In Building Software by Rolling the Dice: A Qualitative Study of Vibe Coding, Chou et al. use “rolling the dice” for the practice of reissuing prompts with similar intent without adding new information. In their prompt analysis, a prompt counts as rolling the dice — coded as “method-redundant” — when it repeats a prior intent through simple rewording, copying an identical error message, or rejecting an output without further explanation; a prompt that introduces new details or a hypothesis does not count, even if it pursues the same goal. The image echoes the vibe coders they studied, who described debugging and feature refinement — tasks expected to be deterministic — as feeling stochastic, like “throwing a dice”.
Usage
The term belongs to the study of Vibe Coding, where the authors tie it to how much a coder relies on AI and how much they know about the code. In their analysis of seven live-streamed sessions, the two coders with the highest reliance on AI and less relevant technical background devoted nearly 40% of their prompts to rolling the dice, often reposting error messages without elaboration, while coders who inspected code more often or drew on relevant backgrounds typically stayed under 20%. One coder who repeated the same intents avoided method-redundancy by adding hypotheses or technical specifics each time. The authors connect this to their finding that a coder’s mental model of the artifacts shapes their prompting strategies.
The practitioners in the study did not agree on the framing. One described the AI’s stochastic changes as a “vision quest” and recommended resetting with version control and rolling the dice again; another rejected the analogy with image generation, where rerolling works because many outputs fit the problem, arguing that in programming one pixel off is a bug. The safeguards the authors observed for reining in stochastic changes were undo, version control, small incremental changes, automated tests and linters.