The Brute Squad
This turned out to be the biggest surprise of the new world: agentic coding is addictive. You will hear it more and more often, because it bewitches people once they’ve got the hang of it. Agentic coding is like a slot machine, where each of your requests is a pull of the lever with potentially infinite upside or downside. On any given query, you don’t know if it’s going to one-shot everything you wished for, or delete your repo and send weenie pics to your grandma.
Every time something good happens, which is often, you get rewarded with dopamine. And when something bad happens, also often, you get adrenaline. The intermittent reinforcement of those dopamine and adrenaline hits creates the core addictive pull. It can become near-impossible to tear yourself away. We had to drag several vibe coders off stage at a conference I was at recently. As we escorted them away from the podium, they would still be wailing, “It’ll work on the next try!”