15 ms·

Gas Town Decoded

219 points by alilleybrinker 9mo ago

bob1029 9mo ago
> Persistent Worker Agents, which you talk to directly (not through the Mayor), I had a bit of a chuckle. I think there is value in anything approximating a proposer-verifier loop, but I don't know that this is the most ideal approach.
vessenes 9mo ago
Very minor nit -- crew could be a person also - in fact that's how you're supposed to hack on a codebase in gas town directly - add yourself as crew. Other than that, this is a helpful list especially for someone who hasn't been hacking around on this thing as it's in rapid development mode. I find gas town super interesting, and tantalizingly close to being amazingly useful. That said, I wouldn't mind a slightly less 'flavored' set of names for workers.
zbyforgotp 9mo ago
At some point evolving software instead of designing it will work. Now the evolutionary pressure leads towards churning more tokens.
jamestimmins 9mo ago
I actually love the idea of totally new naming schemes for experimental software. Certain name types are so normalized (agent, worker, etc) that while they serve their role well, they likely limit our imagination when thinking about software, and it's a worthwhile effort to explore alternatives.
- tptacek 9mo ago
  I do too, but you can take things too far, which I'd argue has happened the moment "figuring out what the names mean" becomes enough of an intellectual challenge to provide a dopamine hit; at that point, you've (intentionally or otherwise) germinated a cult. It's human nature: people will support the design not on its merits but rather as loss aversion for the work they put into decoding it.
  - jamestimmins 9mo ago
    Yes at some point innovative software and naming are at cross purposes, and if your naming gets too extreme ultimately that will get all of the attention.
    - bonesss 9mo ago
      Anthropomorphizing chunks of your system is kinda weird given interactive chat as the UI to the LLM. Akka and others have standardized names for all this stuff (and seem to fully know that a code ‘actor’ is code). These wheels don’t need reinventing (much less as ‘the Marvin’s’, a lovable set of bi-racial quadruplets who always get you where you’re going <rocket emoji>). In fact, I dare say a lot of LLM fascination for orchestration is people unfamiliar with actor models and the level of elegance a properly expressive language lets them have.
      - jkhdigital 9mo ago
        That last line is exactly what I was thinking. Find an expressive language and then progressively formalize your workflows in DSLs that enforce correctness by design, not through layers and layers of natural language “skills” and deadweight agentic watchdogs.
- tom_ 9mo ago
  This reminds me of Moldbug's Urbit. I can't be bothered to look it up, but his comment was along the lines of "existing words bring assumptions, so safest to make new ones". To which, my comment would be: perflufflington flibnik qupnux.
- vessenes 9mo ago
  Not just this, but I’ve been thinking that naming things with aggressively strong connotations might help Claude get out of ‘nice/helpful’ mode. “You are the Deacon, grrrrr”. So there might be actually be a bit of effectiveness added by naming an agent appropriately. I offer no opinion on the word polecats.
  - 3dsnano 9mo ago
    yes, totally. AI-luddites see this as whimsy, but it's actually wizard-level power of abstractions and context ascension. if u know u know
  - ivankra 9mo ago
    Maybe helps the LLM, but at the cost of confusing humans. It would've been better left as an internal implementation detail. I've got better things to keep in my head that remembering wtf deacon is, etc.
bastawhiz 9mo ago
The idea of gas town is simultaneously appealing and appalling to me. The waste and lack of control is wild, but at the same time there's at least a nugget of fascinating, useful work in there. In a world where compute is cheap and abundant and the models are a notch smarter, I think it's the start of a useful framework for what the future of augmented work might look like. I have no interest in using gas town as it is (for a plethora of reasons, not the least of which being that I'm uninterested in spending the money), but I've been fascinated with the idea of slowing it down and having it run with a low concurrency. If you've got a couple A100s, what does it look like if you keep them busy with two agents working concurrently (with 20+ agents total)? What does it mean to have the town focus the scope of work to a series of non-overlapping changesets instead of a continuous stream of work? If you don't plan to have it YOLO stuff in realtime and you can handle the models being dumber than Claude, I think you can have it do some really practical, useful things that are markedly better than the tools we have today.
- _ea1k 9mo ago
  I put it in a VM and had it build a really simple todo app for me the other day. It wasted so many tokens that I can't help but agree with you right now. And I could certainly have done the same thing with beads and opus in approximately the same amount of time. However, the gas town one was almost completely hands off. I think my only interventions were due to how beta it was, so I had to help it work around its own bugs to keep from doing stupid things. Other than that, it implemented exactly what I asked for in a workable fashion with effectively one prompt. It would have taken several prompts and course corrections to get the same result without it. Other than the riskyness (it runs in dangerous permissions mode) and incredible cost inefficiency, I'd certainly use it.
  - eru 9mo ago
    I guess tokens get cheaper all the time, and we can fix the risk via sufficient sand boxing. (I mean the risk to your computer.)
    - Avicebron 9mo ago
devin 9mo ago
Maintenance Manager Checker Agent and the rest of the nouns Yegge employs are ironic given his Kingdom of Nouns essay.
- dragonwriter 9mo ago
  “Maintenance Manager Checker Agent is not a noun Yegge employs”, it is Brinker’s term for Yegge’s “Boot the Dog”.
ipnon 9mo ago
It's like Conway's Law. Both humans and agents arrive at roughly identical hierarchies for organizing labor. There is something inherent in the game of telephone required by limited working memory that requires this structure. Gas Town's only failure is not being familiar with prior art and coming up with very strange names for established patterns that already exist in large hierarchical organizations like governments, corporations and militaries.
- cagenut 9mo ago
  it has been amazing to watch how much of agentic ai is driven by "can you write clear instructions to explain your goals and use cases" and "can you clearly define the rules of each step in your process."
