Comment by krackers
12 hours ago
I've heard some people say that "vibe coding" with chatbots is like slot machines, you just keep "propmting" until you hit the jackpot. And there was some earlier study that people _felt_ more productive even if they weren't (caveat that this was with older models), which aligns with the sort of time-dilation people feel when gambling.
I guess "agentic swarms" are the next evolution of the meta-game, the perfect nerd-sniping strategy. Now you can spend all your time minmaxing your team, balancing strengths/weaknesses by tweaking subagents, adding more verifiers and project managers. Maybe there's some psychological draw, that people can feel like gods and have a taste of the power execs feel, even though that power is ultimately a simulacra as well.
Extending this -- unlike real slot machines, there is no definite state of won or not for the person prompting, only if they've been convinced they've won, and that comes down to how much you're willing to verify the code it has provided, or better, fully test it (which no one wants to do), versus the reality where they do a little light testing and say it's good enough and move on.
Recently fixed a problem over a few days, and found that it was duplicated though differently enough that I asked my coworker to try fixing it with an LLM (he was the originator of the duplicated code, and I didn't want to mess up what was mostly functioning code). Using an LLM, he seemingly did in 1 hour what took me maybe a day or two of tinkering and fixing. After we hop off the call, I do a code read to make sure I understand it fully, and immediately see an issue and test it further only to find out.. it did not in fact fix it, and suffered from the same problems, but it convincingly LOOKED like it fixed it. He was ecstatic at the time-saved while presenting it, and afterwards, alone, all I could think about was how our business users were going to be really unhappy being gaslit into thinking it was fixed because literally every tester I've ever met would definitely have missed it without understanding the code.
People are overjoyed with good enough, and I'm starting to think maybe I'm the problem when it comes to progress? It just gives me Big Short vibes -- why am I drawing attention to this obvious issue in quality, I'm just the guy in the casino screaming "does no one else see the obvious problem with shipping this?" And then I start to understand, yes I am the problem: people have been selling eachother dog water product for millenia because at the end of the day, Edison is the person people remember, not the guy who came after that made it near perfect or hammered out all the issues. Good enough takes its place in history, not perfection. The trick others have found out is they just need to get to the point that they've secured the money and have time to get away before the customer realizes the world of hurt they've paid for.