"Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name
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Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name
#2I 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
Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name
#3Probably 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.
Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name
#4I 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 is a very real phenomenon.
Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name
#5If you are trying to build something well represented in the training data, you could get a usable prototype.
If you are unfamiliar with the various ways that naive code would fail in production, you could be fooled into thinking generated code is all you need.
If you try to hold the hand of the coding agents to bring code to a point where it is production ready, be prepared for a frustrating cycle of models responding with ‘Fixed it!’ while only having introduced further issues.
Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name
#6Probably 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.
Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name
#7How are we still citing the (excellent) METR study in support of conclusions about productivity that its authors rightly insist[0] it does not support?
My paraphrase of their caveats:
- experts on their own open source proj are not representative of most software dev
- measuring time undervalues trading time for effort
- tools are noticeably better than they were a year ago when the study was conducted
- it really does take months of use to get the hang of it (or did then, less so now)
Before you respond to these points, please look at the full study’s treatment of the caveats! It’s fantastic, and it’s clear almost no one citing the study actually read it.
[0]: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name
#8I think that in a world where code has zero marginal cost (or close to zero, for the right companies), we need to be incredibly cognizant of the fact that more code is not more profit, nor is it better code. Simpler is still better, and products with taste omit features that detract from vision. You can scaffold thousands of lines of code very easily, but this makes your codebase hard to reason about, maintain, and work in. It is like unleashing a horde of mid-level engineers with spec documents and coming back in a week with everything refactored wrong. Sure you have some new buttons but does anyone (or can any AI agent, for that matter) understand how it works?
And to another point: work life balance is a huge challenge. Burnout happens in all departments, not just engineering. Managers can get burnout just as easily. If you manage AI agents, you'll just get burnout from that too.
Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name
#9After actually using LLM coding tools for a while, some of these anti-LLM thinkpieces feel very contrived. I don’t see the comparison to gambling addiction at all. I understand how someone might believe that if they only view LLMs through second hand Twitter hot takes and think that it’s a process of typing a prompt and hoping for the best. Some people do that, but the really effective coders work with the LLM and drive the coding, writing some or much of the code themselves. The social media version of vibe coding where you just prompt continuously and hope for the best is not going to work in any serious endeavor where details matter. We see claims of it in some high profile examples like OpenClaw, but even OpenClaw has maintainers and contributors who look at the code and make decisions. It’s also riddled with security problems as a result of the YOLO coding style.
Re: "Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name
#10Probably 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.
Very much normal yes. This is why I've been (so far) still mainly sticking to having it as an all-knowing oracle telling me what I need to know, which it mostly does successfully.
When it works for pure generation it's beautiful, when it doesn't it's ruinous enough to make me take two steps back. I'll have another go at getting with all the pure agentic rage everyone's talking about soon enough.