Excellent observations. It's the no-armed bandit. 🎰

The randomness+reward is definitely part of why AI is addictive. Coding was already addictive though. Gotta see that next thing work, beat the next boss. And working too long into diminishing returns was definitely already a thing. But AI makes it more pronounced and the tendency of people to get over their skis more and in more ways (and rationalize it) is striking.

Study after study shows that real productivity gains from AI are way less than developers perceive, sometimes even negative. There's a lot of performative and fictitious AI flex going on too. (Turns out a lot of the more exciting sounding things that happened on clawedbook we're actually astroturfed... Or whatever the inverse of astroturfed is... By human users)