Vibe Coding, the Slot Machine and Me

I’m addicted to vibe coding.

Doomscrolling and online games used to work on me too. Since I started vibe coding, I don’t even look at them. That sounds like a good thing, until you notice what took their place.

If I’m at my desk, I’m vibe coding. When I get up to go to the bathroom, I grab my phone and keep going in there with a remote access app I built myself. At night in bed I send prompts to Claude like I’m texting someone. Sitting outside with friends, I check my phone, but not my messages. Claude. I can’t stop myself.

The first few months were great. Then I slowly started to lose interest in everything else. I was stuck in a strange loop: I have to build something, the product has to ship, I have to share it, and then I get my dopamine. For a long time I called this productivity, the most respectable looking addiction there is. Then I realized it was far more insidious.

Vibe coding is a slot machine.

I type the prompt and hit Enter, which is to say I pull the lever. I wait a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes. A task closes, my brain cheers, and it immediately wants the next one. I send another prompt, and while I wait the question in my head is always the same: will it come out exactly the way I want this time? It’s no different from the question of the person sitting at a slot machine: will it pay this time? The brain doesn’t release dopamine when it gets the reward, it releases it while waiting, and the more uncertain the outcome, the more it releases. If it worked every time I’d get bored, if it never worked I’d quit. It working now and then is what keeps me at the table. (Even Anthropic’s own team wrote “treat it like a slot machine” about Claude Code in their docs. Not a joke.)

Worst of all are the “almost” moments. On a slot machine, two cherries landing and the third stopping one row short lights up the same places in the brain as a win, and pushes you to play one more round. And the effect only shows up if you pulled the lever yourself. In vibe coding I get dozens of near misses a day. The app opens but a button is in the wrong place, half the tests are green. I wrote the prompt too, so if I write it a little better it’ll work. One more prompt.

The only difference: the person at the slot machine knows they’re gambling. I think I’m working. Nobody calls someone who plays slots until morning “hardworking”. They do say it about someone who prompts until morning.

The jackpot never comes, because the moment it does, I’m already typing the next prompt.

I’ve finished this post too. Now I’m going to share it and get my dopamine.

Anthropic’s “treat it like a slot machine” tip: How Anthropic teams use Claude Code (tips from the Data Science and ML Engineering teams)