I've been experimenting a lot with AI-assisted development lately and noticed a strange pattern.
The feedback loop becomes extremely fast: prompt → result → tweak → repeat.
That speed creates a kind of variable reward system where near-misses keep you iterating longer than planned. I also started noticing things like thinking about prompts late at night or waking up early wanting to try "just one more idea".
This post is an attempt to describe some of the psychological effects behind that experience.
Curious if other developers noticed similar patterns when using LLM coding tools.
This really hit home for me. Before vibe coding, I'd only go on coding binges maybe once a month (coding for 8 hours straight). Now with AI, the velocity is addictive. My coding binges have become much more frequent but sadly less satisfying.
The dopamine loop framing is spot-on. The "it compiles and the tests pass" feedback cycle is genuinely intoxicating, and it's very different from the slower, more uncertain feeling of writing careful code yourself.
What's interesting is that the same AI tools that create the loop can partially break it if you add a mandatory quality gate between "agent generates code" and "you merge it." The friction of seeing a linting/security report before you hit merge forces a moment of actual review that the vibe coding flow otherwise eliminates.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 21.2 ms ] threadThe feedback loop becomes extremely fast: prompt → result → tweak → repeat.
That speed creates a kind of variable reward system where near-misses keep you iterating longer than planned. I also started noticing things like thinking about prompts late at night or waking up early wanting to try "just one more idea".
This post is an attempt to describe some of the psychological effects behind that experience.
Curious if other developers noticed similar patterns when using LLM coding tools.
What's interesting is that the same AI tools that create the loop can partially break it if you add a mandatory quality gate between "agent generates code" and "you merge it." The friction of seeing a linting/security report before you hit merge forces a moment of actual review that the vibe coding flow otherwise eliminates.