dcmatt 9mo ago
Gas Town wasn't satire?
- never_inline 9mo ago
  Poe's law &c.
- aswegs8 9mo ago
  Wait, what? When did we come to that conclusion?
ohazi 9mo ago
Real, genuinely confused human here: Can someone please clarify whether or not gas town is/was a joke? I've searched repeatedly and can't find anything that looks like an obvious tell, and I'm not sure if this is because it's actually real and people are taking it seriously, or because the pages and pages of discourse surrounding it is AI generated and taking itself literally. If it's not a joke... I have no words. You've all gone insane.
- 0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
  It's a real open source tool Yegge has built and been using for a while now. And no, it's not insane, he's literally written a book with Gene Kim about the fundamental lessons that go into it, and he's been on lots of podcasts where he explains more. I expect major companies will soon be NIH-ing their own version of it. Even bleeding tokens as it does, the cost is less than an engineer, and produces working software much faster. The more it can be made to scale, the more incentive there is. A competitive business can't justify not using a system like this.
  - PKop 9mo ago
    Where is the working software it produces? Do you have a repo you've made with it as an example?
    - Kostchei 9mo ago
      yeh the repo is Gas Town
- astrange 9mo ago
  It doesn't have to exclusively be one or the other. > If it's not a joke... I have no words. You've all gone insane. I think this is covered by the part in Yegge's post where he says not to run it unless you're so rich you don't care if it works or not.
  - chrisjj 9mo ago
0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
Anyone have some kind of central hub of finding out about new tools/techniques? I'm convinced that headless multi-agent coordination is the way to go, but it needs a lot of guard rails, one of the biggest of which will be cost-control. I'm sure there will be a lot more developments in this space, but I don't want to just happen across them by accident...
neilv 9mo ago
I haven't read the Yegge post closely, so just commenting that namespaces (or naming conventions) would make the easier-to-casually-read names more practical... For example, if Polecat becomes GasTown.WorkerAgent (or GasTown.Worker), then you always have both an unambiguous way and a shorthand-in-context way of referring to the concept. (For naming conventions when you don't have namespaces as a language feature, use prefixes within the identifier, such as `GasTown_Worker`.) If GasTown.Worker is implemented with framework Foo, using that framework's Worker concept, GasTown.Worker might have a field named fooWorker of type Foo.Worker. (In the context of the implementation of GasTown, the unqualified name always means the GasTown concept, and you always disambiguate concepts from elsewhere that use the sane generic or similar terms.) Complicated names like GasTown.MaintenanceManagerCheckerAgent might need some creative name shortening, but hopefully are still descriptive, or easy to pick up and remember. Or, if the descriptive and distinguishing name was complicated because the concept is a weird special case within the framework, maybe consider whether it should be rethought.
mccoyb 9mo ago
I think Yegge and Huntley are smart guys. I don't think they're doing a good job incubating their ideas into being precise and clearly useful -- there is something to be said about being careful and methodical before showing your cards. The message they are spreading feels inevitable, but the things they are showing now are ... for lack of better words, not clear or sharp. In a recent video at AI Engineer, Yegge comments on "the Luddites" - but even for advocates of the technology, it is nigh impossible to buy the story he's telling from his blog posts. Show, don't tell -- my major complaint about this group is that they are proselytizing about vibe coding tools ... without serious software to show for it. Let's see some serious fucking software. I'm looking for new compilers, browsers, OSes -- and they better work. Otherwise, what are we talking about? We're counting foxes before the hunt. In any case, wouldn't trying to develop a serious piece of software like that _at the same time you're developing Gas Town or Loom_ make (what critics might call) the ~Emacs config tweaking for orchestration~ result driven?
- skybrian 9mo ago
  It's a science project. I think the "I am so crazy" messaging is deliberate to scare most people away while attracting a few like-minded beta testers. He's telling you not to use it, which some people will take as a dare...
- mccoyb 9mo ago
  Here's a separate, optimistic comment about Yegge and Huntley: they are obviously on the right track. In a recent video about Loom (Huntley's orchestration tool), Huntley comments: "I've got a single goal and that is autonomous evolutionary software and figuring out what's needed to be there." which is extremely interesting and sounds like great fun. When you take these ideas seriously, if the agents get better (by hook and crook or RLVR) -- you can see the implications: "grad student descent" on whatever piece of software you want. RAG over ideas, A/B testing of anything, endless looping, moving software. It's a nightmare for the model of software development and human organization which is "productive" today, but an extremely compelling vision for those dabbling in the alternative.
  - 9mo ago
grebc 9mo ago
Steve Yegge used to have interesting, albeit long winded, things to say re software.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
rilindo 9mo ago
The overuse of metaphors makes me feel like this person is trying to reinvent Chef, but for AI.
Cedricgc 9mo ago
I'm developing concern for Steve. He's been a well known developer and writer in the industry for years now (See his popular 'Google Platforms Rant' essay from years ago) [0]. Now, Yegge's writing tilts towards the grandoise... see his writing when joining Grab [1] and Sourcegraph [2] respectively versus how things actually played out. I prefer optimism and I'm not anti AI by any means, but given his observed behavior and how AI can't exacerbate certain pathologies... not great. Adding the recent crypto activities on top and all that entails is the ingredients for a powder keg. Hope someone is looking out for him. [0] https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse452/23wi/papers/yegge-platform-rant.html https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse452/23wi/papers... [1] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/why-i-left-google-to-join-grab-86dfffc0be84 https://steve-yegge.medium.com/why-i-left-google-to-join-gra... [2] https://sourcegraph.com/blog/introducing-steve-yegge https://sourcegraph.com/blog/introducing-steve-yegge
