Glyph develops this analogy to describe why LLMs are worse than slot machines. He says that (non-pathological) gamblers set a budget for the amount of money they’re prepared to lose to the slots, while a coder who’s feeling warmly disposed to an LLM coding assistant may not put any explicit limits on how much time they’ll spend futzing with LLM-generated code (I’ll add here that part of the seductive joy of coding is that it can put its practitioners into a kind of autohyptnotic fugue state where they don’t notice the passing of time, a state that is also a feature of pathological gambling).