11 ms·

Welcome to Gas Town

354 points by gmays 10mo ago

thallavajhula 10mo ago
IDK why, but I love the name of the project. It sounds so fun and the naming of the entities is very playful. Love it.
mccoyb 10mo ago
The article seems to be about fun, which I'm all for, and I highly appreciate the usage of MAKER as an evaluation task (finally, people are actually evaluating their theories on something quantitative) but the messaging here seems inherently contradictory: > Gas Town helps with all that yak shaving, and lets you focus on what your Claude Codes are working on. Then: > Working effectively in Gas Town involves committing to vibe coding. Work becomes fluid, an uncountable that you sling around freely, like slopping shiny fish into wooden barrels at the docks. Most work gets done; some work gets lost. Fish fall out of the barrel. Some escape back to sea, or get stepped on. More fish will come. The focus is throughput: creation and correction at the speed of thought. I see -- so where exactly is my focus supposed to sit? As someone who sits comfortably in the "Stage 8" category that this article defines, my concern has never been throughput, it has always been about retaining a high-degree of quality while organizing work so that, when context switching occurs, it transitions me to near-orthogonal tasks which are easy to remember so I can give high-quality feedback before switching again. For instance, I know Project A -- these are the concerns of Project A. I know Project B -- these are the concerns of Project B. I have the insight to design these projects so they compose, so I don't have to keep track of a hundred parallel issues in a mono Project C. On each of those projects, run a single agent -- with review gates for 2-3 independent agents (fresh context, different models! Codex and Gemini). Use a loop, let the agents go back and forth. This works and actually gets shit done. I'm not convinced that 20 Claudes or massively parallel worktrees or whatever improves on quality, because, indeed, I always have to intervene at some point. The blocker for me is not throughput, it's me -- a human being -- my focus, and the random points of intervention which ... by definition ... occur stochastically (because agents). Finally: > Opus 4.5 can handle any reasonably sized task, so your job is to make tasks for it. That’s it. This is laughably not true, for anyone who has used Opus 4.5 for non-trivial tasks. Claude Code constantly gives up early, corrupts itself with self-bias, the list goes on and on. It's getting better, but it's not that good.
- iamwil 10mo ago
  > For instance, I know Project A -- these are the concerns of Project A. I know Project B -- these are the concerns of Project B. I have the insight to design these projects so they compose, so I don't have to keep track of a hundred parallel issues in a mono Project C. On each of those projects, run a single agent -- with review gates for 2-3 independent agents (fresh context, different models! Codex and Gemini). Use a loop, let the agents go back and forth. Can you talk more about the structure of your workflow and how you evolved it to be that?
  - mccoyb 10mo ago
    I've tried most of the agentic "let it rip" tools. Quickly I realized that GPT 5~ was significantly better at reasoning and more exhaustive than Claude Code (Opus, RL finetuned for Claude Code). "What if Opus wrote the code, and GPT 5~ reviewed it?" I started evaluating this question, and started to get higher quality results and better control of complexity. I could also trust this process to a greater degree than my previous process of trying to drive Opus, look at the code myself, try and drive Opus again, etc. Codex was catching bugs I would not catch with the same amount of time, including bugs in hard math, etc -- so I started having a great degree of trust in its reasoning capabilities. I've codified this workflow into a plugin which I've started developing recently: https://github.com/evil-mind-evil-sword/idle https://github.com/evil-mind-evil-sword/idle It's a Claude Code plugin -- it combines the "don't let Claude stop until condition" (Stop hook) with a few CLI tools to induce (what the article calls) review gates: Claude will work indefinitely until the reviewer is satisfied. In this case, the reviewer is a fresh Opus subagent which can invoke and discuss with Codex and Gemini. One perspective I have which relates to this article is that the thing one wants to optimize for is minimizing the error per unit of work. If you have a dynamic programming style orchestration pattern for agents, you want the thing that solves the small unit of work (a task) to have as low error as possible, or else I suspect the error compounds quickly with these stochastic systems. I'm trying this stuff for fairly advanced work (in a PhD), so I'm dogfooding ideas (like the ones presented in this article) in complex settings. I think there is still a lot of room to learn here.
    - 10mo ago
wredcoll 10mo ago
Boy this smells a lot like early days of blogging about block chains, specifically ethereum and friends. It's not that there's nothing useful, maybe even important, in there, it's just so far it's all just the easy parts: playing around inside a computer. I've noticed a certain trend over the years where you get certain types of projects that get lots of hype and excitement and much progress seems to be made, but when you dig deep enough you find out that it's all just the fun, easy sort of progress. The fun progress, which not at all coincidentallly tends to also be the easy progress, is the type that happens solely inside a computer. What do I mean by that? I mean programs who only operate at the level of artificial computer abstractions. The hard part is always dealing with "the real world": hardware that returns "impossible" results to your nicely abstract api functions, things that stop working in places they really shouldn't be able to, or even, and this is the really tricky bit, dealing with humans. Databases are a good example of this kind of thing. It's easy to start off a database writing all the clever (and fun) bits like btrees and hash maps and chained hashes that spill to disk to optimize certain types of tables and so on, but I'd wager that at least half of the code in a "real" database like sqlite or postgresql is devoted to dealing with strange hardware errors or leaky api abstractions across multiple platforms or the various ways a human can send nonsensical input into the system and really screw things up. I'd also bet that this type of code is a lot less fun to write and took much longer than the rest (which incidentally is why I always get annoyes when programming language demos show code with only a happy path, but that's another rant and this comment is already excessive). Anyways, this AI thing is definitely a gold rush and it's important to keep in mind that there was in fact a lot of gold that got dug up but, as everyone constantly repeats, the more consistent way to benefit is sell the shovels and this is very definitely an ad for a shovel.
- WesolyKubeczek 10mo ago
  It's not a coincidence that all those articles and tutorials urge you to use agents to spend tokens and write more agents that spend more tokens and talk to even more LLMs, and write even more agents and wrappers... I don't know to which end. Probably to spend tokens until your wallet bleeds dry, I guess. Agents and wrappers that put you deeper into LLM spending frenzy is like the new "todo app".
- 10mo ago
ForHackernews 10mo ago
Naming your energy-guzzling "just throw more agents at it" thingamajig after a location in the post-apocalyptic Mad Max universe is certainly a choice.
qcnguy 10mo ago
This is clearly going to develop the same problem Beads has. I've used it. I'm in stage 7. Beads is a good idea with a bad implementation. It's not a designed product in the sense we are used to, it's more like a stream of consciousness converted directly into code. There are many features that overlap significantly, strange bugs, and the docs are also AI generated so have fun reading them. It's a program that isn't only vibe coded, it was vibe designed too. Gas Town is clearly the same thing multiplied by ten thousand. The number of overlapping and adhoc concepts in this design is overwhelming. Steve is ahead of his time but we aren't going to end up using this stuff. Instead a few of the core insights will get incorporated into other agents in a simpler but no less effective way. And anyway the big problem is accountability. The reason everyone makes a face when Steve preaches agent orchestration is that he must be in an unusual social situation. Gas Town sounds fun if you are accountable to nobody: not for code quality, design coherence or inferencing costs. The rest of us are accountable for at least the first two and even in corporate scenarios where there is a blank check for tokens, that can't last. So the bottleneck is going to be how fast humans can review code and agree to take responsibility for it. Meaning, if it's crap code with embarrassing bugs then that goes on your EOY perf review. Lots of parallel agents can't solve that fundamental bottleneck.
- ac29 10mo ago
  >This is clearly going to develop the same problem Beads has. I've used it. I'm in stage 7. Beads is a good idea with a bad implementation. It's not a designed product in the sense we are used to, it's more like a stream of consciousness converted directly into code. There are many features that overlap significantly, strange bugs, and the docs are also AI generated so have fun reading them. It's a program that isn't only vibe coded, it was vibe designed too. Yeah this describes my feeling on beads too. I actually really like the idea - a lightweight task/issue tracker integrated with a coding agent does seem more useful than a pile of markdown todos/plans/etc. But it just doesnt work that well. Its really buggy and the bugs seem to confuse the agent since it was given instructions to do things a certain way that dont work consistently.
  - laxori666 10mo ago
haburka 10mo ago
This is either a meme or the way everyone will code in 2 years, in both cases, it terrifies me.
- lifetimerubyist 10mo ago
  I was trying to be patient, hoping this entire thing would collapse sooner rather than later - but now I think I'm just going to start planning my exit from this industry forever.
  - wiseowise 10mo ago
    Why would it collapse?
  - wffurr 10mo ago
    Even if you do exit, all the software around you will steadily get worse and worse. Software engineering is already really bad, especially for consumer products, and all this vibe agent crud is only going to accelerate the badness.
  - elzbardico 10mo ago
    Nah, believe me, the next few years are going to be very, but very interesting. We are building megatons of technical debt. On the application side, people who have no idea of how all of this works down the hood are using LLMs for things that any chimp could do with deterministic code, and even when they use it for what it is really good at, that is, dealing with natural language and other unstructured input, nobody really has the discipline to have extensive validation suits, guardrails and quality gates. The simplicity of just plugging a few lines of code in a framework or a workflow engine means the barrier of entry is really, really low, what guarantees that we will have thousands of business process running through those duct taped agents in almost every kind of industry you can imagine. Mountains of code nobody understand, even more Byzantine post-training to shoehorn more complex tool-usage into the models. Compliance issues galore. Security incidents by the ton. The future is going to be very, very interesting pretty soon. Why would you leave your front-row seat right now? I would instead invest some good time and money in buying and learning to play a modern replica of a greek Kithara.
mccoyb 10mo ago
There are no concepts in this blog post. It is the author's opinions in the form of a pseudo-Erlang program with probabilities. If one reads it like it is a program, you realize that the underlying core has been obfuscated by implementation details. I'm looking for "the Emacs" of whatever this is, and I haven't read a blog post which isolates the design yet.
- leftbehinds 10mo ago
  excellent summary, thanks
nobodywillobsrv 10mo ago