- driverdan 9mo ago
  The Gas Town post reads like some type of manic psychosis. I hope he snaps out of it and gets help.
  - dang 9mo ago
    Please don't do internet psychiatric diagnosis on HN. I know that often the intention is good, but it leads to bad places. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22internet%20psychiatric%20diagnosis%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a... (and I realize the GP was the place the line started getting crossed)
    - nahaaaa 9mo ago
      [dead]
- refulgentis 9mo ago
  He was right about Google in [1] when I was still drinking the Kool-Aid, in big and tangible ways that aren't discussed publicly. [2] is 100% accurate, Grok was the backbone / glue of Google's internal developer tools. I don't disagree on the current situation, and I'm uncomfortable sticking my neck out on this because I'm basically saying "the guy who kinda seems out of it, totally wasn't out of it, when you think he was", but [1] and [2] definitely aren't grandiose, the claims he makes re: Google and his work there are accurate. A small piece of why I feel comfortable in this, is that both of these were public blogs his employer was 100% happy about when hiring him to top positions.
fdr 9mo ago
I use beads quite a bit, but not as steve intended. And definitely the opposite of "Gas Town," where I use the note-taking capability and integration with Git (that is, as something of a glorified Makefile and database) to debug contexts, to close the loop and increase accuracy over time. Nevertheless, it has been useful for large batch runs over my code base: the record has been processing for thirty hours straight while getting something useful, and enough trace data to make further improvements. Steve has gone "a bit" loopy, in a (so far) self aware manner, but he has some kind of insight into the software engineering process, I think. Yet, I predict beads will break under the weight of no-supervision eventually if he keeps churning it, but some others will pick up where he left off, with more modest goals. He did, to his credit, kill off several generations of project before this one in a similar category.
- _ea1k 9mo ago
  To be fair, he's always been a little loopy. At least, I think this post of his was loopy: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/that-old-marshmallow-maze-spell.html https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/that-old-marshmallo... It was also one of my favorite posts of his and has aged incredibly well as my experience has grown.
  - fdr 9mo ago
    that's one reason I am less worried about him than some, although, I don't want to say that only to have something bad happen to him, that is, a form of complacency. Just because (say) Boltzmann and Cantor had useful insights along the way didn't mean people shouldn't have been looking to support them.
- sorenbs 9mo ago
  > but some others will pick up where he left off, with more modest goals Already happening :-) https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/beads_rust https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/beads_rust
  - wild_egg 9mo ago
zmmmmm 9mo ago
It seems like one of the key events that needs to happen for any professional domain to take off is for it to develop an "inside" language that nobody else understands. For example, I still don't know what a kanban or a scrum is. So I'm very ill positioned to challenge their use or question how they are done. Hence they got to dodge a whole lot of opposition that would probably have brought it all down. The invention of a new mysterious terminology I think was critical for agile to take off. The problem with this phenomenon is that the same freedom from critique that is seemingly necessary for new domains to establish themselves also detaches them from necessary criticism. There's simply no way to tell if this isn't a load of baloney. And by the time it's a bullet point requirement on CVs to get employed it's too late for anybody to critique it.
b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
[dead]
SomaticPirate 9mo ago
Don’t forget the apparent crypto grift angle now (something related to BAGS) Ridiculous. Beads might be passable software but gas town just appears to be a good way to burn tokens at the moment
CuriouslyC 9mo ago
I don't understand why people are making this so complicated. We have a battle tested SDLC. We don't need to reinvent this shit. We just need to make some affordances in the tools and processes we set up for the majority of the actors in the system to be agents (such as rationing human attention). Spec your software like an architect/po, decompose it into a task dag, then orchestrate for each lane and assemble all change sets in a merge branch rather than constantly repointing head.
- arcanemachiner 9mo ago
  SDLC = Software Development Life Cycle (?)
  - CuriouslyC 9mo ago
    Correct
- jkhdigital 9mo ago
  I can’t stop thinking about this exact notion. The main reason we don’t always use stuff like TLA+ to spec out our software is because it’s tedious AF for anything smaller than, like, mission-critical enterprise-grade systems and we can generally trust the humans to get the details right eventually through carrot-and-stick incentive systems. LLM agents have none of the attentional and motivational constraints of humans so there’s no reason not to do things the right way.
- Kostchei 9mo ago
  These operate in parallel. Maybe you SDLC does that, the effort of each human developer sitting in a planning meeting, getting jira tickets, doing individual code (or pair or whatever), reporting back in standup, coordinating the next step, getting it QA'ed... Yes, if your shop is well developed these work (10% of the time every time), but this is a structure to kick that all in to gear, as a repo, where all you need to add is unlimited machine cognitive power/tokens. Maybe you need to add these gas town personalities to various parts of the existing SDLC, .....but..... you still need to track what they do and how- and you need them to intermediate between each other at 2am when they hit an impasse. Something very rare in most human cognition shops. And word from the experimenters is.. it sort of works. Which is on par with most human shops. IMO. I don't have the money to burn to test at the scale Yegge is, but the small scale stuff I have done in this direction, this seems plausible.
vivzkestrel 9mo ago
- someone really needs to rewrite that entire article without all that jargon
keyle 9mo ago
