Vibe Coding Casino

Be honest, you’re just gambling for your next ‘jackpot’ side project…

You need just one lucky hit, that one perfect pull from the coding agent, and it will all come together…

You will build the perfect project that everybody will love and pay you thousands for, maybe, just maybe you’ll get acquired by some venture capital firm for a million dollars yourself!..

An ever-growing drive towards exploiting gambling instincts is being employed by AI coding agents and the companies developing them. The addictive nature of low-effort to high-output environment of LLM interfaces is being actively monetized, and incentives are once again stacked against you.

Claude Code, Qodo, Gemini CLI, Kilo Code, and their friends make it easier than ever to build thousands of individual projects to solve all our digital needs! Except, there are certain things about them that don’t smell quite right.

In the very beginning of the Cambrian software explosion, two issues are becoming increasingly concerning to me:

1. Software pollution, of course!
2. Gambling?

Let’s take a superficial look at how gambling has become ever so pervasive in today’s society, how AI/LLM environments (for programming, knowledge, companionship, and more) exploit (willingly or unknowingly) our dopamine systems, and how we can resist.

(I’m titling this post the ‘vibe coding casino,’ but the topic applies all the same to LLM girlfriends (“Man proposes to AI chatbot after programming it to flirt”) or digital AI-agent marketers designed to automate content spam. The same compulsion loop dynamics apply to our interactions with all of these tools.)

Vibe coding

I know about it, you know about it. It’s the hottest thing. Don’t lie, you used the tools, I did too. And you saw how it shredded through your Jira tickets and TODO lists (or it didn’t and you’re working on problems that are still beyond the agents’ reach, such as optimizing the Lean compiler for mathematical proof methods, well done!)

You’ve been there, Claude Code wrapped up 90% of the way there but it’s such a mess, and it didn’t even align the buttons properly! If you prompt it again for that, and one for the missing permissions on this API endpoint, and another one for optimizing SQL queries, perhaps I could get it to also take care of integration testing too?

…and you’re out of free tier requests. Damn, let’s get rid of that usage cap, I guess!

…

Hours and days later, still digging around. Your API egress has just hit 100 dollars. You’re probably a month away from your first beta test.

Compulsion loops

This is the compulsion loop, and is described succinctly with this lovely chart from Wikipedia:

Well, let’s tweak it a little bit for our purposes:

Anticipation is… an elusive bug or annoying chore being just squashed and done with!

Challenge is… the methodical detective work of actual debugging, reading stack traces, reproducing edge cases, studying system architectures, tracking the data flow, unit testing… ugh! So damn tedious. Let me just ask Claude to wrap this one up.

Reward is… well, it works!? Holy shit, let’s go through the rest of the list!

At a higher abstraction, say with projects, you deal with it in more or less the same way:

Anticipation is… a cool project that will make you famous and rich!

Challenge is… the endless drudgery of actually getting there. Prototyping, designing, architecting, testing, programming, marketing, customer support, sales, accounting… ouch. That’s a lot! Let’s reduce our load here by vibe coding and relying on LLMs, that’ll get us iterating faster.

Reward is… oh. Only THREE UPVOTES ON MY SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS!? Damn, that’s not a lot. Let’s try again!

Flow zone state

Here’s a little intro to vibe coding from Zencoder, a coding agent startup.

Flow state… that word just keeps popping up…

Ah yeah, I remember! Addiction by Design, that book about machine gambling in Las Vegas and how the gambling industry perfected grabbing your focus with a death grip. Actually, the expert consultants seem to call it the ‘zone,’ but, potæto potàto.

Vibe coding is as easy as pulling the lever on a slot machine, and it brings you to immediate satisfaction… or dissatisfaction? Dopamine systems don’t seem to care. You only need to get in the flow and stay there…

Although these tools may not be designed per se to exploit the compulsion loop, they unfortunately do. It’s too easy to keep rolling the prompts over and over again, iterating relentlessly. Companies who provide the vibe coding tools, however, are happy to market it to you in order to exploit your compulsion loop.

