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That might be the right analogy except it is not clear that it is a house always wins situation.

If you have a .6 chance of success on any particular outcome. Long term win or loss is down to your behaviour. If you double or nothing every time loss is guaranteed. The right strategy will win over the long term.

Gambling addicts make all kinds of post-hoc rationalizations for why they are actually up, if you think about it. "Well, if you consider my entertainment, I'm actually up." "Well, if you think of all the drinks I got comped, I'm actually up." Even worse are the ones who talk about runs, "I was up $10,000 at one point." Nevermind they gave it all back and another $20k chasing that first $10k. At the end of the day, if they had just gone to the movies instead, they'd have more money on their pocket.

Same with most people "doing a startup" or "opening a restaurant". There will be arguments all day long about how these affairs are technically possible and quite lucrative if everything goes according to plan. But the reality is that vanishly few people are equipped to identify and stick to the right plan. Reality meeting theory.

I've told my developers they can use agentic coding if they want, but they must never mention it in the course of development. Not because I don't want to know, but because it's not going to change my evaluation of "their" work. If they can use the AI and get to a point that they can submit a PR that they themselves understand, then technically speaking, what do I care? But if it breaks the build or does something stupid and they don't understand it, it's going to be a bad day for them, whether they wrote it themselves or copied it out of StackOverflow or had Gemini do it.

Nobody has taken me up on this offer, because I think they know that they aren't going to have the extreme discipline to do the hard thing of understanding "someone" else's code and sign their name to it.

thenewnewguy 11 days ago

> Same with most people "doing a startup" or "opening a restaurant".

While I mostly agree with your sentiment, I think there is an important difference. Unless you are attempting advantage play (99.99% of gamblers are not, and casinos ban the few that are), there is literally nothing you can do at a casino to make it a positive EV activity. No amount of skill, drive, effort, or anything other than pure luck can consistently generate profit at a casino.

A startup/business, on the other hand, can be effectived by your actions. Luck obviously plays a large factor, but you have some level of control over the outcome.

I don't think it really matters all that much if the restaurant's success can be attributable to skill at a 2% or 4% rate or whatever. For all practical purposes, since you only get one or two shots at doing that kind of thing in a lifetime, your chances are practically 0. You don't have the infinite resources to make 5% all-or-nothing return work. Focusing on the math aspect is ignoring that people are not mathematical creatures. The math is not used to analyze, it's used to justify, to construct a story that folks then use to delude themselves into believing. I can be a great poker player. I can run tight margins to make a restaurant work. I can use cocaine and not get addicted. I'm special.

pjc50 11 days ago

> If they can use the AI and get to a point that they can submit a PR that they themselves understand, then technically speaking, what do I care?

This is where my employer has ended up after extremely cautious AI adoption: _must_ be reviewed by a human, and the human whose name is on the gerrit review is responsible for the quality of the work.

For some reason the OpenAI dashboard shows me how much money the company as a whole has spent? It's still a very reasonable-looking amount of money and a tiny fraction of salaries.

bee_rider 11 days ago

That doesn’t seem “extremely cautious,” it seems… exactly the right amount of cautious. “A computer can never be held accountable” and all that.

DrewADesign 11 days ago

I am actually up all the drinks I got comped in Vegas. I sit down at the penny slots and bet one penny one row until I get offered a free drink. I tip the server $3, bet two more pennies for good measure, get up, and walk out with the drink in my hand. I just got like a $3.10 Manhattan for walking around the strip, including tip, courtesy of some business that was low-key trying to scam me and deserves to have less money than they do.

The casino runs the probabilies on the customers too. You get the Manhattan because it, on average, gives them a return.

They probably aren't making a loss on the $3.10 Manhatten either.

DrewADesign 11 days ago

I worked in the bar business and know what a shot of rail bourbon costs with a volume discount, and the ten cents they get from the slot machine definitely does not cover it. I’m happy to give the server $3 for their effort.

They’re obviously doing it because it’s profitable. If they were being genuinely altruistic, I’d be much less likely to take advantage of it.

https://www.casino.org/news/vegas-myths-re-busted-the-end-of...

JackFr 11 days ago

I not sure what crap casino you're going to, but there are no penny slots in Vegas.

DrewADesign 11 days ago

Last time I went was well pre-pandemic so it’s probably changed. Not going to Vegas is another way to not lose money in Vegas.

RHSeeger 11 days ago

> Nobody has taken me up on this offer, because I think they know that they aren't going to have the extreme discipline to do the hard thing of understanding "someone" else's code and sign their name to it.

That seems lazy to me. "I'm not willing to see if I can do a better job by using this tool, because I don't want to bother analyzing it's work".

If they cannot mention it how do you know that they have not taken up the offer?

I agree that people will rationalise being in a losing situation as a winning situation. That does not change the fact that winning situations can exist.

They can't talk about it during the code review. Basically, "no excuses." We talk about what we're doing otherwise.

That's still gambling, you've just made yourself the house.

Developers have to gamble on whether they will be better with AI or without.

The no excuses criteria means if they choose AI and it performs well, you both win, if it performs poorly they lose.

If they don't choose AI but colleagues do and it performs well, they lose relative to their colleagues.

The sensible solution would be solidarity and all reject the offer. Don't play the house.

I very much doubt they are thinking that deep. I think you're bending over backwards to give the AI an out based off of an incomplete picture. You can't have a complete picture because you haven't been here in this project.

Back two years ago, a lot of them were playing with AI code gen. They also have some explicit tasking for using agentic AI tooling to evaluate for use in an analytics product we're building, so it's not like they don't even have access or permission or time to try. We're just not religious converts who think AI would one day replace humanity and we should be working to help it.

Through the lens of "don't ask don't tell", throughout all of this, I've not seen any significant change in work output. The folks that have used AI for the specific research tasks they had did not produce solutions faster than without it. They spent huge amounts of time on things like getting the AI to produce results that have any meaning beyond what was trivially reportable in the data already, reliably reproduce the same results, even reliably operate over the full dataset. It's not been the go-fast button everyone has said it would be. I think folks are optimizing for reducing their cognitive workload: it's easier to understand, modify, and live with code you wrote yourself.

pocksuppet 10 days ago

And it works. It fucking works. It's the same reason every game has lootboxes.