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gambiting | on: Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses
Yes, because in video games there is always a chance to win so you can optimize your strategy around that chance. If you have a 1% chance to drop a legendary weapon, the question becomes how do I manufacture 100 chances for a weapon drop in the shortest possible time. With agentic coding there is no such guaranteed chance - in a way it's worse than a slot machine that is guaranteed to pay out eventually. You could spend hundreds of millions of tokens and still not get what you asked for.
dgellow | parent | next
You’re right, the arpg analogy isnt great, it’s too simplistic. I was trying to come up with something heavily stochastic where people are coming up with strategies to get the odds in their favor. Maybe closer to speculating on the real estate market? But even that feels too simplistic compared to LLMs. Even the definition of a win isn’t well defined.

Actually it’s really its own thing, I don’t think the slot machine analogy works too well, you also have fixed odds (and you know they aren’t in your favor), and a binary output

skydhash | root | parent
The analogy to slot machine is that you're spending your own resources in hope of a reward. So you're ultimately bound by your resources and your strategy doesn't count for much in the grand scheme of things.

With employees, there's a lot of punishments in place for people to not want to mess up. Loss of wages and reputation, prison time,... Startup do not fail because they have a bug-ridden product, they fail because of the market.

With AI, all bets are off. They're not aligned with your goals and it's very hard to discern when they go off unless you're an expert. And if you are one, at best it's just a slight boost in typing especially with all the works involved in software development.

echoangle | parent
> If you have a 1% chance to drop a legendary weapon, the question becomes how do I manufacture 100 chances for a weapon drop in the shortest possible time.

Sidenote but I hope everyone realizes that 100 is kind of arbitrary here and does not mean the total chance to to get something is 100%.

avadodin | root | parent
you don't have to do the math unless it's on the exam, lol.