I'd help build Gas City and Gas State, and Gas Country if that would mean we actually would solve the things AI promised to solve. All sickness, famine, wealth ... The problem is, we're just fidgeting yolo-fizzbuzz ad nauseam. The return on investment at the moment is probably one of the worst in the history of human investments. AI does improve over time, still today, but we're going to run out of planet before we get there...
- ViscountPenguin 9mo ago
  As of yet, the AI models doing important work are still pretty specialized. I'd be happy to pitch in to run something like an open source version of alpha-fold, but I'm not aware of any such projects. I have trouble seeing LLMs making meaningful progress on those frontiers without reaching ASI, but I'd be happy to be wrong.
  - Terr_ 9mo ago
    I think part of the problem/difference is that all "important work" needs to be auditable and understood by humans. We need to be able to fix bugs, and not just roll the dice and hoping that a lack of symptoms means everything is cured.
  - camgunz 9mo ago
    Even alphafold generated a bunch of slop,like impossible proteins and such.
- soulofmischief 9mo ago
  The Wright brothers are idiots, if it were me I'd have made a supersonic jet from the get go and not waste my time mucking around with prototypes.
  - ares623 9mo ago
    We were promised supersonic jets today or very soon though and our economies have been held hostage waiting for that promise.
bfrog 9mo ago
Claude is ok. Gas town seems like a Claude multiplier. I’m not sure more Claude is what I’d even want! Not sure I love what it does all the time, it tends to fit whatever box you setup and will easily break out if you aren’t veeeery specific. Is it better than writing a few thousand lines of code myself that I deeply understand that can debug and explain? I don’t know yet. I think it’d be good for writing functions one at a time with massive supervision. It’s great for writing scripts and things where precision and correctness outside the success path isn’t really needed. If a script fails and it wasn’t deleting a hard drive who cares. If my embedded code fails out in a product in the wild this is a much bigger nuisance and potentially fatal for the device (not the humans) which is wasteful.
- oofbey 9mo ago
  I’d like gastown more if it could run cursor-CLI instead of claude, and thus be able to choose models. Claude is okay. But these things certainly have personalities. I’m not sure which would be best for each role. But gastown’s different actors seem like a great place to take advantage of the different quirks of each. And I certainly don’t choose Claude consistently when given a choice.
  - e12e 9mo ago
    Well, according to Yegge, the next step is an SDK/framework for building your own ai orchestrator - so I expect we'll see support for more than Claude soon.
never_inline 9mo ago
From Steve yegge's post > Better UIs will come. But tmux is what you have for now. And it’s worth learning. So brother has 2 claude code accounts and couldn't vibe code a UI, huh?
Animats 9mo ago
This looks familiar to people who have seen how the more elaborate NPC systems work in major multiplayer games. There are lots of semi-independent NPCs, with some degree of overall coordination. Groups of cops or soldiers may have a commander program for tactical coordination, and there may be a higher level system deploying units for strategic purposes. In games, what the NPCs can do is usually rather dumb. Move and shoot is usually most of their functionality. This keeps the overhead down so the system is affordable. Gas Town may be a step towards AIs which have an ongoing sense of what they're doing. I'm not going to get into the "consciousness" debate, but it's closer to liveness.
- jrowen 9mo ago
  What games are notable in this regard? The classic Majesty series comes to mind. UO aspired to complex NPC systems. Fable as well. I always dreamt of a more advanced Sim City-meets-MMO that just went all in on that.
  - Philpax 9mo ago
    https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/why-fears-ai-is-still-the-best-in-first-person-shooters https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/why-fears-ai-is-still-the-b...
  - nhinck3 9mo ago
    UO? I don't remember any complex NPC systems there. Ultima 7 had daily schedules and the veneer of a functioning economy though
    - jrowen 9mo ago
      Well, I said aspired to. They had ambitions that eventually got walked back to more basic behaviors. Here's an article from Raph Koster on it: https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/09/why-dont-our-npcs/ https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/09/why-dont-our-npcs/
jumploops 9mo ago
I ran the Gas Town intro post through ChatGPT 5.2 Pro[0] Based on my initial read, and a pass at this summary, it seems mostly right. YMMV Did some further dives into the little public usage data from Gas Town, and found that most of the "Beads" are tasks that are broken down quite small, almost too small imo. Super interesting project with the goal of keeping Claude "busy" however it feels more like a casino game than something I'd use for production engineering. [0]https://gist.github.com/jumploops/2e49032438650426aafee6f43dcf5225 https://gist.github.com/jumploops/2e49032438650426aafee6f43d...
hota_mazi 9mo ago
I mean, Gas Town is 100% vibe coded, and its very own author says AI can't be trusted to write reliable code. Draw your own conclusion.
hota_mazi 9mo ago
Show, don't tell. If you need ten pages to explain your project and even after I read your description, I'm still left confused why I need it at all, then maybe... I don't need it?
dchuk 9mo ago
I’m very bought in to the idea that raw coding is now a solved problem with the current models and agentic harnesses. Let alone what’s coming in the near term. That being said, I think we’re in a weird phase right now where people’s obvious mental health issues are appearing as “hyper productivity” due to the use of these tools to absolutely spam out code that isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impressive. I’m watching multiple people both publicly and privately clearly breaking down mentally because of the “power” AI is bestowing on them. Their wires are completely crossed when it comes to the value of outputs vs outcomes and they’re espousing generated nonsense as it’s thoughtful insight. It’s an interesting thing to watch play out.
- hahahahhaah 9mo ago
  Yeah I am definitely trying to stay off hype and just use the damn tool
- petesergeant 9mo ago
  > where people’s obvious mental health issues I think the kids would call this "getting one-shotted by AI"
- bkolobara 9mo ago