It's nice to see someone else going mad, even deeper down the well. I don't known the details but I was wondering why people aren't "just" writing chat venues any commns protocols for the chats? So the fundamental unit is a chat that humans and agents can be a member of. You can also have DMs etc to avoid chattiness. But fundmantally if you start with this kind of madness you don't have a strict hierarchy and it might also be fun to see how it goes. I briefly started building this but just spun out and am stuck using PAL MCP for now and some dumb scripts. Not super content with any of it yet.
dang 10mo ago
(We re-upped this post because it hadn't made the frontpage despite lots of upvotes - which happens sometimes. This explains why some of the comments have timestamps that appear older than the post itself. I got tired of trying to make them line up, sorry!)
- mhitza 10mo ago
  What happens sometimes, artifical uplifting of posts, posts with high vote count that don't reach the frontpage, or both?
  - dang 10mo ago
    I meant the latter, but both! Re artificial uplifting a.k.a. re-upping, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 and https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
- toast0 10mo ago
  > I got tired of trying to make them line up, sorry! IMHO, it's less disorienting to have the post dated after the comments than it is to see a comment you thought you wrote a couple days ago but is dated today. So you're welcome to stop trying to line up timestamps.
  - Philpax 10mo ago
    Agreed, although perhaps not as strongly; I remember seeing these comments from a few days ago, so I was feeling a little gaslit seeing the new timestamps and wondered if I'd hallucinated the original thread.
  - dang 10mo ago
    The problem is that it leads to endless confusion that ends up taking over threads. We tried it! Status quo sucks also, it just sucks less. Haven't yet figured out an actually good solution. Sorry!
gneray 10mo ago
> But first, before we get into Gas Town’s operation, I need to get rid of you real quick. WARNING DANGER CAUTION GET THE F** OUT YOU WILL DIE I have never met Steve, but this warning alone is :chefskiss:
- lukeinator42 10mo ago
  reminds me of this warning from Dante in the YARP documentation: https://www.yarp.it/latest/warning.html https://www.yarp.it/latest/warning.html.
giancarlostoro 10mo ago
What's really amazing to me is this is how I've thought about building the same thing, by using beads... Glad someone in the hivemind did it.
- 22c 10mo ago
  > I've thought about building the same thing, by using beads... Glad someone in the hivemind did it. Gas Town is from the creator of beads.
  - giancarlostoro 10mo ago
    This makes even more sense, it definitely feels like a logical step with beads. I use Beads a lot, its one of the few things I use with Claude Code.
- michaelbuckbee 10mo ago
  Late to the party, would love to know more of your workflow with how you're using beads.
  - giancarlostoro 10mo ago
    I use Zed (this is completely optional since claude code can work 100% stand alone), Claude Code (I have Max) and Beads. I also take advantage of the .claude/instructions.md file and let Claude know to ALWAYS use Beads, and to use rg instead of "grep" which is kind of slow (if anyone from Anthropic is reading this, for the love of GOD use ripgrep instead of grep), a small summary about the project, and some ground rules. If there's key tickets that matter for the project I tell it to note them in the instructions. The instructions files the first thing Claude reads when you first open up a chat window with it, if you make amendments ask it to reread the file. Outside of that its trial and error, but I've learned you don't need to kick off a new chat instance very much if at all. I also like Beads because if I have to "run" or go offline I can tell it to pause and log where it left off / where its at. For some projects I tell claude not to close tickets without my direct approval because sometimes it closes them without testing, my baseline across all projects is that it compiles and runs without major errors.
lifetimerubyist 10mo ago
If babysitting 30 claude agents is the future of professional programming I want zero part of it.
- nonethewiser 10mo ago
  I bet you type with a keyboard.
  - BalinKing 10mo ago
    Keyboards are highly deterministic. And when they're not, e.g. due to physical wear or software glitches, this makes them basically unusable for touch typists.
  - lifetimerubyist 10mo ago
    My keyboard doesn't randomly input "banana" when I type "apple". If it did, it would be considered extremely defective.
    - nonethewiser 10mo ago
      doesnt matter when you type 80k wpm
    - troupo 10mo ago
      Unless you're on iOS. Then it's a shipped "feature".
- deleted 10mo ago
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vessenes 10mo ago
I put in 15 hours or so with gas town this weekend, from just around the 0.1 release. Think of as an extended bipolar-optimism-fueled glimpse into the future. Steve's MO is laid out in the medium post - but basically, it's okay to lose things, rewrite whole subsystems, whatever, this is the future. It's really fun and interesting to watch the speed of development. I've made a few multi agent coding setups in the last year, and I think gas town has the team side about right: big boss (mayor), operations boss (deacon), relatively linear keeper of truth (witness), single point for merges (refiner), lots of coders with their code held lightly. I love the idea of formulas - a lot of what makes gas town work and informs how well it ultimately will work is the formulas. They're close conceptually to skills. I don't love the mad max branding, but meh, whatever, it's fun, and a perk of the brave new world where you can make stuff like for a few hundred bucks a month sent to anthropic - software can have personality again, yay. Conceptually I think there is a product team element to this still missing - deploy engineers, product managers, visual testing. Everything is sort of out there, janky in parts, but workable to glue together right now, and will only improve. That said, the mad max town analogy is going to get overstretched at some point; we already have pretty good names for all the parts that are needed, and as coordination improves, we're going to want to add more stuff into the coordination. So, I'd like to see a version of this with normal names and expanded. Upshot - worth a look - if beads is any indication, give it a month or two or four to settle down unless you like living on the bleeding bleeding edge.
- boredtofears 10mo ago
  Did you get anything workable out of it? How much money did you end up burning? (If you don't mind me asking)
  - vessenes 10mo ago
    Yes, definitely. I spent about half that time poking around, understanding the setup, doing some bug fixing and put in a PR for gas town itself, although I used Claude Code separately for making the PR. I pointed it at a Postgres time series project I was working on, and it deployed a much better UI and (with some nudging) fixed docker errors on a remote server, which involved logging in to the server to check logs. It probably opened and fixed 50 or so beads in total. I'd reach for it first to do something complicated ("convoy" or epic) over Claude Code even as is -- like, e.g. "copy this data ingestion we do for site x, and implement it for sites y,z,,a,b,c,d. start with a formal architecture that respects our current one and remains extensible for all these sites" is something I think it would do a fair job at. As to cost - I did not run out of my claude pro max subscription poking around with it. It infers ... a lot ... though. I pulled together a PR that would let you point some or all of the agent types at local or other endpoints, but it's a little early, I think for the codebase. I'd definitely reach for some cheaper and/or faster inference for some of the use cases.
hi_hi 10mo ago
Are many, many Agents going to produce better quality outputs than 1 Agent? Assuming this isn't a parody project, maybe this just isn't for me, and thats fine. I'm struggling to understand a production use case where I'd be comfortable letting this thing loose. Who is the intended audience for this design?
- elzbardico 10mo ago
  No. It is going to produce a mindboggling amount of code in a very short amount of time, and hopefully in the process bad variants somehow would be pruned out as the horde of agents engage in an orgy of edits.
thesurlydev 10mo ago
I had a lot of fun reading the articles about Gas Town although I started to lose track of the odd naming. Only odd because they make sense to Steve and others who have seen the Mad Max, Water World movies. I promptly gave Claude the text to the articles and had him rewrite using idiomatic distributed systems naming. Fun times!
- fragmede 10mo ago
  Care to share that with the rest of the class? I'd love to hear what those idiomatic distributed systems namings are!
  - dgunay 10mo ago
    Ran it through ChatGPT: Town = Central orchestrator / control plane Rig = Project or workspace namespace Polecat = Ephemeral worker job Refinery = Merge queue manager Witness = Worker health monitor Crew = Persistent worker pool Beads = Persistent work items / tasks Hooks = Work queues / task slots GUPP = Work processing guarantee Molecules/Wisps = Structured, persistent workflows Convoys = Grouped feature work units https://chatgpt.com/share/695c6216-e7a4-800d-b83d-fc1a22fd8a9c https://chatgpt.com/share/695c6216-e7a4-800d-b83d-fc1a22fd8a...
    - fragmede 10mo ago
      Thank you! Is this the future? Everyone gets to have their own cutesy translation of everything? If I want "kubectl apply" to have a Tron theme, while my coworker wants a Disney theme. Is the runbook going to be in Klingon if I'm fluent in that?
      - deleted 10mo ago
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      - dgunay 10mo ago
        I hope not. Homebrew is a great example of why boring tools shouldn't invent quirky terminology.
bigwheels 10mo ago
I tried it out but despite what the README says (https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown), the mayor didn't create a convoy or anything, the mayor is just doing all the work itself, appearing no different than a `claude` invocation. Update: I was hoping it'd at least be smart enough to automatically test the project still builds but it did not. It also didn't commit the changes. > are you the mayor? Yes. I violated the Mayor protocol - I should have dispatched this work to the gmailthreading crew worktree instead of implementing it directly myself. The CLAUDE.md is clear: "Mayor Does NOT Edit Code" and "Coordinate, don't implement." Maybe Yegge should have build it around Codex instead - Codex is a lot better at adhering to instructions. Pros: The overall system architecture is similar to my own latest attempt at solving this problem. I like the tmux-based console-monitoring approach (rather than going full SDK + custom UI), it makes it easier to inspect what is going on. The overlap between my ideas and Steve's is around 75%. Cons: Arguing with "The Mayor" about some other detached processes poor workmanship seems like a major disconnect and architectural gap. A game of telephone is unlikely to be better than simply using claude. I was also hoping gastown would amplify my intent to complete the task of "Add feature X" without early-stopping, but so far it's more work than both 1. Vibing with claude directly and 2. Creating a highly-detailed spec with checkboxes and piping in "do the next task" until it's done. Definitely looking forward to seeing how the tools in this space evolve. Eventually someone is bound to get it right! P.s. the choice of nomenclature throughout the article is a bit odd, making it hard to follow. Movie characters, dogs and raccoons, huh? How about striving for descriptive SWE clarity?
- Quarrelsome 10mo ago
  > How about striving for descriptive SWE clarity? that's what got us CQRS "command query responsibility segregation" which is technically correct word but absolutely fucking meaningless to anyone that doesn't know what it means already. It should have been called "read here, write there" but noooooooOOOOOooooo we need descriptive SWE clarity so only people with CS degrees that know all the acronyms already can understand wtf is being said.
- 63stack 10mo ago
  The E part of SWE has left the building a long time ago
swah 10mo ago
Sounds like "madness" (or better, fun) but - if this work all converged into "something", wouldn't the product/system improve so much, that in a matter of days, really nothing would be left to do..? Most likely, tens of other bugs are being introduced at each step, etc etc, right?
gensym 10mo ago
Gas Town is an appropriate name since using it is effectively pouring a tank of gasoline on a pile of money and lighting a match.
