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Effort without reward

I think blindly offloading our work to AI (vibe coding, vibe writing, vibe everything) is slowly disrupting the dopamine system, and I see it more as a general problem in society than a programmer thing. Dopamine is not pleasure, it is closer to wanting and to learning from the gap between expected and actual outcome (reward prediction error). Effort and outcome normally come tightly coupled in time, and with enough pairing the effort itself gains some reward value (learned industriousness).

What I observe is that this coupling is gone. The outcome arrives without the effort, and the human role becomes mostly prompting and verifying, or not even verifying. Once good outputs become the expectation, the positive prediction error goes to ~0, and the only remaining errors are negative ones (hallucinations, silent breakage). And for the ones who do check, continuous verification is exactly the kind of sustained cognitive control that makes further control more costly (glutamate in the lateral PFC).

There is also the ownership part. We value things more when we build them ourselves, but only if we actually finish them (IKEA effect). And the feeling of "I did this" depends on the brain predicting the outcome of its own action (sense of agency). A prompt doesn't give much to predict, so the result is experienced more like something that happened to us than something we did.

So I don't think the "fried brain" is only about workload. Short term it's fatigue. Long term my worry is that effortful work loses its value, since the effort-reward association is no longer being reinforced.