One More Prompt: The Dopamine Trap of Agentic Coding

It’s 2:47 AM on a Tuesday. I’m not debugging a production outage. There’s no deadline. I’m just watching Claude Code refactor a module — and I can’t stop. One more prompt. One more agent run. One more hit.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Something strange is happening to developers in 2026: AI coding tools may be triggering the same dopamine loops as slot machines, and the tech industry is sleepwalking into it...