The Reroll Button as a Product Decision: When Regenerate Trains Your Users to Distrust You
The reroll button is the easiest UX affordance to ship in an AI product. One icon, one handler, one cache-busting flag on the next request. It feels like the obvious accommodation for non-deterministic systems — the model is stochastic, so let the user resample. Two weeks of engineering work, ship to GA, move on to the next feature.
Then six months later, the team looks at session logs and finds that the median power user clicks regenerate 2.4 times per response. The 90th percentile clicks it eight times. Some users have stopped reading the first response entirely — they fire off a prompt, immediately reroll twice, and only then start evaluating which of the three drafts is least bad. The team didn't ship a regenerate button. They shipped a behavioral retrain that taught their users to treat the model as a slot machine.
