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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

#31

Post by simonw »

saulpw wrote: post #30
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…

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…

> 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/ 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.

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

#32

Post by mikkupikku »

mossTechnician wrote: post #28
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…

At one point, people said Google's optimization target was giving you the right search results as soon as possible. What will prevent Anthropic from falling into the same pattern of enshittification as its predecessors, optimizing for profit like all other businesses?

I stopped using Google years ago because they stopped trying to provide good search results. If Anthropic stops trying to provide a good coding agent, I'll stop using them too.

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

#33

Post by pixl97 »

roblh wrote: post #29
ctoth wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a not a binary thing, it's a spectrum. There are many elements of uncertainty in every action imaginable. I'm inclined to agree with the other commenter though, the LLM slot machine is absolutely closer on that spectrum to gambling than your example is. Anthropic's optimization target is getting you to spend tokens, not produce the right answer. It's to produce an answer plausible enough but incomplete enough th…

> you'll continue to spend as many tokens as possible for as long as possible.

I mean this only works if Anthropic is the only game in town. In your analogy if anyone else builds a casino with a higher payout then they lose the game. With the rate of LLM improvement over the years, this doesn't seem like a stable means of business.

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

#34

Post by nharada »

BoxFour wrote: post #24

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 awkwa…

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.

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

#35

Post by baq »

biophysboy wrote: post #20
mrbungie wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#37

Post by mikkupikku »

Kiro wrote: post #23
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…

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.

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.

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

#38

Post by fy20 »

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

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.

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

#39

Post by mikkupikku »

shaokind wrote: post #14

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,…

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.

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

#40

Post by biophysboy »

baq wrote: post #35
biophysboy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.
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