"In the case of LLM coding assistants, this manifests as an unconscious overestimation of how often the LLM saves you time. That's because a coding program that produces a bug that you have to "futz with" for a while before it starts working is normal, and thus unmemorable, while a coding tool that turns a plain-language prompt into a working computer program is amazing, so it stands out in your memory.
Glyph likens this to a slot-machine: when you lose a dollar to a slot-machine, that is totally unremarkable, "the expected outcome." But when a slot pays out a jackpot, you remember that for the rest of your life. Walk through a casino floor on which a player hits a slot jackpot, and the ringing bells, flashing lights, and cheering crowd will stick with you, giving you an enduring perception that slot-machines are paying out all the time, even though no casino could stay in business if this were the case.
Glyph develops this analogy to describe why LLMs are worse than slot machines. He says that (non-pathological) gamblers set a budget for the amount of money they're prepared to lose to the slots, while a coder who's feeling warmly disposed to an LLM coding assistant may not put any explicit limits on how much time they'll spend futzing with LLM-generated code (I'll add here that part of the seductive joy of coding is that it can put its practitioners into a kind of autohyptnotic fugue state where they don't notice the passing of time, a state that is also a feature of pathological gambling)."
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/16/jackpot/#salience-bias
Glyph likens this to a slot-machine: when you lose a dollar to a slot-machine, that is totally unremarkable, "the expected outcome." But when a slot pays out a jackpot, you remember that for the rest of your life. Walk through a casino floor on which a player hits a slot jackpot, and the ringing bells, flashing lights, and cheering crowd will stick with you, giving you an enduring perception that slot-machines are paying out all the time, even though no casino could stay in business if this were the case.
Glyph develops this analogy to describe why LLMs are worse than slot machines. He says that (non-pathological) gamblers set a budget for the amount of money they're prepared to lose to the slots, while a coder who's feeling warmly disposed to an LLM coding assistant may not put any explicit limits on how much time they'll spend futzing with LLM-generated code (I'll add here that part of the seductive joy of coding is that it can put its practitioners into a kind of autohyptnotic fugue state where they don't notice the passing of time, a state that is also a feature of pathological gambling)."
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/16/jackpot/#salience-bias
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