You mean in the sense that programming can be addicting?
Factorio doesn't do the loot box stuff that F2P games are famous for. I think the best way to describe the game's addictiveness is that it's programming, but simpler, and gamified, with much more immediate emotional payoff.
The thing Factorio does do is that it evenly spaces out its achievement moments so that you get a steady stream of goals and accomplishing goals. That's what makes it so addictive: you feel like you're constantly overcoming challenges. And you are, but it's in a game and doesn't translate into real life.
It's definitely addicting. No denying that. I just think it Factorio does a good job of giving you enjoyment for the time you put into it rather than resorting to gambling mechanics like some games. (The list is rather long.)
In many ways. In Factorio, your factory can have concurrency, parallelism, race conditions, bottlenecks, deadlocks, resource starvation, etc, etc.
Looking for those types of problems and solving them is a very fun feedback loop. You can spend a few hours just walking around a large factory, making small incremental improvements as you go, and your entire factory will be visibly better off. The only thing preventing you from doing this to your application is the lack of visibility into the problems. There's a bottleneck in your code right now, but can you find it? They're almost never detectable by simple inspection of the source code, so it takes specialized tools. I would say then that building a large factory is like an optimal form of programming where nothing is opaque or hidden from you.