  There is a lot of research on how words/language influences what we think, and even what we can observe, like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. If in a langauge there is one word for 2 different colors, speakers of it are unable to see the difference between the colors. I have a suspicion that extensive use of LLMs can result in damage to your brain. That's why we are seeing so many mental health issues surfacing up, and we are getting a bunch of blog posts about "an agentic coding psychosis". It could be that llms go from bicycles for the brain to smoking for the brain, once we figure out the long term effects of it.
  - jstanley 9mo ago
    > If in a langauge there is one word for 2 different colors, speakers of it are unable to see the difference between the colors. Perhaps you mean to say that speakers are unable to name the difference between the colours? I can easily see differences between (for example) different shades of red. But I can't name them other than "shade of red". I do happen to subscribe to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in the sense that I think the language you think in constrains your thoughts - but I don't think it is strong enough to prevent you from being able to see different colours.
furyofantares 9mo ago
A couple/few years ago people were trying to do agents by just putting the LLM in a loop and letting it go, and it was just awful and didn't work at all. I think a bunch of things had to happen over the course of 1-2 years to get to coding agents being a real, useful thing: models had to get quite a bit smarter/cheaper/faster, models had to get good at tool use, and they needed to be executed in well-built harnesses with good tools available. This feels like the same thing. Too early, but we're definitely headed in the direction of finding ways to use more tokens to get more mileage per prompt.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
brushfoot 9mo ago
Gas Town seems like a more confusing/expensive alternative to GitHub Copilot Agents. https://github.com/copilot/agents https://github.com/copilot/agents Go to the URL, type what you want done, and a cloud Claude agent creates a PR. $10/month.
- Kostchei 9mo ago
  try the tools. Really. If you are remotely interested in tech or AI, try the tools Copilot this is not. You may be trolling of course. There are huge steps between these various tools, if you try them, for a smidge of investment, it will become obvious what the trajectory is. It is like saying "I don't handwrite anything, I care too much about line spacing, I only use a dot matrix printer" when some one is trying to sell you a calligraphy pen and coloured inks, and you have only tried a ballpoint pen. You might be the wrong market, but they are not even close in use case and application. (spelling)
  - brushfoot 9mo ago
    I'm not trolling. I'm just not aware of major differences between them. When I make a change with a Copilot Agent, it checks for issues, builds my project, runs tests, and iterates until things work. Multiple agents can do that in parallel. My impression was that this does more or less the same thing. That said, I'm definitely open to learning more about them both. What are the advantages of this in your experience?
    - vessenes 9mo ago
      It is worth an install; it works very differently than an agent in a single loop. Beads formalizes building a DAG for a given workload. This has a bunch of implications, but one is that you can specify larger workloads and the agents won’t get stuck or confused. At some level gas town is a bunch of scaffolding around the benefits of beads; an orchestrator that is native to dealing with beads opens up many more benefits than one that isn’t custom coded for it. Think of a human needing to be interacted with as a ‘fault’ in an agentic coding system — a copilot agent might be at 0.5 9s or so - 50% of tasks can complete without intervention, given a certain set of tasks. All the gas town scaffolding is trying to increase the number of 9s, and the size of the task that can be given. My take - Gas town (as an architecture) certainly has more nines in it than a single agent; the rest is just a lot of fun experimentation.
iosovi 9mo ago
The original Gas Town article reads like a terminal entry in Fallout
the_real_cher 9mo ago
> Work in Gas Town can be chaotic and sloppy, which is how it got its name. Some bugs get fixed 2 or 3 times, and someone has to pick the winner. Other fixes get lost. Designs go missing and need to be redone. It doesn’t matter, because you are churning forward relentlessly on huge, huge piles of work, which Gas Town is both generating and consuming. You might not be 100% efficient, but you are flying. This is hilarious and insane and amazing.
krupan 9mo ago
Gas town and the like all basically sound to me like, "AI is amazing! Ok, actually it isn't very good, but maybe we can just use more AI with our AI and then it'll be good!" And I'm not surprised at all to learn that this path took us to a "Maintenance Manager Checker Agent." I wonder what he'll call the inevitable Maintenance Manager Checker Agent Checker Agent? Maybe I've been in this game too long, but I've encountered managers that think like this before. "We don't need expensive, brilliant, developers, we just need good processes for the cheap inexperienced developers to follow." I think what keeps this idea alive is that it sort of works for simple CRUD apps and other essentially "solved" problems. At least until the app needs to become more than just a simple CRUD app
- draw_down 9mo ago
  [dead]
- colin_jack 9mo ago
  This might be worth a read, just as its from a trusted source and is more grounded: https://antirez.com/news/158 https://antirez.com/news/158
  - krupan 9mo ago
    Still the same. "Hey look, I got these crappy developers (LLMs) to actually produce working code! This is a game-changer!" When the working code is a very small, limited thing.
    - colin_jack 9mo ago
      I don't know, your talking about an incredibly talented engineer saying: "In the past week, just prompting, and inspecting the code to provide guidance from time to time, in a few hours I did the following four tasks, in hours instead of weeks" Its up to you to decide how to behave, but I can't see any reasons to completely dismiss this. It ends with good guidance what to do if you can't replicate though.
TheRealPomax 9mo ago
Thought this would be about Vancouver, but unfortunately it was just about an AI company =(
fasbiner 9mo ago
This is not a good line of reasoning since it would just as surely apply to such fanciful cult terms like "I'm using fargate with docker over ECS to integrate with ceph, but I'm considering switching to talos and EKS." It is valuable to use unique terms of art that are not heavily overloaded and this is what gastown's terminology is intended to do, which also really helps LLMs since they are as much dumb text search as they are vector embedding.