- NoImmatureAdHom 10mo ago
  Out of curiosity, how much money are we talking about?
  - tom_ 10mo ago
    I am interested in this as well. From the article: ```Gas Town is also expensive as hell. You won’t like Gas Town if you ever have to think, even for a moment, about where money comes from. I had to get my second Claude Code account, finally; they don’t let you siphon unlimited dollars from a single account, so you need multiple emails and siphons, it’s all very silly. My calculations show that now that Gas Town has finally achieved liftoff, I will need a third Claude Code account by the end of next week. It is a cash guzzler.''' Since I am quite capable of shitting up my own code for free, and I've got zero interest in this stupid AI nonsense anyway, I'm vanishingly unlikely to actually use this. But, still: I like to keep half an eye on what is going on, even if I hate it. And I am more than somewhat intrigued about what the numbers actually look like.
lostdog 10mo ago
There's a simpler design here begging to show itself. We're trying to orchestrate a horde of agents. The workers (polecats?) are the main problem solvers. Now you need a top level agent (mayor) to breakdown the problem and delegate work, and then a merger to resolve conflicts in the resulting code (refinery). Sometimes agents get stuck and need encouragement. The molecules stuff confused me, but I think they're just "policy docs," checklists to do common tasks. But this is baby stuff. Only one level of hierarchy? Show me a design for your VP agent and I'll be impressed for real.
- baq 10mo ago
  ‘We need to offshore to a cheaper token provider’ after which the town burns down.
deepjoy 10mo ago
Not sure if anyone else noticed. The first commit on that repository was just about 3 weeks ago. https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown/commit/4c782bc59de8cba4a1cf1632aa6adaaac47e50ca https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown/commit/4c782bc59de8cba... Has to be close for the shortest time from first commit to HN front page.
- deleted 10mo ago
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yowlingcat 10mo ago
Someone here has lost the plot and at this point I wonder if it is me. Is software supposed to be deterministic anymore? Are incremental steps expected to be upgrades and not regressions? Is stability of behavior and dependability desirable? Should we culturally reward striving to get more done with less. ...no, I haven't lost the plot. I'm seeing another fad of the intoxicated parting with their money bending a useful tool into a golden hammer of a caricature. I dread seeing the eventual wreckage and self-realization from the inevitable hangover.
- Quarrelsome 10mo ago
  i always thought my job was to be able to prove the correctness of the system but maybe the reality is that my job was actually just to sling shit at someone until they were satisfied.
- orangecat 10mo ago
  Is software supposed to be deterministic anymore? I've never understood this argument. Do you ever work with other humans? They are very much not deterministic, yet they can often produce useful code that helps you achieve more than you could by yourself.
tokioyoyo 10mo ago
Everyone keeps being angry at me when I mention that the way things are going, future development will just be based on "did something wrong while writing code? all good, throw everything out and rewrite, keep pulling the level of the slot machine and eventually it'll work". It's a fair tactic, and it might work if we make the coding agents cheap enough. I'll add a personal anecdote - 2 years ago, I wrote a SwiftUI app by myself (bare you, I'm mostly an infrastructure/backend guy with some expertise in front end, where I get the general stuff, but never really made anything big out of it other than stuff on LAMPP back in 2000s) and it took me a few weeks to get it to do what I want to do, with bare minimum of features. As I was playtesting my app, I kept writing a wishlist of features for myself, and later when I put it on AppStore, people around the world would email me asking for some other features. But life, work and etc. would get into way, and I would have no time to actually do them, as some of the features would take me days/weeks. Fast forward to 2 weeks ago, at this point I'm very familiar with Claude Code, how to steer multiple agents at a time, quick review its outputs, stitch things together in my head, and ask for right things. I've completed almost all of the features, rewrote the app, and it's already been submitted to AppStore. The code isn't perfect, but it's also not that bad. Honestly, it's probably better from what I would've written myself. It's an app that can be memory intensive in some parts, and it's been doing well from my testings. On top of it, since I've been steering 2-3 agents actively myself, I have the entire codebase in my mind. I also have overwhelming amount of more notes what I would do better and etc. My point is, if you have enough expertise and experience, you'll be able to "stitch things together" cleaner than others with no expertise. This also means, user acquisition, marketing and data will be more valuable than the product itself, since it'll be easier to develop competing products. Finding users for your product will be the hard part. Which kinda sucks, if I'll be honest, but it is what it is.
- nonethewiser 10mo ago
  The difficulty comes in managing the agent. Ensuring it knows the state of the codebase, conventions to follow, etc. Steering it. I've had the same experience as you. I've applied it to old projects which I have some frame of reference for and it's like a 200x speed boost. Just absolutely insane - that sort of speed can overcome a lot of other shortcomings.
dwd 10mo ago
> I actually have six species of bamboo on my property. I have enjoyed Steve's rants since "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns" and the Google "Platform rant", but he may need someone to talk to him about bamboo and what a terrible life choice it is. Unless you can keep it the hell away from you and your neighbours it is bad, very bad. I'm talking about clumping varieties, the runners are a whole other level.
- pjc50 10mo ago
  It's perfectly on brand for an AI advocate to have a fast-growing invasive species that's going to externalize costs onto his neighbors and damage the local ecosystem.
  - neves 10mo ago
    Best comment in this thread. Bamboo is hell. Search the web about how to limit its spread. It's a war operation (trenches included)
xantronix 10mo ago
This is performance art and certain members of the audience are the punchline; I genuinely cannot conceive of any other meaning or purpose for this.
- wwweston 10mo ago
  If there weren’t a repo I think it was satire. There is a repo and I am not sure; the only way to resolve it probably is to spend some of that money he’s talking about.
deleted 10mo ago
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Jdstanhope 10mo ago
Is there an example of something built with this other than itself?
- neonnoodle 10mo ago
  That's the OLD way of thinking! The future is bigger and bigger vibe-coded machines for faster and faster vibe coding, oceans of unread code piped back into the intake valve, for the glorification of itself and its own inevitability. "Practical" "applications" are merely speedbumps in the way of our new Singularity Engines, shooting out million-line diffs that will not, and SHOULD NOT, be useful for anything. We will know when we have achieved success when we no longer even consider computer programming a tool for solving real-world problems.
bitwize 10mo ago
Upon reading the nth "Web development is fun again because LLMs make the complexity go away" article here on Hackernews, I started thinking, "LLM-based development is going to get even more complicated, fiddly, and tedious, and then we'll have to paper that complexity over with abstractions, which we'll then manage using LLMs in another turn of an infinite spiral of setting the earth progressively more on fire, just to stand up a basic web app which we could have done in 2000 with some HTML and PHP/Perl/Python knowledge". And here we are.
- 63stack 10mo ago
  Don't worry, we will paper over the AI fever dream with quantum computing.
ex-aws-dude 10mo ago
As someone out of the loop on this LLM/agent stuff I actually can’t tell if this is satire or not
- an0malous 10mo ago
  I’m glad it’s not just me. Reading the post felt like satire, came to the comments and everyone’s talking about how Gas Town is the future
  - techdmn 10mo ago
    I've been reading Steve for a long long time. He's had a lot of good ideas, issued some solid advice, but has always had a quirky sense of humor. A few pages into it I thought "this has to be a joke". But I couldn't find the punchline. This is the most depressing comment section I've read in a long time. I might have to enter the lottery to become an apprentice electrician.
- 63stack 10mo ago
  Same here, but then I found the github project
thomasjudge 10mo ago
It took me a while to figure out if this was a really elaborate satire or not
csours 10mo ago
Legacy Code is dead! Long live Zero Day Legacy Code!
munchler 10mo ago
With dozens of agents running at a time, it must cost $1000's to build anything non-trivial. Is there a business model behind this project, or is he just made of money?
- an0malous 10mo ago
  The second one
  - 63stack 10mo ago
    This is not the same Steve Yegge that had an old "blog of rants", or is it?
    - andrewl-hn 10mo ago
      Same dude. After 20+ years at FAANG he probably has enough FU money to burn on AI for next few decades.
outlore 10mo ago
Loved the themes of this article. It's inspiring me to make my own agentic coding system modeled after the Napoleonic Wars. You'll be able to command an army of agents to battle! My boss will be so happy
desireco42 10mo ago
I love Steve Yegge, but even if this thing was working how it should (and it isn't), it is just overly complicated and with a lot of misdirection. He as a dev should know that adding a layer of names on top of already named entities is not a good practice. But he just had fun and this came up. Which is fantastic. But I don't want to have to translate names in my head all the time. Just not useful. Beads also... really sorry to say this, but it is a task runner with labels, but it has 0 awareness of the actual tasks. I don't know, maybe I am wrong, but this just doesn't seem like a thing that will work. Which is why I think it will be popular, nobody will be able to make it work, but they will not want to look dumb and will say it is awesome and amazing. Like another AI thingy I could name but will not that everyone is using. But love Yegge and hope he does well. Amp for a little bit that I used it, is really solid agent and delivered much better results than many others.
anu7df 10mo ago
I don't know about you, but when the creator of a software says I have not read any of the code, I don't want to install or use it. Call me old fashioned. Really hoping this terrifying vibe coding future dies an early death before the incurred technical debt makes every digital interaction a landmine.
- jeffrallen 10mo ago
  You're old fashioned, and that's ok, if it's ok with you. But when high level languages were getting started, we had to read and debug the the transformed lower level output they made (hello C-front). At a certain point, most of us stopped debugging the layer below and most LLVM IR and assembly flow by without anyone reading it. I use https://exe.dev https://exe.dev to orchestrate several agents, and I am seeing the same benefits as Steve (with a better UI). My code smell triggers with lots of diffs that flow by, but just as often this feeling of, "oh, that's a nice feature, it's much better than I could have made" is also triggered. If you work with colleagues who occasionally delight and surprise you with excellent work, it's the same thing. Maybe if you are not used to the feeling of being surprised and mostly delighted by your (human) colleagues, orchestrated agentic coding is hard to get your head around.
  - anu7df 10mo ago
    I have nothing against automated code completion on steroids or agents. What I cannot condone is not reading and understanding the generated code. If you have not understood your agent generated code, you will be "surprised" for sure, sooner or later.
- MarkSweep 10mo ago
