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Machine Learning Street Talk · 3 min · Mar 3, 2026
AI coding can reward the feeling of progress more than shipped work
Jeremy Howard
Jeremy Howard compares AI coding to a slot machine: prompts create an illusion of control, and occasional wins keep users trying.
The episode’s best minutes
Full analysis- 47:47AI coding can reward the feeling of progress more than shipped work3 min
“you know you can get to craft your prompt and your list of mcps and your skills and whatever and then but in the end you pull the lever right”
Jeremy Howardat 48:50 · Machine Learning Street Talk
Takeaways
- Prompt tweaks can feel like control without making outcomes predictable.
- Occasional wins can keep users coding long after the value is clear.
- Howard says there has been only a tiny uptick in shipped work.
About this segment
Jeremy Howard compares AI coding to a slot machine: prompts create an illusion of control, and occasional wins keep users trying. He says shipped work has risen only slightly, despite the hype.
Jeremy Howard is cofounder of fast.ai, former president of Kaggle, and creator of ULMFiT.
Created ULMFiT, a transfer-learning method behind modern language models, and co-founded the AI R&D lab Answer.AI.
- TS
Tim Scarfe, Host · Host, Machine Learning Street Talk
Keith Duggar, Host · Co-host, Machine Learning Street Talk
From “The Dangerous Illusion of AI Coding? - Jeremy Howard”, Mar 3, 2026. Watch the full episode
Answers “Is AI overhyped?” See all 11 answers
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 48:00
But also, my wife, Rachel, recently pointed out in an article, all of the pieces that make gambling addictive are present in… Oh, yeah, dark flow. I was going to bring that up. AI-based coding. yeah it's this really awkward situation where it's very almost everybody i know who got very enthusiastic about ai powered coding in recent months have totally changed their mind about it when they finally went back and looked at like how much stuff that i built during those days of great enthusiasm am i using today are my customers using today am i making money from today almost all the money is being made by influencers you know or by the companies that produce the tokens the thing about ai based coding is that it's like a slot machine and that you you have an illusion of control you know you can get to craft your prompt and your
- 49:06
list of mcps and your skills and whatever and then but in the end you pull the lever right you put in the prompt and something comes back and it's like cherry cherry it's like oh next time i'll change my prompt a bit i'll add a bit more context pull the lever again pull the lever again it's the stochastic thing you get the occasional win it's like oh i won i got a feature so it's got it's got all these hallmarks of like loss described as a wind somewhat stochastic feeling of control all the stuff that gaming companies try to engineer into their gaming rooms now none of that means that ai is not useful but gosh it's hard to tell i know and and rachel just just to be clear as well she also said that one of the hallmarks of gambling is that you kind of delude yourself that you have some awareness
- 50:03
of what's going on but but actually you don't but let's do the bull case a little bit though so because i do i do think in restricted cases it it is it is very useful and these are cases where we understand and we can place constraints and specification but um even in those cases you could argue on the one hand that we're not you know we're not going to be unemployed anytime soon because you just do more work on the addiction thing i've noticed that so i've had 14 hour clawed code marathon sessions and i actually feel addicted to it it's like a slot machine you know it really is in there too absolutely yeah i know it's and it just i've never felt more drained writing i actually need to take a rest afterwards like a few days rest because it completely it feels like crap you know yeah definitely i've had some successes right and so
- 50:49
In fact, we've spent the last couple of years building a whole product based around where