the key comparison is variable reward.
replyThat 'triggers a surge of dopamine and creates highly addictive habits' [thanks Gemini!]
LLM use for code generation does exactly that, sometimes it works amazingly, sometimes it fails inexplicably. Whether it is negative sum or not doesn't really matter. Indeed it may well prove to be negative sum, especially if we step back a bit and consider the business benefit of the code produced, not just lines of code or even features produced.
I think whether it's negative sum or not matters quite a lot, really. The variability of the outcome is a thing that might create some addictive components, but it matters a lot whether it's something with positive effects with some potential negative effects that may need to be managed, or whether it's the same as gambling, and I think it's extremely unlikely that it is the same as gambling.
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