  Agreed. If the author did not bother to write, much less read, their work, why should we spend time reading it? In the past a large codebase indicated that maybe you might take the project serious, as some human effort was expended in its creation. There were still some outliers like Urbit and it's 144 KLOC of Hoon code, perverse loobeans and all. Now if I get so much as a whiff of AI scent of a project, I lot all interest. It indicates that the author did not a modicum of their own time in the project, so therefore I should waste my own time on it. (I use LLM-based coding tools in some of my projects, but I have the self-respect to review the generated code before publishing init.)
jumploops 10mo ago
Curious what fidelity/precision the author finds necessary with Claude 4.5 Opus/GPT 5.2. Looking at the screenshot of "Tracked Issues", it seems many of the "tasks" are likely overlapping in terms of code locality. Based on my own experience, I've found the current crop of models to work well at a slightly higher-level of complexity than the tasks listed there, and they often benefit from having a shared context vs. when I've tried to parallelize down to that level of work (individual schema changes/helper creation/etc.). Maybe I'm still just unclear on the inner workings, but it's my understanding each of those tasks is passed to Claude Code and developed separately? In either case, I think this project is a glimpse into the future of software development (albeit with a grungy desert punk tinted lens). For context, I've been "full vibe-coding"[0] for the past 6 months, and though it started painfully, the models are now good enough that not reading the code isn't much of an issue anymore.
globular-toast 10mo ago
I thought I was working in a respectable trade with mostly conscientious adults doing a job with a lot of responsibility. What is this shit? Are we actually just a bunch of children who value fun over anything else?
- baq 10mo ago
  ‘The trade’ is dying in front of our eyes, might as well have some fun in the end of times.
foreigner 10mo ago
Naming this after a distopia may be unintentionally apt...
mbgerring 10mo ago
Everything I read from AI boosters drives me further from any desire to continue in software as a profession
pan69 10mo ago
So, can anyone point me to a video where someone is doing this to produce something meaningful, real world stuff? I want to see the requirements being decided upfront, followed by the prompting and then "coding" by the agents. Not some, fly by the seat of my pants and we stop when "it kinda looks okay" thing. E.g. an end-to-end SaaS or whatever non-trivial.
- andrepd 10mo ago
  They can't show you because that doesn't exist, and will likely never exist as long as the approach is "just scale LLMs lol". Once in a blue moon it will not completely fail and might even spit out something impressive at first glance, so some people will latch on to that.
  - acron0 10mo ago
    Is this your first-hand experience?
- CurleighBraces 10mo ago
  I've replaced a couple of apps that I would have previously paid for with my own vibe coded agent based setup similar to GasTown. What I am finding most beneficial almost immediately is I have a dedicated Telegram channel that I can post all sorts of unstructured data into and it's automatically routed via LLMS and stored into the right channel and then other agents work on that data to provide me insights. I have a calorie counter, workout capture, reminders, daily diary prompts all up and running as of right now, and honestly it's better than anything I could have bought "off the shelf"
- qingcharles 10mo ago
  I use AI every day to write stuff. Last night I needed a C# console app to convert PDFs to a sprite sheet. I spent 30 seconds writing the prompt and another 30 seconds later the app was running and successfully converting PDFs on the first try. I then spent about another 2 mins adding a progress bar, tweaking the output format and moving the main logic into a new library.
troupo 10mo ago
When he posted this on X/Twitter I wrote this: He is so in love with his own voice. Try to find actual screenshots of this shit or what it really does in the 200 000-word diarrhea (funnily he agrees it's diarrhea [1]). --- He also references his previous slop called beads. To quote, "Course, I’ve never looked at Beads either, and it’s 225k lines of Go code that tens of thousands of people are using every day". It's slop to a level that people create extensive scripts to try and purge it from the system since it infects everything you do: https://gist.github.com/banteg/1a539b88b3c8945cd71e4b958f319d8d https://gist.github.com/banteg/1a539b88b3c8945cd71e4b958f319... Do not listen to newly converted or accept anything from them. Steve Yegge used to be a good engineer with great understanding of the world. Now it's all gupps and polecats [1] Quote from the article: "it’s a bunch of bullshit I pulled out of my arse over the past 3 weeks, and I named it after badgers and stuff."
swiftcoder 10mo ago
Every time I read one of these, I'm increasingly convinced that the whole AI crowd are just high as kites 24/7. Must be some good drugs in the valley
- andrepd 10mo ago
  They are high on ego and self-importance, that they are.
- zipy124 10mo ago
  I mean a higher than average amount of them are, there is a whole psychadelics movement within tech. Just look at Elon Musk and his ketamine usage.
  - hungryhobbit 10mo ago
    "Lets make extreme generalizations about tens of thousands of people because of an extremely unique outlier (who doesn't even belong to that group of people)."
    - zipy124 10mo ago
      Ok fine, here is some data that isn't from a unique outlier: "Psychedelics are the latest employee health benefit" (tech company) https://www.ft.com/content/e17e5187-8aa7-4564-9e63-eec294226ef9 https://www.ft.com/content/e17e5187-8aa7-4564-9e63-eec294226... "A new psychedelic era dawns in America" (specifically about use in california) https://www.ft.com/content/5b64945f-da21-46d9-853f-c949a95b9655 https://www.ft.com/content/5b64945f-da21-46d9-853f-c949a95b9... "How Silicon Valley rediscovered LSD" https://www.ft.com/content/0a5a4404-7c8e-11e7-ab01-a13271d1ee9c https://www.ft.com/content/0a5a4404-7c8e-11e7-ab01-a13271d1e... I could go on, but the knowledge that psychadelic drugs are prominent in the tech community is not a new fact.
  - gertrunde 10mo ago
    Also, Bill Atkinson of Apple fame. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44530767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44530767 (posted here a few months back)
rsanheim 10mo ago
Is there a term for AI-fueled dev psychosis? "AI architecture astronaut" ? There should be one if not. Or maybe just AI-fueled hucksterisim... I recognize 100% that a tool to manage ai agents with long term context tracking is going to be a big thing. Many folks have written versions of this already. But mashing together the complexity of k8s with a hodge podge of lotr and mad max references is not it. Its like the complexity of J2EE combined with AI-fueled solipsim and a microdosing mushroom regime gone off the rails. What even are all the layers of abstractions here? and to build what? What actual apps or systems has this thing built? AFAICT it has built gas town, and nothing else. Not surprising that it has eaten its own tail. The amount of jargon, ai art, pop culture references, and excessive complexity going on here is truly amazing, and I would assume its satire if I didn't know Yegge's style and previous writings. Its like someone looked at the amount of overlapping and confusing tools Anthropic has released around Claude Code, and said "hold my beer, hand me 3 red bulls and a shot of espresso, I can top that!". I do think a friend of mine nailed it though with this quote: "This whole "I'm using agents to write so much software" building-in-public trend, but without actually showing what they built, reminds me of the people selling courses on stock trading or drop shipping." The amount of get-rich quick schemes around any new tech are boundless. As yegge himself points out in the post towards the end, you'd be surprised what you can pull off with a ridiculous blog post, big-tech reputation, and excessive LOC dev-tools in a hype-driven market. How could it be wrong if it aligns so closely with so many CEOs dreams?
rozab 10mo ago
>It’s also 100% vibe coded. I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to, which might give you pause. ‘Course, I’ve never looked at Beads either, and it’s 225k lines of Go code that tens of thousands of people are using every day. 225k lines for a cli issue tracker? What the fuck?
camgunz 10mo ago
This thing is so long and poorly written I honestly quit reading. I got all the way to Gas Town 101. If some LLM didn't write most of this I'd be surprised. These things all have the same tone, the breathless, maniacally uncritical, young Robin Williams aura but none of the comedy.
nicodjimenez 10mo ago
What I dislike about Claude code and vibe coding in general is that I haven’t seen Claude code users learn a whole lot about how to do their jobs better. A terminal pane is just too small to be a good place to learn. With vibe coding you just give the code some constraints and then system will try to work within those constraints, but what if those constraints are wrong? What if you’re asking the wrong question? Then you’ll end up with over complicated slop. It’s a shame that vibe coded slop seems to be a new standard, when in fact you can use AI tools to produce much higher quality code if you actually care to engage in thoughtful conversations with the AIs and take a growth mindset.
neonnoodle 10mo ago
> Manifesto of Futurism We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. … https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/filippo-tommaso-marinetti/the-futurist-manifesto/ https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/filippo-tommaso-ma...
- andrepd 10mo ago
  They were all a bunch of fascists (exalt the punch and the slap and all that), so the comparison is more than appropriate x)
mda 10mo ago
Wasn't his name a unit of rant? (1 yegge is like 1 Farad, so usually used in minor scales e.g. "He made a rant worth of 3 nano-yegge")
nasmorn 10mo ago
I used Claude Code yesterday to increase the duration the invite email token is valid if the invite is sent from another user and the account is new. It simply made all tokens valid for a longer time instead. If you don’t look at the code how do you spot it?
rekabis 10mo ago
This reads as genuinely nightmarish. Our civilization is doomed if this is the future. Zero quality, zero resiliency, zero coherent vision, zero cohesive intent. Just chaotic slop everywhere, the ultimate Ouroboros.
_alaya 10mo ago
A Steve Yegge blog post was made to be shortened with AI. :) I think Gas Town looks interesting directionally and as a PoC. Like it or not, that's the world we'll end up in. Some products will do it well and some will be horrible monsters. (Like I'm already dreading Oracle Gas Town and Azure Gas Town). I think the Amp coding agent trends in the direction of Gas Town already. Powerful but expensive, uses a mix of models and capabilities to do something that's greater than the sum of the parts.
johnnyclem 10mo ago
[dead]
otekengineering 10mo ago
This reminds me so much of my own experience with AI fueled dev mania. Rapidly build semi-functional wonders, then pivot to something shiny and new to avoid the QA trudge of polishing that wonderous turd. I'm on my second agent orchestration framework, Omnispect - https://omnispect.dev/ https://omnispect.dev/ Example created by Omnispect: Oneshot - https://omnispect.dev/battleclone00.html https://omnispect.dev/battleclone00.html Polished - https://omnispect.dev/battleclone04.html https://omnispect.dev/battleclone04.html
imp0cat 10mo ago
Some ideas in Gas Town are quite similar to how the Q3A bots are implemented - their layered system is desribed here: https://youtu.be/NeLkxuzCssA?si=i9PlXDQvb2WiHdix&t=2065 https://youtu.be/NeLkxuzCssA?si=i9PlXDQvb2WiHdix&t=2065
sumek83 10mo ago
I wonder if gas in the name is a reference to a natural gas given that it powers so many of the new AI data centers https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/how-ai-labs-are-solving-the-power https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/how-ai-labs-are-solvin...
sevenseacat 10mo ago
I'll stick to stage 2 in the AI-assisted coding journey, thanks!
bitjaru0402 10mo ago
For those who find Gas Town overwhelming for solo projects: I built a lighter alternative - same "persistent context" philosophy, but 1 agent instead of 20. Context stored in code comments, 5-min setup, no $100/hr cost. github.com/bitjaru/codesyncer Not a Gas Town replacement - just a motorcycle for those who don't need a chariot.

