AI Coding Is Gambling

AI Coding is Gambling

I’ve been coding a lot with AI since November, when we all noticed it got really good. And it is quite good for instantly generating something that looks half decent. Impressive even, until you look closer. The actual details, the individual parts that make a system are still a challenge.

But I'm not here to review a coding agent or nitpick it's output. Nor will I expound on how I left Claude code running for 8 days and have a 8+ year portfolio of projects build up, all of which sound totally impressive, complete and good. I'm here to talk about feelings, a life well lived and a nurtured soul.

The Gambling Proposition

Getting yourself in a state where any change to your entire codebase is trivial to make is intoxicating. Previously we've been burdened by our own cognition and laziness. We'd see a to do ticket and have to weight how much work it's gonna take. Weather this will need lots of looking up, research, reading code we forgot about and trying to understand or reconnect to our thinking, divided by months or years.

But now either the AI can handle it or it can pretend to handle it. Frankly it's pretending both times, but often it's enough to get the result we need. Giving us a vaguely plausible but often surprisingly wrong.

But this doesn't really resemble coding. An act that requires a lot of thinking and writing long detailed code. Both parts are technically here, but the first isn't essential (you can easily offload it to the AI) and the second can be minimal.

But it does perfectly map onto the tech industries favorite mechanic, Gambling! It’s just gambling, just pulling a slot machine with a custom message. We've been pulling to refresh for years and having more and more of the economy resemble gambling by the day. Now we turned the infinity machine, the truly "general intelligence" into a gambling machine. Great job!

But this explains why it’s so preposterously addicting to so many people. I won’t decry the benefits or be scared for my job. You really gotta know what you’re doing to get what you want, have it work right and not be filled with holes. Nor will I be explaining how much more work AI gives us. I'll just explore a simpler problem. It sucks.

The Simplest Problem

I divide my tasks into good for the soul and bad for it. Coding generally goes into good for the soul, even when I do it poorly. Gathering inspiration for what I should to is in the same category. I love finding what other people have made, how I can integrate, refine or iterate to suit my needs. Having the infinite plagiarism machine makes it that much easier.

But it robs me of the part that’s best for the soul. Figuring out how this works for me, finding the clever fix or conversion and getting it working. My job went from connecting these two things being the hard and reward part, to just mopping up how poorly they’ve been connected.

It’s deeply unsatisfying and while I have plenty of people to blame, the fix rests on me. To avoid my own laziness and actually interact with my code more. Use the methods I’ve been honing for years, for finding inspiration and cleverness on the internet. Don’t just default and be confined to the infinite machine.

The Special Case

I am not your average developer. I’ve never worked on large teams and I’ve barely started a project from scratch. The internet is filled with code and ideas, most of it freely available for you to fork and change.

My job has included working in small teams and even being the sole developer, so I’ve gotten quite clever at reusing code, minimizing it and optimizing it. But I’m not just a developer, I’m mostly a designer. So shouldn’t I be happy AI has made me a better developer?

I question if it has. It certainly has made me more confident in trying new frameworks and getting out of my comfort zone. I’ve certainly been spending more time coding. But is it because it’s making me more efficient and smarter or is it because I’m just gambling on what I want to see? Am I just pulling the lever until I reach jackpot?