Seeing the final result of a feature doesn't really give me any dopamine. Maybe because I'm mostly working on projects I know how to do. When I give it a prompt I already know what the result should look like, so I'm not really surprised by anything it produces.

The "uncertain reward" nature of LLM usage makes it a skinner box, yes.

Everything can be optimized, performance can be improved, you can always think of more edge cases and user stories to cover everything, but after a point that just becomes procrastination in the form of chasing perfection. It's also hell if you've got even the slightest bit of ADHD, rapidly leading to task paralysis with the sheer scale of the plan.

Now I sit with a notebook sketch out everything I am thinking about and then condense it to a planning prompt and then once the plan aligns with my representation of the task, I start implementing.

They always end up praising me for the high quality code and howdthey found exactly ZERO manifest bugs in the code, and this must be the work of a skilled senior developer owing to the code's polish.

Then I point out the bug I had just discovered.... "you're exactly right!"

It will look nothing like those things, but it will be obvious in retrospect.

For better and worse.