because your script told it about the mistakes while you were off doing something else) Think of it like linting but far more advanced - your script can walk the code AST and assess anything, or use regex - your agent will make that call when you ask for the script. If the script has an exit code of 2, stderr is shown to the agent! So you (via your script) can print to stderr what the agent did wrong - what line, what file, wha mistake. It’s what I do every day and it works (200k LOC codebase, 99.5% AI-coded) - there’s info and ideas here: https://codeleash.dev/docs/code-quality-checks https://codeleash.dev/docs/code-quality-checks This is just another technique to engineer quality outcomes; you’re just working from a different starting point.
- selixe_ 8mo agoI think "gambling" is a bit too strong, but there is a real shift in how we evaluate correctness. With traditional coding, you reason step by step and with AI-assisted code, you're often validating outputs after the fact. The risk isn't randomness per se it's over trusting something that looks correct. The skill ceiling is moving from "can you write it" to "can you reliably verify it"
- lll-o-lll 8mo agoBut “reliably verify it” was always the critical difference between high and low quality engineering efforts. Good programmers might have made things that “performed well”, and had “few bugs”, without this step, but it was not robust to changes over time. If we end up in a place where every project has solid automated verification, perhaps things get better overall.
- fittingopposite 8mo agoBackground image makes the website fairly hard/unpleasant to read (in mobile view)
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- wolttam 8mo agoI used to write code by hand. AI has removed some of the tedium, and freed up more of my bandwidth to think about the problems I’m trying to solve and what the actual best ways to solve those problems are. Only once I have a good feel for the problem I am solving do I go to the AI for help implementing. My style of prompting usually leads to code that is very close to what I would have manually typed. I review it and tweak it until it is effectively identical to what I would have typed. The speed up is significant. YMMV.
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- batuhandumani 8mo agoLife is a gamble
- apf6 8mo agoHiring a human is gambling too.
- macinjosh 8mo agoI disagree. I have a successful software product that I vibe coded using claude code starting last June. It does something novel and useful that wasn't yet offered on the App Store or any app on Android. I am not going to say what it is because all of the AI haters will immediately flock to leave it bad reviews and overwhelm my support systems with bad faith requests (something that has already happened). I've been writing software for 25 years, I know what I am doing. Every bug I shipped was my fault either because I didn't test well enough or I did not possess enough platform knowledge to know myself the right way to do things. "Unknown unknowns" But I have also learned better ways to do things and fixed every bug using AI tools. I don't read the code. I may scan it to gain context and then tweak a single value myself, but beyond that I don't write or read code anymore. Its not a magical few shot prompt then reap profits machine. I just feel like a solopreneur ditch digger who just got a lease on a new CAT excavator. I can get work done faster I can also do damage faster if I am not careful. Beyond this concern,
- 6thbit 8mo agoCome on now. I pull the slot machine every time I ask my coworker Digbert to work on a ticket. Will Digbert be able to handle it or will he pretend to handle it? Or will he handle it in a way that it will break again in six weeks and will evolve into his full time job for a year? If this is gambling, middle management has been gambling for too long.
- muwtyhg 8mo agoYou know there is a difference between a tool being unable to predictably accomplish its task, and asking employees to do work and them failing to do so. The accountability alone is leagues apart.
- 6thbit 8mo agoDigbert is also unable to predictably accomplish the task. I'm not arguing against accountability, only against gambling.
- abcde666777 8mo agoBespoke suits are still a thing. Meaning where the highest quality is desired or valued, things still get handmade, and the rest of the time it happens on a factory line. I suppose what's happening with software development is we're exploring where the line between the two is going to land. It's pretty clear that something like a simple and generic website can be reliably vibecoded, but on the other extreme I wouldn't expect the software for something like a space shuttle to be vibe coded due to the stringent safety requirements.
- asaiacai 8mo agoit's the perfect drug. You don't know how to code something up. Ask AI to implement it. It's broken? Ask AI to fix it for you. Will people become unable to fix things without it?
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- QuiEgo 8mo agoIf I were going to make a gambling analogy, I'd imagine a casino game as follows: draw a card from a standard playing card deck. If it's a spade you lose. Otherwise you win. For any one hand you may win or lose, but on average you should still take the "gamble" every time, because the odds are so good you'll win. That's what using AI is like right now. This is a new state of things - a year ago, the analogy would have been reversed.
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- AbstractH24 8mo agoTo an extent entrusting anyone to do something other than yourself is gambling. But you can't survive alone on an island. So you need to determine where to make gambles and where not.
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- visaint 8mo agoThis really blew up and I'm just now seeing it (The Author Vi Saint). I have a lot of replies to sift through, most of them here. Thank you to everyone who read my piece, even if you disagree or read too much into it.