354 points by gmays 10mo ago

IDK why, but I love the name of the project. It sounds so fun and the naming of the entities is very playful. Love it.

mccoyb 10mo ago

The article seems to be about fun, which I'm all for, and I highly appreciate the usage of MAKER as an evaluation task (finally, people are actually evaluating their theories on something quantitative) but the messaging here seems inherently contradictory: > Gas Town helps with all that yak shaving, and lets you focus on what your Claude Codes are working on. Then: > Working effectively in Gas Town involves committing to vibe coding. Work becomes fluid, an uncountable that you sling around freely, like slopping shiny fish into wooden barrels at the docks. Most work gets done; some work gets lost. Fish fall out of the barrel. Some escape back to sea, or get stepped on. More fish will come. The focus is throughput: creation and correction at the speed of thought. I see -- so where exactly is my focus supposed to sit? As someone who sits comfortably in the "Stage 8" category that this article defines, my concern has never been throughput, it has always been about retaining a high-degree of quality while organizing work so that, when context switching occurs, it transitions me to near-orthogonal tasks which are easy to remember so I can give high-quality feedback before switching again. For instance, I know Project A -- these are the concerns of Project A. I know Project B -- these are the concerns of Project B. I have the insight to design these projects so they compose, so I don't have to keep track of a hundred parallel issues in a mono Project C. On each of those projects, run a single agent -- with review gates for 2-3 independent agents (fresh context, different models! Codex and Gemini). Use a loop, let the agents go back and forth. This works and actually gets shit done. I'm not convinced that 20 Claudes or massively parallel worktrees or whatever improves on quality, because, indeed, I always have to intervene at some point. The blocker for me is not throughput, it's me -- a human being -- my focus, and the random points of intervention which ... by definition ... occur stochastically (because agents). Finally: > Opus 4.5 can handle any reasonably sized task, so your job is to make tasks for it. That’s it. This is laughably not true, for anyone who has used Opus 4.5 for non-trivial tasks. Claude Code constantly gives up early, corrupts itself with self-bias, the list goes on and on. It's getting better, but it's not that good.

iamwil 10mo ago
> For instance, I know Project A -- these are the concerns of Project A. I know Project B -- these are the concerns of Project B. I have the insight to design these projects so they compose, so I don't have to keep track of a hundred parallel issues in a mono Project C. On each of those projects, run a single agent -- with review gates for 2-3 independent agents (fresh context, different models! Codex and Gemini). Use a loop, let the agents go back and forth. Can you talk more about the structure of your workflow and how you evolved it to be that?
- mccoyb 10mo ago
  I've tried most of the agentic "let it rip" tools. Quickly I realized that GPT 5~ was significantly better at reasoning and more exhaustive than Claude Code (Opus, RL finetuned for Claude Code). "What if Opus wrote the code, and GPT 5~ reviewed it?" I started evaluating this question, and started to get higher quality results and better control of complexity. I could also trust this process to a greater degree than my previous process of trying to drive Opus, look at the code myself, try and drive Opus again, etc. Codex was catching bugs I would not catch with the same amount of time, including bugs in hard math, etc -- so I started having a great degree of trust in its reasoning capabilities. I've codified this workflow into a plugin which I've started developing recently: https://github.com/evil-mind-evil-sword/idle https://github.com/evil-mind-evil-sword/idle It's a Claude Code plugin -- it combines the "don't let Claude stop until condition" (Stop hook) with a few CLI tools to induce (what the article calls) review gates: Claude will work indefinitely until the reviewer is satisfied. In this case, the reviewer is a fresh Opus subagent which can invoke and discuss with Codex and Gemini. One perspective I have which relates to this article is that the thing one wants to optimize for is minimizing the error per unit of work. If you have a dynamic programming style orchestration pattern for agents, you want the thing that solves the small unit of work (a task) to have as low error as possible, or else I suspect the error compounds quickly with these stochastic systems. I'm trying this stuff for fairly advanced work (in a PhD), so I'm dogfooding ideas (like the ones presented in this article) in complex settings. I think there is still a lot of room to learn here.
  - 10mo ago

wredcoll 10mo ago

Boy this smells a lot like early days of blogging about block chains, specifically ethereum and friends. It's not that there's nothing useful, maybe even important, in there, it's just so far it's all just the easy parts: playing around inside a computer. I've noticed a certain trend over the years where you get certain types of projects that get lots of hype and excitement and much progress seems to be made, but when you dig deep enough you find out that it's all just the fun, easy sort of progress. The fun progress, which not at all coincidentallly tends to also be the easy progress, is the type that happens solely inside a computer. What do I mean by that? I mean programs who only operate at the level of artificial computer abstractions. The hard part is always dealing with "the real world": hardware that returns "impossible" results to your nicely abstract api functions, things that stop working in places they really shouldn't be able to, or even, and this is the really tricky bit, dealing with humans. Databases are a good example of this kind of thing. It's easy to start off a database writing all the clever (and fun) bits like btrees and hash maps and chained hashes that spill to disk to optimize certain types of tables and so on, but I'd wager that at least half of the code in a "real" database like sqlite or postgresql is devoted to dealing with strange hardware errors or leaky api abstractions across multiple platforms or the various ways a human can send nonsensical input into the system and really screw things up. I'd also bet that this type of code is a lot less fun to write and took much longer than the rest (which incidentally is why I always get annoyes when programming language demos show code with only a happy path, but that's another rant and this comment is already excessive). Anyways, this AI thing is definitely a gold rush and it's important to keep in mind that there was in fact a lot of gold that got dug up but, as everyone constantly repeats, the more consistent way to benefit is sell the shovels and this is very definitely an ad for a shovel.

WesolyKubeczek 10mo ago
It's not a coincidence that all those articles and tutorials urge you to use agents to spend tokens and write more agents that spend more tokens and talk to even more LLMs, and write even more agents and wrappers... I don't know to which end. Probably to spend tokens until your wallet bleeds dry, I guess. Agents and wrappers that put you deeper into LLM spending frenzy is like the new "todo app".
10mo ago

ForHackernews 10mo ago

Naming your energy-guzzling "just throw more agents at it" thingamajig after a location in the post-apocalyptic Mad Max universe is certainly a choice.

qcnguy 10mo ago

This is clearly going to develop the same problem Beads has. I've used it. I'm in stage 7. Beads is a good idea with a bad implementation. It's not a designed product in the sense we are used to, it's more like a stream of consciousness converted directly into code. There are many features that overlap significantly, strange bugs, and the docs are also AI generated so have fun reading them. It's a program that isn't only vibe coded, it was vibe designed too. Gas Town is clearly the same thing multiplied by ten thousand. The number of overlapping and adhoc concepts in this design is overwhelming. Steve is ahead of his time but we aren't going to end up using this stuff. Instead a few of the core insights will get incorporated into other agents in a simpler but no less effective way. And anyway the big problem is accountability. The reason everyone makes a face when Steve preaches agent orchestration is that he must be in an unusual social situation. Gas Town sounds fun if you are accountable to nobody: not for code quality, design coherence or inferencing costs. The rest of us are accountable for at least the first two and even in corporate scenarios where there is a blank check for tokens, that can't last. So the bottleneck is going to be how fast humans can review code and agree to take responsibility for it. Meaning, if it's crap code with embarrassing bugs then that goes on your EOY perf review. Lots of parallel agents can't solve that fundamental bottleneck.

ac29 10mo ago
>This is clearly going to develop the same problem Beads has. I've used it. I'm in stage 7. Beads is a good idea with a bad implementation. It's not a designed product in the sense we are used to, it's more like a stream of consciousness converted directly into code. There are many features that overlap significantly, strange bugs, and the docs are also AI generated so have fun reading them. It's a program that isn't only vibe coded, it was vibe designed too. Yeah this describes my feeling on beads too. I actually really like the idea - a lightweight task/issue tracker integrated with a coding agent does seem more useful than a pile of markdown todos/plans/etc. But it just doesnt work that well. Its really buggy and the bugs seem to confuse the agent since it was given instructions to do things a certain way that dont work consistently.
- laxori666 10mo ago

haburka 10mo ago

This is either a meme or the way everyone will code in 2 years, in both cases, it terrifies me.

lifetimerubyist 10mo ago
I was trying to be patient, hoping this entire thing would collapse sooner rather than later - but now I think I'm just going to start planning my exit from this industry forever.
- wiseowise 10mo ago
  Why would it collapse?
- wffurr 10mo ago
  Even if you do exit, all the software around you will steadily get worse and worse. Software engineering is already really bad, especially for consumer products, and all this vibe agent crud is only going to accelerate the badness.
- elzbardico 10mo ago
  Nah, believe me, the next few years are going to be very, but very interesting. We are building megatons of technical debt. On the application side, people who have no idea of how all of this works down the hood are using LLMs for things that any chimp could do with deterministic code, and even when they use it for what it is really good at, that is, dealing with natural language and other unstructured input, nobody really has the discipline to have extensive validation suits, guardrails and quality gates. The simplicity of just plugging a few lines of code in a framework or a workflow engine means the barrier of entry is really, really low, what guarantees that we will have thousands of business process running through those duct taped agents in almost every kind of industry you can imagine. Mountains of code nobody understand, even more Byzantine post-training to shoehorn more complex tool-usage into the models. Compliance issues galore. Security incidents by the ton. The future is going to be very, very interesting pretty soon. Why would you leave your front-row seat right now? I would instead invest some good time and money in buying and learning to play a modern replica of a greek Kithara.

mccoyb 10mo ago

There are no concepts in this blog post. It is the author's opinions in the form of a pseudo-Erlang program with probabilities. If one reads it like it is a program, you realize that the underlying core has been obfuscated by implementation details. I'm looking for "the Emacs" of whatever this is, and I haven't read a blog post which isolates the design yet.

leftbehinds 10mo ago
excellent summary, thanks

nobodywillobsrv 10mo ago

It's nice to see someone else going mad, even deeper down the well. I don't known the details but I was wondering why people aren't "just" writing chat venues any commns protocols for the chats? So the fundamental unit is a chat that humans and agents can be a member of. You can also have DMs etc to avoid chattiness. But fundmantally if you start with this kind of madness you don't have a strict hierarchy and it might also be fun to see how it goes. I briefly started building this but just spun out and am stuck using PAL MCP for now and some dumb scripts. Not super content with any of it yet.