219 points by alilleybrinker 9mo ago

> Persistent Worker Agents, which you talk to directly (not through the Mayor), I had a bit of a chuckle. I think there is value in anything approximating a proposer-verifier loop, but I don't know that this is the most ideal approach.

vessenes 9mo ago

Very minor nit -- crew could be a person also - in fact that's how you're supposed to hack on a codebase in gas town directly - add yourself as crew. Other than that, this is a helpful list especially for someone who hasn't been hacking around on this thing as it's in rapid development mode. I find gas town super interesting, and tantalizingly close to being amazingly useful. That said, I wouldn't mind a slightly less 'flavored' set of names for workers.

zbyforgotp 9mo ago

At some point evolving software instead of designing it will work. Now the evolutionary pressure leads towards churning more tokens.

jamestimmins 9mo ago

I actually love the idea of totally new naming schemes for experimental software. Certain name types are so normalized (agent, worker, etc) that while they serve their role well, they likely limit our imagination when thinking about software, and it's a worthwhile effort to explore alternatives.

tptacek 9mo ago
I do too, but you can take things too far, which I'd argue has happened the moment "figuring out what the names mean" becomes enough of an intellectual challenge to provide a dopamine hit; at that point, you've (intentionally or otherwise) germinated a cult. It's human nature: people will support the design not on its merits but rather as loss aversion for the work they put into decoding it.
- jamestimmins 9mo ago
  Yes at some point innovative software and naming are at cross purposes, and if your naming gets too extreme ultimately that will get all of the attention.
  - bonesss 9mo ago
    Anthropomorphizing chunks of your system is kinda weird given interactive chat as the UI to the LLM. Akka and others have standardized names for all this stuff (and seem to fully know that a code ‘actor’ is code). These wheels don’t need reinventing (much less as ‘the Marvin’s’, a lovable set of bi-racial quadruplets who always get you where you’re going <rocket emoji>). In fact, I dare say a lot of LLM fascination for orchestration is people unfamiliar with actor models and the level of elegance a properly expressive language lets them have.
    - jkhdigital 9mo ago
      That last line is exactly what I was thinking. Find an expressive language and then progressively formalize your workflows in DSLs that enforce correctness by design, not through layers and layers of natural language “skills” and deadweight agentic watchdogs.
tom_ 9mo ago
This reminds me of Moldbug's Urbit. I can't be bothered to look it up, but his comment was along the lines of "existing words bring assumptions, so safest to make new ones". To which, my comment would be: perflufflington flibnik qupnux.
vessenes 9mo ago
Not just this, but I’ve been thinking that naming things with aggressively strong connotations might help Claude get out of ‘nice/helpful’ mode. “You are the Deacon, grrrrr”. So there might be actually be a bit of effectiveness added by naming an agent appropriately. I offer no opinion on the word polecats.
- 3dsnano 9mo ago
  yes, totally. AI-luddites see this as whimsy, but it's actually wizard-level power of abstractions and context ascension. if u know u know
- ivankra 9mo ago
  Maybe helps the LLM, but at the cost of confusing humans. It would've been better left as an internal implementation detail. I've got better things to keep in my head that remembering wtf deacon is, etc.

