Though I'm not a "vibe coder" myself I very much recognize this as part of the "appeal" of GenAI tools more generally. Trying to get Image Generators to do what I want has a very "gambling-like" quality to it.
if it doesn't work the first time you pull the lever, it might the second time, and it might not. Either way, the house wins.
It should be regulated as gambling, because it is. There's no metaphor, the only difference from a slot machine is that AI will never output cash directly, only the possibility of an output that could make money. So if you're lucky with your first gamble, it'll give you a second one to try.
Gambling all the way down.
Every prompt and answer is contributing value toward your progress toward the final solution, even if that value is just narrowing the latent space of potential outputs by keeping track of failed paths in the context window, so that it can avoid that path in a future answer after you provide followup feedback.
The vast majority of slot machine pulls produce no value to the player. Every single prompt into an LLM tool produces some form of value. I have never once had an entirely wasted prompt unless you count the AI service literally crashing and returning a "Service Unavailable" type error.
One of the stupidest takes about AI is that a partial hallucination or a single bug destroys the value of the tool. If a response is 90% of the way there and I have to fix the 10% of it that doesn't meet my expectations, then I still got 90% value from that answer.
AI is not an excuse to turn off your brain. I find it ironic that many people complain that they have a hard time identifying the hallucinations in LLM generated content, and then also complain that LLM's are making LLM users dumber.
The problem here is also the solution. LLM's make smarter people even smarter, because they get even better at thinking about the hard parts, while not wasting time thinking about the easy parts.
But people who don't want to think at all about what they are doing... well they do get dumber.