You just shipped. Now you’re refreshing. Analytics. Twitter. Stripe. Back to analytics. You know it’s too early for meaningful data, but you can’t stop. The thing took you two days to build - LLMs wrote most of the code. The whole cycle that used to take weeks now fits in a weekend.
So why does the waiting feel unbearable?
What Changed
Building used to be slow. You’d spend weeks on a feature, months on a product. The slowness was frustrating, but it came with a hidden benefit: built-in patience. When the input takes a long time, you don’t expect instant output.
Now the constraint is gone. You can go from idea to deployed product in a day. But here’s what nobody warned us about: reality didn’t speed up with us. Users still take time to discover you. Word of mouth still spreads at human pace. Product-market fit still requires iteration and feedback - none of which can be prompted into existence.
Your brain calibrated to the new input speed and now expects output to match. You built fast, so results should come fast. When they don’t, something feels broken. You refresh again.
The Casino Floor
I keep coming back to this comparison because it’s not really a metaphor. The dynamics are almost identical.
Variable reward schedules. This is the core mechanic of slot machines. You don’t win every time - that would actually be less addictive. You win unpredictably. Shipping works the same way. Sometimes your project gets traction on day one. Sometimes it’s crickets for weeks. The randomness keeps you pulling the lever, convinced the next ship might be the one.
Chasing losses. In gambling, this is when you’ve lost money and keep playing to win it back. In building, it’s what happens after your last project didn’t hit. You don’t pause to understand why. You ship faster, try more ideas, spread thinner. You’re not building strategically anymore - you’re chasing. Each new project is an attempt to recover from the last disappointment.
Speed of play. Casinos make more money from faster games. A slot machine you can pull every three seconds extracts more value than a poker hand that takes ten minutes. LLMs dramatically increased our speed of play. We can ship ten projects in the time it used to take to ship one. But if the base rate of success hasn’t changed, we’re just exposing ourselves to more losses, faster. We’re not improving our odds. We’re spinning the wheel more often.
FOMO Is the Pit Boss
Every casino has pit bosses - people who keep players in the game. FOMO does the same thing for builders.
It whispers that others are winning while you’re hesitating. It tells you that the week you spent thinking was a week someone else spent shipping. Every time you consider taking a break, a new launch catches your eye, a new success story makes you feel behind.
This is the FOMO loop: see others shipping, feel behind, ship faster to catch up, get no results because you didn’t think it through, feel more behind, repeat. It’s a hamster wheel with a slot machine attached.
Two Types of Players
There are really two different games being played, often by people who think they’re playing the same one.
The craftsman builds because building is the reward. The act of making something is inherently satisfying. These people can walk away from the table more easily because the variable rewards aren’t the source of their satisfaction.
The gambler builds because building is the cost of playing. The reward is the outcome: money, status, freedom. There’s nothing wrong with wanting these things. But this orientation makes you more vulnerable to the casino dynamics. Every ship is a bet placed. Every refresh is checking if you won.
Most of us are a mix, and the ratio shifts depending on the project and the phase of life. The trouble comes when you don’t know which mode you’re in. If you’re gambling but pretending you’re crafting, you’ll burn out wondering why the work doesn’t feel meaningful. If you’re crafting but measuring yourself by other people’s revenue, you’ll feel like a failure despite doing exactly what you love.
The Recalibration
I’m not saying stop building. The problem isn’t building - it’s the casino dynamics we’ve let take over.
Question before you prompt. Spend an hour thinking about whether the idea is worth a weekend. The LLM will happily build something nobody needs. The cheap part is the building now. The expensive part is your time and attention.
Know which player you are today. Are you building because you want to build, or because you want the outcome? Both are fine. But the strategy is different.
Slow the refresh rate. Ship and step away. Check once a day. The data doesn’t change faster because you’re watching it. You’re not gathering information when you refresh constantly - you’re feeding the addiction.
Leave the casino sometimes. Close the laptop. The game will be there tomorrow. The best builders I know have lives outside of building, and it shows in their work.
The people who win at this aren’t the ones who shipped the most. They’re the ones who stayed in the game long enough, with enough clarity, to find the thing that worked. You don’t get there by playing like a gambler, chasing losses, burning through your energy on slot machine pulls.
The casino is designed to keep you playing. The exit is right there. We can walk out whenever we want.