[pydry]

The lesson I learned is that agentic coding uses intermittent reinforcement to mimic a slot machine.

It (along with the hundreds of billions in investments hinging on it), explains the legions of people online who passionately defend their "system". Every gambler has a "system" and they usually earnestly believe it is helping them.

Some people even write popular (and profitable!) blogs about playing slots machines where they share their tips and tricks.

[logicprog]

I really wish this meme would die.

We know LLMs instruction follow meaningfully and relatively consistently; we know they are in context learners and also pull from their context window for knowledge; we also know that prompt phrasing and especially organization can have a large effect on their behavior in general; we know from first principles that you can improve the reliability of their results by putting them in a loop with compilers / linters / tests because they do actually fix things when you tell them to. None of this is equivalent to a gambler's superstitions. It may not be perfectly effective, but neither are a million other systems and best practices and paradigms in software.

Also, it doesn't "use" anything. It may be a feature of the program but it isn't intentionally designed that way.

Also who sits around rerunning the same prompt over and over again to see if you get a different outcome like its a slot machine? You just directly tell it to fix whatever was bad about the output and it does so. Sometimes initial outputs have a larger or smaller amount of bad, but still. It isn't really analogous to a slot machine.

Also, you talk as if the whole "do something -> might work / might not, stochastic to a degree, but also meaningfully directable -> dopamine rush if it does; if not goto 1" loop isn't inherent to coding lol

[pydry]

I dont think the "meme" that LLMs follow instructions inconsistently will ever die because they do. It's in the nature of how LLMs function under the hood.

>Also who sits around rerunning the same prompt over and over again to see if you get a different outcome like its a slot machine?

Nobody. Plenty of people do like to tell the LLM that somebody might die if they dont do X properly and other such faith based interventions with their "magic box" though.

Boy do their eyes light up when they hit the "jackpot", too (LLM writes what appears to be the correct code on the first shot).

[simonw]

They're so much more consistent now than they used to be. The new LLMs almost always boast about how much better they are at "instruction following" and it really shows, I find Claude 4.5 and GPT-5.x models do exactly what I tell them to most of the time.