Dopamine Loop for AI Coding Agents: Open-Source Skill Cuts Costs by 30%
AutoProspectAI · reddit · 2026-08-13
A developer introduced Dopamine, an open-source skill designed to stop AI coding agents from over-engineering by mistaking motion for progress.
Inspired by human prediction and feedback, the skill forces agents to take the cheapest useful action. Before writing any new code, the agent checks if existing configurations, project helpers, or platform dependencies can solve the problem.
Benchmark Results
Tested on 12 tasks (48 trials) in a real open-source repository, Dopamine showed major efficiency gains compared to a baseline agent:
- 63.8% less source code
- 29.7% fewer tokens
- 27.9% lower estimated cost
- 31.1% less time
The author later published a more rigorous comparison acknowledging benchmark limitations, but Dopamine still beat the baseline across all four efficiency metrics. It works with Codex and Claude Code, is MIT licensed, and includes no telemetry.
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