alt Hacker NewsA lot of this really seems to be pattern matching on superficial similarities when the meat of the issue is probably the more important one. I think for LLM usage to be compared to gambling, it has to be a) universally negative-sum in the long run, and b) extremely addictive. a) seems very unlikely to be true, even if it is sometimes negative. b) seems to be the case for some subset of programmers, but again I would not assume this just because someone uses some statements that are sometimes uttered falsely by gamblers (the siren song of those statements being that if they were true, the gambling would be a good thing. That means the truth of those statements matters and should not be assumed to be false like they are more obviously so for gambling).
the key comparison is variable reward.
That '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.