Claude Code Is a Slot Machine

...but the odds are better

Claude Code keeps me waiting. Here I am pressing return like a crack-addicted rodent in a lab. “Yes, I want to make this edit.” I watch as it works, glassy-eyed and bored as the code scrolls by, and on the edge of my seat because my ideas are about to become reality.

I became a software engineer because I loved the process of it. I could sit for hours, figuring out how to wire something up just so and get an idea made into something real. And it didn’t feel like work. It was just fun. Joyful. Satisfying.

AI disrupts the process. What was that high from flow state is now intermittent rewards and a lot of waiting. And maybe that's ok. Maybe that's the new skill. I’m in meetings all day anyways.

Software engineering is all about managing complexity. Early on in my career, someone much wiser than me described two modes of operating: the Conjurer, and the Scribe. The Conjurer is a wizard, creating realities out of thin air, working in broad strokes and never going deep. The Scribe reads every line of the text, and every line it refers to, understanding everything to its deepest and fullest extent before acting. Some of us tend more towards one way of operating or the other. Both are critical.

But the real skill, the real thing that makes you effective, is knowing when to use one mode or the other, and being able to switch between them as needed. When does understanding matter? When should we skip it and move onto the next thing? In a field with endless and important detail at every level, we have to both “let it go and move on” and “slow down” constantly.

AI coding tools supercharge this, allowing you to bring whole machineries to life by waving your hands around, offloading the understanding for much longer, but if you want it all to actually work, you'll need to dive into the details eventually.

I have to assume that part of why AI coding tools are so popular is the slot machine effect. Intermittent rewards, lots of waiting that fractures your attention, and inherent laziness keeping you trying with yet another prompt in hopes that you don’t have to actually turn on your brain after so many hours of being told not to.

The exhilarating power of creation. Just insert a few more cents, and you’ll get another shot at making your dreams a reality.