dang 10mo ago

(We re-upped this post because it hadn't made the frontpage despite lots of upvotes - which happens sometimes. This explains why some of the comments have timestamps that appear older than the post itself. I got tired of trying to make them line up, sorry!)

mhitza 10mo ago
What happens sometimes, artifical uplifting of posts, posts with high vote count that don't reach the frontpage, or both?
- dang 10mo ago
  I meant the latter, but both! Re artificial uplifting a.k.a. re-upping, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 and https://news.ycombinator.com/pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
toast0 10mo ago
> I got tired of trying to make them line up, sorry! IMHO, it's less disorienting to have the post dated after the comments than it is to see a comment you thought you wrote a couple days ago but is dated today. So you're welcome to stop trying to line up timestamps.
- Philpax 10mo ago
  Agreed, although perhaps not as strongly; I remember seeing these comments from a few days ago, so I was feeling a little gaslit seeing the new timestamps and wondered if I'd hallucinated the original thread.
- dang 10mo ago
  The problem is that it leads to endless confusion that ends up taking over threads. We tried it! Status quo sucks also, it just sucks less. Haven't yet figured out an actually good solution. Sorry!

gneray 10mo ago

> But first, before we get into Gas Town’s operation, I need to get rid of you real quick. WARNING DANGER CAUTION GET THE F** OUT YOU WILL DIE I have never met Steve, but this warning alone is :chefskiss:

lukeinator42 10mo ago
reminds me of this warning from Dante in the YARP documentation: https://www.yarp.it/latest/warning.html https://www.yarp.it/latest/warning.html.

giancarlostoro 10mo ago

What's really amazing to me is this is how I've thought about building the same thing, by using beads... Glad someone in the hivemind did it.

22c 10mo ago
> I've thought about building the same thing, by using beads... Glad someone in the hivemind did it. Gas Town is from the creator of beads.
- giancarlostoro 10mo ago
  This makes even more sense, it definitely feels like a logical step with beads. I use Beads a lot, its one of the few things I use with Claude Code.
michaelbuckbee 10mo ago
Late to the party, would love to know more of your workflow with how you're using beads.
- giancarlostoro 10mo ago
  I use Zed (this is completely optional since claude code can work 100% stand alone), Claude Code (I have Max) and Beads. I also take advantage of the .claude/instructions.md file and let Claude know to ALWAYS use Beads, and to use rg instead of "grep" which is kind of slow (if anyone from Anthropic is reading this, for the love of GOD use ripgrep instead of grep), a small summary about the project, and some ground rules. If there's key tickets that matter for the project I tell it to note them in the instructions. The instructions files the first thing Claude reads when you first open up a chat window with it, if you make amendments ask it to reread the file. Outside of that its trial and error, but I've learned you don't need to kick off a new chat instance very much if at all. I also like Beads because if I have to "run" or go offline I can tell it to pause and log where it left off / where its at. For some projects I tell claude not to close tickets without my direct approval because sometimes it closes them without testing, my baseline across all projects is that it compiles and runs without major errors.

lifetimerubyist 10mo ago

If babysitting 30 claude agents is the future of professional programming I want zero part of it.

nonethewiser 10mo ago
I bet you type with a keyboard.
- BalinKing 10mo ago
  Keyboards are highly deterministic. And when they're not, e.g. due to physical wear or software glitches, this makes them basically unusable for touch typists.
- lifetimerubyist 10mo ago
  My keyboard doesn't randomly input "banana" when I type "apple". If it did, it would be considered extremely defective.
  - nonethewiser 10mo ago
    doesnt matter when you type 80k wpm
  - troupo 10mo ago
    Unless you're on iOS. Then it's a shipped "feature".
deleted 10mo ago
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vessenes 10mo ago

I put in 15 hours or so with gas town this weekend, from just around the 0.1 release. Think of as an extended bipolar-optimism-fueled glimpse into the future. Steve's MO is laid out in the medium post - but basically, it's okay to lose things, rewrite whole subsystems, whatever, this is the future. It's really fun and interesting to watch the speed of development. I've made a few multi agent coding setups in the last year, and I think gas town has the team side about right: big boss (mayor), operations boss (deacon), relatively linear keeper of truth (witness), single point for merges (refiner), lots of coders with their code held lightly. I love the idea of formulas - a lot of what makes gas town work and informs how well it ultimately will work is the formulas. They're close conceptually to skills. I don't love the mad max branding, but meh, whatever, it's fun, and a perk of the brave new world where you can make stuff like for a few hundred bucks a month sent to anthropic - software can have personality again, yay. Conceptually I think there is a product team element to this still missing - deploy engineers, product managers, visual testing. Everything is sort of out there, janky in parts, but workable to glue together right now, and will only improve. That said, the mad max town analogy is going to get overstretched at some point; we already have pretty good names for all the parts that are needed, and as coordination improves, we're going to want to add more stuff into the coordination. So, I'd like to see a version of this with normal names and expanded. Upshot - worth a look - if beads is any indication, give it a month or two or four to settle down unless you like living on the bleeding bleeding edge.

boredtofears 10mo ago
Did you get anything workable out of it? How much money did you end up burning? (If you don't mind me asking)
- vessenes 10mo ago
  Yes, definitely. I spent about half that time poking around, understanding the setup, doing some bug fixing and put in a PR for gas town itself, although I used Claude Code separately for making the PR. I pointed it at a Postgres time series project I was working on, and it deployed a much better UI and (with some nudging) fixed docker errors on a remote server, which involved logging in to the server to check logs. It probably opened and fixed 50 or so beads in total. I'd reach for it first to do something complicated ("convoy" or epic) over Claude Code even as is -- like, e.g. "copy this data ingestion we do for site x, and implement it for sites y,z,,a,b,c,d. start with a formal architecture that respects our current one and remains extensible for all these sites" is something I think it would do a fair job at. As to cost - I did not run out of my claude pro max subscription poking around with it. It infers ... a lot ... though. I pulled together a PR that would let you point some or all of the agent types at local or other endpoints, but it's a little early, I think for the codebase. I'd definitely reach for some cheaper and/or faster inference for some of the use cases.

hi_hi 10mo ago

Are many, many Agents going to produce better quality outputs than 1 Agent? Assuming this isn't a parody project, maybe this just isn't for me, and thats fine. I'm struggling to understand a production use case where I'd be comfortable letting this thing loose. Who is the intended audience for this design?

elzbardico 10mo ago
No. It is going to produce a mindboggling amount of code in a very short amount of time, and hopefully in the process bad variants somehow would be pruned out as the horde of agents engage in an orgy of edits.

thesurlydev 10mo ago

I had a lot of fun reading the articles about Gas Town although I started to lose track of the odd naming. Only odd because they make sense to Steve and others who have seen the Mad Max, Water World movies. I promptly gave Claude the text to the articles and had him rewrite using idiomatic distributed systems naming. Fun times!

fragmede 10mo ago
Care to share that with the rest of the class? I'd love to hear what those idiomatic distributed systems namings are!
- dgunay 10mo ago
  Ran it through ChatGPT: Town = Central orchestrator / control plane Rig = Project or workspace namespace Polecat = Ephemeral worker job Refinery = Merge queue manager Witness = Worker health monitor Crew = Persistent worker pool Beads = Persistent work items / tasks Hooks = Work queues / task slots GUPP = Work processing guarantee Molecules/Wisps = Structured, persistent workflows Convoys = Grouped feature work units https://chatgpt.com/share/695c6216-e7a4-800d-b83d-fc1a22fd8a9c https://chatgpt.com/share/695c6216-e7a4-800d-b83d-fc1a22fd8a...
  - fragmede 10mo ago
    Thank you! Is this the future? Everyone gets to have their own cutesy translation of everything? If I want "kubectl apply" to have a Tron theme, while my coworker wants a Disney theme. Is the runbook going to be in Klingon if I'm fluent in that?
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - dgunay 10mo ago
      I hope not. Homebrew is a great example of why boring tools shouldn't invent quirky terminology.

bigwheels 10mo ago

I tried it out but despite what the README says (https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown), the mayor didn't create a convoy or anything, the mayor is just doing all the work itself, appearing no different than a `claude` invocation. Update: I was hoping it'd at least be smart enough to automatically test the project still builds but it did not. It also didn't commit the changes. > are you the mayor? Yes. I violated the Mayor protocol - I should have dispatched this work to the gmailthreading crew worktree instead of implementing it directly myself. The CLAUDE.md is clear: "Mayor Does NOT Edit Code" and "Coordinate, don't implement." Maybe Yegge should have build it around Codex instead - Codex is a lot better at adhering to instructions. Pros: The overall system architecture is similar to my own latest attempt at solving this problem. I like the tmux-based console-monitoring approach (rather than going full SDK + custom UI), it makes it easier to inspect what is going on. The overlap between my ideas and Steve's is around 75%. Cons: Arguing with "The Mayor" about some other detached processes poor workmanship seems like a major disconnect and architectural gap. A game of telephone is unlikely to be better than simply using claude. I was also hoping gastown would amplify my intent to complete the task of "Add feature X" without early-stopping, but so far it's more work than both 1. Vibing with claude directly and 2. Creating a highly-detailed spec with checkboxes and piping in "do the next task" until it's done. Definitely looking forward to seeing how the tools in this space evolve. Eventually someone is bound to get it right! P.s. the choice of nomenclature throughout the article is a bit odd, making it hard to follow. Movie characters, dogs and raccoons, huh? How about striving for descriptive SWE clarity?

Quarrelsome 10mo ago
> How about striving for descriptive SWE clarity? that's what got us CQRS "command query responsibility segregation" which is technically correct word but absolutely fucking meaningless to anyone that doesn't know what it means already. It should have been called "read here, write there" but noooooooOOOOOooooo we need descriptive SWE clarity so only people with CS degrees that know all the acronyms already can understand wtf is being said.
63stack 10mo ago
The E part of SWE has left the building a long time ago

swah 10mo ago

Sounds like "madness" (or better, fun) but - if this work all converged into "something", wouldn't the product/system improve so much, that in a matter of days, really nothing would be left to do..? Most likely, tens of other bugs are being introduced at each step, etc etc, right?

gensym 10mo ago

Gas Town is an appropriate name since using it is effectively pouring a tank of gasoline on a pile of money and lighting a match.