Let’s take a break and take a look at the gambling industry.

Gambling

The following is a picture collage describing the current state of affairs when it comes to gambling, because a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s four.

Digital marketplaces that allow you to gamble from the comfort of your own pyjamas are becoming increasingly more influential, control more money, and more media channels.

Almost a decade of endless crypto scams, lubricated by uncontrolled flow of wealth from the clueless to the perpetrators, and we now have the President of the United States selling his own crypto coins (“Trump’s crypto deals and loosening of rules shock observers”) and Coinbase sponsoring military rallies.

Akin to crypto, other legal forms of betting have become a drug of its own kind (“How the quick high of ‘fast-food gambling’ ensnared young men”).

This pervasiveness has become perhaps a bit rude, meanwhile horrible prospects such as tight integrations between messaging platforms and speculative investment assets became commonplace and celebrated (Telegram the ‘secure messaging platform’ pimps crypto assets (“Snoop Dogg’s NFT launch on Telegram sold out in 30 minutes”), have we already forgotten about “Twitter Gives Up on NFT Profile Pics, Killing Ethereum Feature for Paying Users”?)

Free credits

Here’s another collage. Corporate needs you to find the differences between this picture and this picture:

I think they’re the same picture.

The reason why gambling websites offer you free credits for participating? It’s a part of their customer lifetime value acquisition pipeline.

The only reason why Kilo Code would give you free tokens? It’s a part of their customer lifetime value acquisition pipeline.

What’s the customer lifetime value acquisition pipeline? It’s where you get hooked for free, and get milked bone dry.

Startups are presently being valued at millions of dollars (“OpenAI agrees to buy Windsurf for about $3 billion”) for integrating increasingly complex and self-sufficient (but not self-guided) LLM agents, available to purchase for various plans ranging from free to thousands of dollars per month.

Their promise is that they will solve software engineering. I believe they might, eventually, but that’s not the only thing that’s leading to their gross overvaluation today.

A substantial portion of it is driven the retail investors (casual participants of speculative asset markets) of vibe coding, the average joe, who’s ready to dump thousands of dollars into getting the perfect app developed that will turn those thousands into millions.

This is how entire industries like gacha games are funded, this is how they rake in billions of dollars in microtransaction revenue (“Genshin Impact earns $2 billion after ‘unheard of’ success in first year”). The same is happening to vibe coding and similar AI agent platforms, and their incentives to advertise and lure you into their platforms get increasingly stronger.

Be honest, you’re just gambling for your next ‘jackpot’ side project.

State of affairs

In short, our way of interacting with AI agents and LLMs fundamentally exploit our compulsion loop.

This dynamic is then exploited by firms who are packaging increasingly capable AI agents, getting you hooked on for free credits, engaging you in community events and social media circles where vibe coding is celebrated.

Social media circles such as X and Hacker News, popular with the wannabe entrepreneur crowds, is becoming flooded, drop-by-drop, with vibe coded weekend projects with Stripe integrations.

They are ready to solve all your real and fake problems alike, or simply entertain you while you’re bored waiting for your coding agent to finish its sixth shot at rewriting that SQL query.

Influencers on TikTok and other curated feeds are telling you about how easy it is to develop software. You just need a subscription to Kilo Code, here are some free credits!

We’re seeing some dreadful similarities to the aggresive marketing tactics of the crypto wave of the COVID era, who learned from the sports gambling websites, who were trained by the consultants advising Las Vegas casinos at their peak.

However, AI agents are worse in one way: “They’re actually useful unlike those silly ape pictures.”

What do we do?

Here are some mantras for my own use, that might also help you stay cool amidst the heat wave:

Be mindful of the projects you’re working on and what you are guiding your attention towards in your day to day life.

Do not waste an ocean of CPU cycles and electricity for every fleeting thought.

Watch out for people who are selling you shovels for gold that was never there.