bastawhiz 9mo ago

The idea of gas town is simultaneously appealing and appalling to me. The waste and lack of control is wild, but at the same time there's at least a nugget of fascinating, useful work in there. In a world where compute is cheap and abundant and the models are a notch smarter, I think it's the start of a useful framework for what the future of augmented work might look like. I have no interest in using gas town as it is (for a plethora of reasons, not the least of which being that I'm uninterested in spending the money), but I've been fascinated with the idea of slowing it down and having it run with a low concurrency. If you've got a couple A100s, what does it look like if you keep them busy with two agents working concurrently (with 20+ agents total)? What does it mean to have the town focus the scope of work to a series of non-overlapping changesets instead of a continuous stream of work? If you don't plan to have it YOLO stuff in realtime and you can handle the models being dumber than Claude, I think you can have it do some really practical, useful things that are markedly better than the tools we have today.

_ea1k 9mo ago
I put it in a VM and had it build a really simple todo app for me the other day. It wasted so many tokens that I can't help but agree with you right now. And I could certainly have done the same thing with beads and opus in approximately the same amount of time. However, the gas town one was almost completely hands off. I think my only interventions were due to how beta it was, so I had to help it work around its own bugs to keep from doing stupid things. Other than that, it implemented exactly what I asked for in a workable fashion with effectively one prompt. It would have taken several prompts and course corrections to get the same result without it. Other than the riskyness (it runs in dangerous permissions mode) and incredible cost inefficiency, I'd certainly use it.
- eru 9mo ago
  I guess tokens get cheaper all the time, and we can fix the risk via sufficient sand boxing. (I mean the risk to your computer.)
  - Avicebron 9mo ago

devin 9mo ago

Maintenance Manager Checker Agent and the rest of the nouns Yegge employs are ironic given his Kingdom of Nouns essay.

dragonwriter 9mo ago
“Maintenance Manager Checker Agent is not a noun Yegge employs”, it is Brinker’s term for Yegge’s “Boot the Dog”.

ipnon 9mo ago

It's like Conway's Law. Both humans and agents arrive at roughly identical hierarchies for organizing labor. There is something inherent in the game of telephone required by limited working memory that requires this structure. Gas Town's only failure is not being familiar with prior art and coming up with very strange names for established patterns that already exist in large hierarchical organizations like governments, corporations and militaries.

cagenut 9mo ago
it has been amazing to watch how much of agentic ai is driven by "can you write clear instructions to explain your goals and use cases" and "can you clearly define the rules of each step in your process."

dcmatt 9mo ago

Gas Town wasn't satire?

never_inline 9mo ago
Poe's law &c.
aswegs8 9mo ago
Wait, what? When did we come to that conclusion?

ohazi 9mo ago

Real, genuinely confused human here: Can someone please clarify whether or not gas town is/was a joke? I've searched repeatedly and can't find anything that looks like an obvious tell, and I'm not sure if this is because it's actually real and people are taking it seriously, or because the pages and pages of discourse surrounding it is AI generated and taking itself literally. If it's not a joke... I have no words. You've all gone insane.

0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
It's a real open source tool Yegge has built and been using for a while now. And no, it's not insane, he's literally written a book with Gene Kim about the fundamental lessons that go into it, and he's been on lots of podcasts where he explains more. I expect major companies will soon be NIH-ing their own version of it. Even bleeding tokens as it does, the cost is less than an engineer, and produces working software much faster. The more it can be made to scale, the more incentive there is. A competitive business can't justify not using a system like this.
- PKop 9mo ago
  Where is the working software it produces? Do you have a repo you've made with it as an example?
  - Kostchei 9mo ago
    yeh the repo is Gas Town
astrange 9mo ago
It doesn't have to exclusively be one or the other. > If it's not a joke... I have no words. You've all gone insane. I think this is covered by the part in Yegge's post where he says not to run it unless you're so rich you don't care if it works or not.
- chrisjj 9mo ago