NoImmatureAdHom 10mo ago
Out of curiosity, how much money are we talking about?
- tom_ 10mo ago
  I am interested in this as well. From the article: ```Gas Town is also expensive as hell. You won’t like Gas Town if you ever have to think, even for a moment, about where money comes from. I had to get my second Claude Code account, finally; they don’t let you siphon unlimited dollars from a single account, so you need multiple emails and siphons, it’s all very silly. My calculations show that now that Gas Town has finally achieved liftoff, I will need a third Claude Code account by the end of next week. It is a cash guzzler.''' Since I am quite capable of shitting up my own code for free, and I've got zero interest in this stupid AI nonsense anyway, I'm vanishingly unlikely to actually use this. But, still: I like to keep half an eye on what is going on, even if I hate it. And I am more than somewhat intrigued about what the numbers actually look like.

lostdog 10mo ago

There's a simpler design here begging to show itself. We're trying to orchestrate a horde of agents. The workers (polecats?) are the main problem solvers. Now you need a top level agent (mayor) to breakdown the problem and delegate work, and then a merger to resolve conflicts in the resulting code (refinery). Sometimes agents get stuck and need encouragement. The molecules stuff confused me, but I think they're just "policy docs," checklists to do common tasks. But this is baby stuff. Only one level of hierarchy? Show me a design for your VP agent and I'll be impressed for real.

baq 10mo ago
‘We need to offshore to a cheaper token provider’ after which the town burns down.

deepjoy 10mo ago

Not sure if anyone else noticed. The first commit on that repository was just about 3 weeks ago. https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown/commit/4c782bc59de8cba4a1cf1632aa6adaaac47e50ca https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown/commit/4c782bc59de8cba... Has to be close for the shortest time from first commit to HN front page.

deleted 10mo ago
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yowlingcat 10mo ago

Someone here has lost the plot and at this point I wonder if it is me. Is software supposed to be deterministic anymore? Are incremental steps expected to be upgrades and not regressions? Is stability of behavior and dependability desirable? Should we culturally reward striving to get more done with less. ...no, I haven't lost the plot. I'm seeing another fad of the intoxicated parting with their money bending a useful tool into a golden hammer of a caricature. I dread seeing the eventual wreckage and self-realization from the inevitable hangover.

Quarrelsome 10mo ago
i always thought my job was to be able to prove the correctness of the system but maybe the reality is that my job was actually just to sling shit at someone until they were satisfied.
orangecat 10mo ago
Is software supposed to be deterministic anymore? I've never understood this argument. Do you ever work with other humans? They are very much not deterministic, yet they can often produce useful code that helps you achieve more than you could by yourself.

tokioyoyo 10mo ago

Everyone keeps being angry at me when I mention that the way things are going, future development will just be based on "did something wrong while writing code? all good, throw everything out and rewrite, keep pulling the level of the slot machine and eventually it'll work". It's a fair tactic, and it might work if we make the coding agents cheap enough. I'll add a personal anecdote - 2 years ago, I wrote a SwiftUI app by myself (bare you, I'm mostly an infrastructure/backend guy with some expertise in front end, where I get the general stuff, but never really made anything big out of it other than stuff on LAMPP back in 2000s) and it took me a few weeks to get it to do what I want to do, with bare minimum of features. As I was playtesting my app, I kept writing a wishlist of features for myself, and later when I put it on AppStore, people around the world would email me asking for some other features. But life, work and etc. would get into way, and I would have no time to actually do them, as some of the features would take me days/weeks. Fast forward to 2 weeks ago, at this point I'm very familiar with Claude Code, how to steer multiple agents at a time, quick review its outputs, stitch things together in my head, and ask for right things. I've completed almost all of the features, rewrote the app, and it's already been submitted to AppStore. The code isn't perfect, but it's also not that bad. Honestly, it's probably better from what I would've written myself. It's an app that can be memory intensive in some parts, and it's been doing well from my testings. On top of it, since I've been steering 2-3 agents actively myself, I have the entire codebase in my mind. I also have overwhelming amount of more notes what I would do better and etc. My point is, if you have enough expertise and experience, you'll be able to "stitch things together" cleaner than others with no expertise. This also means, user acquisition, marketing and data will be more valuable than the product itself, since it'll be easier to develop competing products. Finding users for your product will be the hard part. Which kinda sucks, if I'll be honest, but it is what it is.

nonethewiser 10mo ago
The difficulty comes in managing the agent. Ensuring it knows the state of the codebase, conventions to follow, etc. Steering it. I've had the same experience as you. I've applied it to old projects which I have some frame of reference for and it's like a 200x speed boost. Just absolutely insane - that sort of speed can overcome a lot of other shortcomings.

dwd 10mo ago

> I actually have six species of bamboo on my property. I have enjoyed Steve's rants since "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns" and the Google "Platform rant", but he may need someone to talk to him about bamboo and what a terrible life choice it is. Unless you can keep it the hell away from you and your neighbours it is bad, very bad. I'm talking about clumping varieties, the runners are a whole other level.

pjc50 10mo ago
It's perfectly on brand for an AI advocate to have a fast-growing invasive species that's going to externalize costs onto his neighbors and damage the local ecosystem.
- neves 10mo ago
  Best comment in this thread. Bamboo is hell. Search the web about how to limit its spread. It's a war operation (trenches included)

xantronix 10mo ago

This is performance art and certain members of the audience are the punchline; I genuinely cannot conceive of any other meaning or purpose for this.

wwweston 10mo ago
If there weren’t a repo I think it was satire. There is a repo and I am not sure; the only way to resolve it probably is to spend some of that money he’s talking about.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

Jdstanhope 10mo ago

Is there an example of something built with this other than itself?

neonnoodle 10mo ago
That's the OLD way of thinking! The future is bigger and bigger vibe-coded machines for faster and faster vibe coding, oceans of unread code piped back into the intake valve, for the glorification of itself and its own inevitability. "Practical" "applications" are merely speedbumps in the way of our new Singularity Engines, shooting out million-line diffs that will not, and SHOULD NOT, be useful for anything. We will know when we have achieved success when we no longer even consider computer programming a tool for solving real-world problems.

bitwize 10mo ago

Upon reading the nth "Web development is fun again because LLMs make the complexity go away" article here on Hackernews, I started thinking, "LLM-based development is going to get even more complicated, fiddly, and tedious, and then we'll have to paper that complexity over with abstractions, which we'll then manage using LLMs in another turn of an infinite spiral of setting the earth progressively more on fire, just to stand up a basic web app which we could have done in 2000 with some HTML and PHP/Perl/Python knowledge". And here we are.

63stack 10mo ago
Don't worry, we will paper over the AI fever dream with quantum computing.

ex-aws-dude 10mo ago

As someone out of the loop on this LLM/agent stuff I actually can’t tell if this is satire or not

an0malous 10mo ago
I’m glad it’s not just me. Reading the post felt like satire, came to the comments and everyone’s talking about how Gas Town is the future
- techdmn 10mo ago
  I've been reading Steve for a long long time. He's had a lot of good ideas, issued some solid advice, but has always had a quirky sense of humor. A few pages into it I thought "this has to be a joke". But I couldn't find the punchline. This is the most depressing comment section I've read in a long time. I might have to enter the lottery to become an apprentice electrician.
63stack 10mo ago
Same here, but then I found the github project

thomasjudge 10mo ago

It took me a while to figure out if this was a really elaborate satire or not

csours 10mo ago

Legacy Code is dead! Long live Zero Day Legacy Code!

munchler 10mo ago

With dozens of agents running at a time, it must cost $1000's to build anything non-trivial. Is there a business model behind this project, or is he just made of money?

an0malous 10mo ago
The second one
- 63stack 10mo ago
  This is not the same Steve Yegge that had an old "blog of rants", or is it?
  - andrewl-hn 10mo ago
    Same dude. After 20+ years at FAANG he probably has enough FU money to burn on AI for next few decades.

outlore 10mo ago

Loved the themes of this article. It's inspiring me to make my own agentic coding system modeled after the Napoleonic Wars. You'll be able to command an army of agents to battle! My boss will be so happy

desireco42 10mo ago

I love Steve Yegge, but even if this thing was working how it should (and it isn't), it is just overly complicated and with a lot of misdirection. He as a dev should know that adding a layer of names on top of already named entities is not a good practice. But he just had fun and this came up. Which is fantastic. But I don't want to have to translate names in my head all the time. Just not useful. Beads also... really sorry to say this, but it is a task runner with labels, but it has 0 awareness of the actual tasks. I don't know, maybe I am wrong, but this just doesn't seem like a thing that will work. Which is why I think it will be popular, nobody will be able to make it work, but they will not want to look dumb and will say it is awesome and amazing. Like another AI thingy I could name but will not that everyone is using. But love Yegge and hope he does well. Amp for a little bit that I used it, is really solid agent and delivered much better results than many others.

anu7df 10mo ago

I don't know about you, but when the creator of a software says I have not read any of the code, I don't want to install or use it. Call me old fashioned. Really hoping this terrifying vibe coding future dies an early death before the incurred technical debt makes every digital interaction a landmine.

jeffrallen 10mo ago
You're old fashioned, and that's ok, if it's ok with you. But when high level languages were getting started, we had to read and debug the the transformed lower level output they made (hello C-front). At a certain point, most of us stopped debugging the layer below and most LLVM IR and assembly flow by without anyone reading it. I use https://exe.dev https://exe.dev to orchestrate several agents, and I am seeing the same benefits as Steve (with a better UI). My code smell triggers with lots of diffs that flow by, but just as often this feeling of, "oh, that's a nice feature, it's much better than I could have made" is also triggered. If you work with colleagues who occasionally delight and surprise you with excellent work, it's the same thing. Maybe if you are not used to the feeling of being surprised and mostly delighted by your (human) colleagues, orchestrated agentic coding is hard to get your head around.
- anu7df 10mo ago
  I have nothing against automated code completion on steroids or agents. What I cannot condone is not reading and understanding the generated code. If you have not understood your agent generated code, you will be "surprised" for sure, sooner or later.
MarkSweep 10mo ago
Agreed. If the author did not bother to write, much less read, their work, why should we spend time reading it? In the past a large codebase indicated that maybe you might take the project serious, as some human effort was expended in its creation. There were still some outliers like Urbit and it's 144 KLOC of Hoon code, perverse loobeans and all. Now if I get so much as a whiff of AI scent of a project, I lot all interest. It indicates that the author did not a modicum of their own time in the project, so therefore I should waste my own time on it. (I use LLM-based coding tools in some of my projects, but I have the self-respect to review the generated code before publishing init.)

