Comment by cruffle_duffle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cruffle_duffle | Hacker News Reader

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The overlap between crypto hustlers and AI hustlers is pretty interesting. Not strictly “hustle both” type overlap but it’s a similar type of energy. Bully the non-believers and hype the hype regardless of reality.

I dunno. People say these tools trigger the gambling part of your brain. I think there is a lot of merit to that. When these tools work (which they absolutely do) it’s incredible and your brain gets a nice hit of dopamine but holy cow can these tools fail. But if you just keep pulling that lever, keep adding “the right” context and keep casting the right “spells” the AI will perform its magic again and you’ll get your next fix. Just keep at it. Eventually you’ll get it.

Surely somebody somewhere is doing brain imagery when using these tools. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same parts of the brain light up as when you play something like Candy Crush. Dig deep into the sunk cost fallacy, pepper with an illusion of control and that glorious “I’m on a roll” feeling (how many agents did this dude have active at once?) and boom…

I mean read the post. The dude spends $1000/mo plugging tokens into a grid of 8 parallel agents. They have a term for this in the gaming industry. It’s a whale.

You're describing the classic developer dopamine loop, just faster now.

Spinning up test after test, tweaking parameters, chasing that "it works!" high, that's what debugging has always been.

You're doing the exact same thing with your code that you're criticizing him for doing with AI. Same sunk cost fallacy ("I've already spent 3 hours, might as well get it working"), same illusion of control, same "I'm on a roll" feeling when the tests finally pass.

The only difference is speed. He gets micro-hits every 10 seconds watching tokens stream. You get them every time you re-run your test suite. Same gambling structure, same reward circuit lighting up, you've just normalized yours because it happened slowly enough to not look like a slot machine.

And you're the one reducing it to "gambling" unless you're claiming human developers experience zero dopamine and write code with omniscient correctness the first time. If they don't, if there's iteration, failure, reward, then you're describing the same neurochemistry. You've just decided it only counts as "gambling" when it makes you uncomfortable.

running and slots are both addictive, so they must be equally bad for you right?

Counter argument: one is actually capable of reasoning, the other is predicting the next token and brute forcing until checks pass.

> pepper with an illusion of control

Did you lose an 'r' or did you mean the ghost glass thing?

Layer on the parasocial angle and it gets even worse: You're gambling and you have a "friend."

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