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

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.

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.

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...

This is a real thing, and it looks like classic addiction.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.