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

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

#11

Post by ctoth »

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.

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

#12

Post by fdefitte »

simonw wrote: post #2

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 mo…

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.

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

#13

Post by jazzyjackson »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #6
htfu wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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/

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

#14

Post by shaokind »

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.

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

#15

Post by Retr0id »

simonw wrote: post #2

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 mo…

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.

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

#16

Post by jrflowers »

simonw wrote: post #2

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 mo…

> 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.

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

#17

Post by [deleted] »

ctoth wrote: post #11

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…

[deleted]

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

#18

Post by CGMthrowaway »

ctoth wrote: post #11

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…

> 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

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

#19

Post by mrbungie »

ctoth wrote: post #11

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…

> What's Anthropic's optimization target??? Getting you the right answer as fast as possible!

Are you totally sure they are not measuring/optimizing engagement metrics? Because at least I can bet OpenAI is doing that with every product they have to offer.

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

#20

Post by biophysboy »

mrbungie wrote: post #4
simonw wrote: post #2

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 mo…

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…

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.

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