It's just paying to get stuff done, which is how it's always been, since the dawn of man.
Reading this while I'm prompting for the third time to fix a 100+ line function is amusing, to say the least. I don't care about the definition of "appreciable", but I definitely have to repeat myself to get stuff done, sometimes even to undo things I never told it to touch.
I tell LLMs what to do in pretty high detail, and they do it. With LLMs I have much less variance than with coworkers.
If you're making the argument that LLMs are gambling simply because they're faster than humans, I'd like to see some evidence.
No I am not. It's more addictive because of the timescale. The comparison of AIs to gambling is through addiction mechanism, as I explain elsewhere.
My aunt used to put in (the same) lottery numbers every week. It was gambling, but probably not an addiction in the clinical sense. If she had played slot machines, god forbid, it could have been more problematic. AI is a slot machine, a hire is a lottery ticket.
If you've gotten to the point where you'd rather talk to an LLM than socialise, go to work, etc, then yes, you definitely have a problem, same as with a gaming addiction.
Saying "LLMs are slot machines" is like saying "video games are slot machines", and nobody says that, even though it's more true of video games (some are actual slot machines/gacha) than of LLMs.
If you know what you're doing, know how to spec a problem space, and can manage the tool competently enough to churn out good results, then everything's fine, and you're maybe being productive or increasing your productivity by some degree. (Professional "Gambler")
If you DON'T know what you're doing, and you're just vibe-coding, then I would argue that it is at least a form of gambling (Amateur "Gambler")
Both of these conditions can also be applied to "hiring people to do a job" however there we can also observe things like reputation, credentials and so on.
"It's just paying to get stuff done..." is, with respect, superflous.
Actually it's quite possible that being a business manager/owner is actually addictive (having power over people), we just don't recognize it as such.
https://www.stavros.io/posts/how-i-write-software-with-llms/
It's to the point that I just push the output of that to production and know it'll be OK, except for very large changes where I'm unlikely to have specified everything at the required level of detail. Even then, things won't so much be wrong, as they'll just not be how I want them.
Where do you get your 24/7 hires from?
You can play overextending the hire analogy all you want but it is simply not the same.