jumploops 10mo ago

Curious what fidelity/precision the author finds necessary with Claude 4.5 Opus/GPT 5.2. Looking at the screenshot of "Tracked Issues", it seems many of the "tasks" are likely overlapping in terms of code locality. Based on my own experience, I've found the current crop of models to work well at a slightly higher-level of complexity than the tasks listed there, and they often benefit from having a shared context vs. when I've tried to parallelize down to that level of work (individual schema changes/helper creation/etc.). Maybe I'm still just unclear on the inner workings, but it's my understanding each of those tasks is passed to Claude Code and developed separately? In either case, I think this project is a glimpse into the future of software development (albeit with a grungy desert punk tinted lens). For context, I've been "full vibe-coding"[0] for the past 6 months, and though it started painfully, the models are now good enough that not reading the code isn't much of an issue anymore.

globular-toast 10mo ago

I thought I was working in a respectable trade with mostly conscientious adults doing a job with a lot of responsibility. What is this shit? Are we actually just a bunch of children who value fun over anything else?

baq 10mo ago
‘The trade’ is dying in front of our eyes, might as well have some fun in the end of times.

foreigner 10mo ago

Naming this after a distopia may be unintentionally apt...

mbgerring 10mo ago

Everything I read from AI boosters drives me further from any desire to continue in software as a profession

pan69 10mo ago

So, can anyone point me to a video where someone is doing this to produce something meaningful, real world stuff? I want to see the requirements being decided upfront, followed by the prompting and then "coding" by the agents. Not some, fly by the seat of my pants and we stop when "it kinda looks okay" thing. E.g. an end-to-end SaaS or whatever non-trivial.

andrepd 10mo ago
They can't show you because that doesn't exist, and will likely never exist as long as the approach is "just scale LLMs lol". Once in a blue moon it will not completely fail and might even spit out something impressive at first glance, so some people will latch on to that.
- acron0 10mo ago
  Is this your first-hand experience?
CurleighBraces 10mo ago
I've replaced a couple of apps that I would have previously paid for with my own vibe coded agent based setup similar to GasTown. What I am finding most beneficial almost immediately is I have a dedicated Telegram channel that I can post all sorts of unstructured data into and it's automatically routed via LLMS and stored into the right channel and then other agents work on that data to provide me insights. I have a calorie counter, workout capture, reminders, daily diary prompts all up and running as of right now, and honestly it's better than anything I could have bought "off the shelf"
qingcharles 10mo ago
I use AI every day to write stuff. Last night I needed a C# console app to convert PDFs to a sprite sheet. I spent 30 seconds writing the prompt and another 30 seconds later the app was running and successfully converting PDFs on the first try. I then spent about another 2 mins adding a progress bar, tweaking the output format and moving the main logic into a new library.

troupo 10mo ago

When he posted this on X/Twitter I wrote this: He is so in love with his own voice. Try to find actual screenshots of this shit or what it really does in the 200 000-word diarrhea (funnily he agrees it's diarrhea [1]). --- He also references his previous slop called beads. To quote, "Course, I’ve never looked at Beads either, and it’s 225k lines of Go code that tens of thousands of people are using every day". It's slop to a level that people create extensive scripts to try and purge it from the system since it infects everything you do: https://gist.github.com/banteg/1a539b88b3c8945cd71e4b958f319d8d https://gist.github.com/banteg/1a539b88b3c8945cd71e4b958f319... Do not listen to newly converted or accept anything from them. Steve Yegge used to be a good engineer with great understanding of the world. Now it's all gupps and polecats [1] Quote from the article: "it’s a bunch of bullshit I pulled out of my arse over the past 3 weeks, and I named it after badgers and stuff."

swiftcoder 10mo ago

Every time I read one of these, I'm increasingly convinced that the whole AI crowd are just high as kites 24/7. Must be some good drugs in the valley

andrepd 10mo ago
They are high on ego and self-importance, that they are.
zipy124 10mo ago
I mean a higher than average amount of them are, there is a whole psychadelics movement within tech. Just look at Elon Musk and his ketamine usage.
- hungryhobbit 10mo ago
  "Lets make extreme generalizations about tens of thousands of people because of an extremely unique outlier (who doesn't even belong to that group of people)."
  - zipy124 10mo ago
    Ok fine, here is some data that isn't from a unique outlier: "Psychedelics are the latest employee health benefit" (tech company) https://www.ft.com/content/e17e5187-8aa7-4564-9e63-eec294226ef9 https://www.ft.com/content/e17e5187-8aa7-4564-9e63-eec294226... "A new psychedelic era dawns in America" (specifically about use in california) https://www.ft.com/content/5b64945f-da21-46d9-853f-c949a95b9655 https://www.ft.com/content/5b64945f-da21-46d9-853f-c949a95b9... "How Silicon Valley rediscovered LSD" https://www.ft.com/content/0a5a4404-7c8e-11e7-ab01-a13271d1ee9c https://www.ft.com/content/0a5a4404-7c8e-11e7-ab01-a13271d1e... I could go on, but the knowledge that psychadelic drugs are prominent in the tech community is not a new fact.
- gertrunde 10mo ago
  Also, Bill Atkinson of Apple fame. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44530767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44530767 (posted here a few months back)

rsanheim 10mo ago

Is there a term for AI-fueled dev psychosis? "AI architecture astronaut" ? There should be one if not. Or maybe just AI-fueled hucksterisim... I recognize 100% that a tool to manage ai agents with long term context tracking is going to be a big thing. Many folks have written versions of this already. But mashing together the complexity of k8s with a hodge podge of lotr and mad max references is not it. Its like the complexity of J2EE combined with AI-fueled solipsim and a microdosing mushroom regime gone off the rails. What even are all the layers of abstractions here? and to build what? What actual apps or systems has this thing built? AFAICT it has built gas town, and nothing else. Not surprising that it has eaten its own tail. The amount of jargon, ai art, pop culture references, and excessive complexity going on here is truly amazing, and I would assume its satire if I didn't know Yegge's style and previous writings. Its like someone looked at the amount of overlapping and confusing tools Anthropic has released around Claude Code, and said "hold my beer, hand me 3 red bulls and a shot of espresso, I can top that!". I do think a friend of mine nailed it though with this quote: "This whole "I'm using agents to write so much software" building-in-public trend, but without actually showing what they built, reminds me of the people selling courses on stock trading or drop shipping." The amount of get-rich quick schemes around any new tech are boundless. As yegge himself points out in the post towards the end, you'd be surprised what you can pull off with a ridiculous blog post, big-tech reputation, and excessive LOC dev-tools in a hype-driven market. How could it be wrong if it aligns so closely with so many CEOs dreams?

rozab 10mo ago

>It’s also 100% vibe coded. I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to, which might give you pause. ‘Course, I’ve never looked at Beads either, and it’s 225k lines of Go code that tens of thousands of people are using every day. 225k lines for a cli issue tracker? What the fuck?

camgunz 10mo ago

This thing is so long and poorly written I honestly quit reading. I got all the way to Gas Town 101. If some LLM didn't write most of this I'd be surprised. These things all have the same tone, the breathless, maniacally uncritical, young Robin Williams aura but none of the comedy.

nicodjimenez 10mo ago

What I dislike about Claude code and vibe coding in general is that I haven’t seen Claude code users learn a whole lot about how to do their jobs better. A terminal pane is just too small to be a good place to learn. With vibe coding you just give the code some constraints and then system will try to work within those constraints, but what if those constraints are wrong? What if you’re asking the wrong question? Then you’ll end up with over complicated slop. It’s a shame that vibe coded slop seems to be a new standard, when in fact you can use AI tools to produce much higher quality code if you actually care to engage in thoughtful conversations with the AIs and take a growth mindset.

neonnoodle 10mo ago

> Manifesto of Futurism We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggresive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. … https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/filippo-tommaso-marinetti/the-futurist-manifesto/ https://www.arthistoryproject.com/artists/filippo-tommaso-ma...

andrepd 10mo ago
They were all a bunch of fascists (exalt the punch and the slap and all that), so the comparison is more than appropriate x)

mda 10mo ago

Wasn't his name a unit of rant? (1 yegge is like 1 Farad, so usually used in minor scales e.g. "He made a rant worth of 3 nano-yegge")

nasmorn 10mo ago

I used Claude Code yesterday to increase the duration the invite email token is valid if the invite is sent from another user and the account is new. It simply made all tokens valid for a longer time instead. If you don’t look at the code how do you spot it?

rekabis 10mo ago

This reads as genuinely nightmarish. Our civilization is doomed if this is the future. Zero quality, zero resiliency, zero coherent vision, zero cohesive intent. Just chaotic slop everywhere, the ultimate Ouroboros.

_alaya 10mo ago

A Steve Yegge blog post was made to be shortened with AI. :) I think Gas Town looks interesting directionally and as a PoC. Like it or not, that's the world we'll end up in. Some products will do it well and some will be horrible monsters. (Like I'm already dreading Oracle Gas Town and Azure Gas Town). I think the Amp coding agent trends in the direction of Gas Town already. Powerful but expensive, uses a mix of models and capabilities to do something that's greater than the sum of the parts.

johnnyclem 10mo ago

[dead]

otekengineering 10mo ago

This reminds me so much of my own experience with AI fueled dev mania. Rapidly build semi-functional wonders, then pivot to something shiny and new to avoid the QA trudge of polishing that wonderous turd. I'm on my second agent orchestration framework, Omnispect - https://omnispect.dev/ https://omnispect.dev/ Example created by Omnispect: Oneshot - https://omnispect.dev/battleclone00.html https://omnispect.dev/battleclone00.html Polished - https://omnispect.dev/battleclone04.html https://omnispect.dev/battleclone04.html

imp0cat 10mo ago

Some ideas in Gas Town are quite similar to how the Q3A bots are implemented - their layered system is desribed here: https://youtu.be/NeLkxuzCssA?si=i9PlXDQvb2WiHdix&t=2065 https://youtu.be/NeLkxuzCssA?si=i9PlXDQvb2WiHdix&t=2065

sumek83 10mo ago

I wonder if gas in the name is a reference to a natural gas given that it powers so many of the new AI data centers https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/how-ai-labs-are-solving-the-power https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/how-ai-labs-are-solvin...

sevenseacat 10mo ago

I'll stick to stage 2 in the AI-assisted coding journey, thanks!

bitjaru0402 10mo ago

For those who find Gas Town overwhelming for solo projects: I built a lighter alternative - same "persistent context" philosophy, but 1 agent instead of 20. Context stored in code comments, 5-min setup, no $100/hr cost. github.com/bitjaru/codesyncer Not a Gas Town replacement - just a motorcycle for those who don't need a chariot.