There's a lot of debate going on right now about whether Artificial Intelligence can write good code.
The actual issue is not with the code but the lever you are using to retrieve it.
The re-roll is the tell
Yes, it's the loop we all know too well. You ask for something, take a look, say "it's not what I had in mind", then ask again, take another look.
At a certain moment in time, you've stopped reading the differences. You're simply waiting for the result that seems correct, so you can stop making changes.
Iteration is not trying the same solution multiple times and failing.
Rerolling is like trying again because you don't like the outcome, with the hope that this time the result will be more favorable. Engineering is about problem-solving, taking into account what you learned from the previous attempt. They are not the same thing. 🔧✨
Why this specific loop rots your brain
"Vibe coding" was a term first used by Karpathy in February 2025. According to him, it's when you fully surrender to the vibes and forget the code completely.
Nice presentation. However, it didn't highlight enough how difficult it is to break the habit.
The numbers that made me quit. In his March 2026 essay "One More Prompt: The Dopamine Trap of Agentic Coding," former Instacart site reliability engineer Quentin Rousseau noted that on average, Vegas slot machines "win," i.e. pay out, about 5% of the time.
AI programming tools are giving back 80% or more. The marginal cost of one more attempt falls to almost zero.
Exactly, that's the trick. A regular slot machine makes you lose enough to quit, but this one makes you win often enough that you never do.
Steve Yegge was right when he wrote "The AI Vampire" in February 2026: AI coding "dispenses dopamine and adrenaline shots like they're a fire sale.
Tyler O. captured the scary part in words in his May 2026 article "The Terminal Star": "Source code flutters past and my hunger to read it diminishes."
That's the whole disease in one sentence. The dopamine trains you to stop reading.
The receipts are ugly
If this was just a feeling, that's okay. But the numbers are appearing in the repositories.
The 2025 report from GitClear conducted an analysis of 211 million lines of code across 3,400 repositories. Refactored or "moved" code, which constituted 25% of all changes in 2021, fell to below 10% in 2024.
Code is no longer being refactored, it is only expanded.
Same report: commits with duplicate code blocks spiked 800% in 2024. Roughly 6.66% of commits now carry substantial duplication, up from 1.8% in 2023.
Yes, they do. If re-rolling is free, then why bother looking for the existing function? Just pull the lever, paste the fresh block and move on.
Another study that is applicable to this context is the DORA report from Google in 2024 which showed that for each 25% increase in AI adoption, delivery stability decreased by 7.2%.
The more you gamble, the more unsteady your financial situation becomes.
The part nobody wants to admit
A March 2026 Multitudes study tracked over 500 developers. Engineers using AI tools showed a 19.6% jump in out-of-hour commits, nights and weekends.
Read that one more time. The tool that was meant to free up your evenings is, in fact, tying you to the desk until late at night.
That is not being productive. It is a casino where you cannot see outside and there are no clocks.
I admit I've done it to our own product. It's 11pm, I've reprompted the same function six times, and I couldn't actually explain what the current version does.
I did not have a vision.
ThePrimeagen referred to much of this as "demo porn," but that term stuck because it was a fitting description.
How I try to break the loop
Not flawlessly. However, these are useful:
→ Read the diff before you decide it's wrong. If you can't say why it failed, you haven't earned a re-roll.
→ Cap your pulls. Three tries, then you stop and think instead of spin.
→ If you're re-prompting the same thing four times, the prompt isn't the problem. Your understanding is.
→ Refactor on purpose. That "moved code" number falling off a cliff is a choice, not a law of physics.
It's not about the tool, it's about the loop. Using a hammer doesn't prevent you from focusing on the nail, but this contraption actually does that.
The solution is not to abandon AI. It is simply to keep our eyes open while pulling the lever.
Come on, tell the truth, when was the last time you reposted something without reading it?
Top comments (0)