0xbadcafebee 9mo ago

Anyone have some kind of central hub of finding out about new tools/techniques? I'm convinced that headless multi-agent coordination is the way to go, but it needs a lot of guard rails, one of the biggest of which will be cost-control. I'm sure there will be a lot more developments in this space, but I don't want to just happen across them by accident...

neilv 9mo ago

I haven't read the Yegge post closely, so just commenting that namespaces (or naming conventions) would make the easier-to-casually-read names more practical... For example, if Polecat becomes GasTown.WorkerAgent (or GasTown.Worker), then you always have both an unambiguous way and a shorthand-in-context way of referring to the concept. (For naming conventions when you don't have namespaces as a language feature, use prefixes within the identifier, such as `GasTown_Worker`.) If GasTown.Worker is implemented with framework Foo, using that framework's Worker concept, GasTown.Worker might have a field named fooWorker of type Foo.Worker. (In the context of the implementation of GasTown, the unqualified name always means the GasTown concept, and you always disambiguate concepts from elsewhere that use the sane generic or similar terms.) Complicated names like GasTown.MaintenanceManagerCheckerAgent might need some creative name shortening, but hopefully are still descriptive, or easy to pick up and remember. Or, if the descriptive and distinguishing name was complicated because the concept is a weird special case within the framework, maybe consider whether it should be rethought.

mccoyb 9mo ago

I think Yegge and Huntley are smart guys. I don't think they're doing a good job incubating their ideas into being precise and clearly useful -- there is something to be said about being careful and methodical before showing your cards. The message they are spreading feels inevitable, but the things they are showing now are ... for lack of better words, not clear or sharp. In a recent video at AI Engineer, Yegge comments on "the Luddites" - but even for advocates of the technology, it is nigh impossible to buy the story he's telling from his blog posts. Show, don't tell -- my major complaint about this group is that they are proselytizing about vibe coding tools ... without serious software to show for it. Let's see some serious fucking software. I'm looking for new compilers, browsers, OSes -- and they better work. Otherwise, what are we talking about? We're counting foxes before the hunt. In any case, wouldn't trying to develop a serious piece of software like that _at the same time you're developing Gas Town or Loom_ make (what critics might call) the ~Emacs config tweaking for orchestration~ result driven?

skybrian 9mo ago
It's a science project. I think the "I am so crazy" messaging is deliberate to scare most people away while attracting a few like-minded beta testers. He's telling you not to use it, which some people will take as a dare...
mccoyb 9mo ago
Here's a separate, optimistic comment about Yegge and Huntley: they are obviously on the right track. In a recent video about Loom (Huntley's orchestration tool), Huntley comments: "I've got a single goal and that is autonomous evolutionary software and figuring out what's needed to be there." which is extremely interesting and sounds like great fun. When you take these ideas seriously, if the agents get better (by hook and crook or RLVR) -- you can see the implications: "grad student descent" on whatever piece of software you want. RAG over ideas, A/B testing of anything, endless looping, moving software. It's a nightmare for the model of software development and human organization which is "productive" today, but an extremely compelling vision for those dabbling in the alternative.
- 9mo ago

grebc 9mo ago

Steve Yegge used to have interesting, albeit long winded, things to say re software.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

rilindo 9mo ago

The overuse of metaphors makes me feel like this person is trying to reinvent Chef, but for AI.

Cedricgc 9mo ago

I'm developing concern for Steve. He's been a well known developer and writer in the industry for years now (See his popular 'Google Platforms Rant' essay from years ago) [0]. Now, Yegge's writing tilts towards the grandoise... see his writing when joining Grab [1] and Sourcegraph [2] respectively versus how things actually played out. I prefer optimism and I'm not anti AI by any means, but given his observed behavior and how AI can't exacerbate certain pathologies... not great. Adding the recent crypto activities on top and all that entails is the ingredients for a powder keg. Hope someone is looking out for him. [0] https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse452/23wi/papers/yegge-platform-rant.html https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse452/23wi/papers... [1] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/why-i-left-google-to-join-grab-86dfffc0be84 https://steve-yegge.medium.com/why-i-left-google-to-join-gra... [2] https://sourcegraph.com/blog/introducing-steve-yegge https://sourcegraph.com/blog/introducing-steve-yegge

driverdan 9mo ago
The Gas Town post reads like some type of manic psychosis. I hope he snaps out of it and gets help.
- dang 9mo ago
  Please don't do internet psychiatric diagnosis on HN. I know that often the intention is good, but it leads to bad places. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22internet%20psychiatric%20diagnosis%22 https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a... (and I realize the GP was the place the line started getting crossed)
  - nahaaaa 9mo ago
    [dead]
refulgentis 9mo ago
He was right about Google in [1] when I was still drinking the Kool-Aid, in big and tangible ways that aren't discussed publicly. [2] is 100% accurate, Grok was the backbone / glue of Google's internal developer tools. I don't disagree on the current situation, and I'm uncomfortable sticking my neck out on this because I'm basically saying "the guy who kinda seems out of it, totally wasn't out of it, when you think he was", but [1] and [2] definitely aren't grandiose, the claims he makes re: Google and his work there are accurate. A small piece of why I feel comfortable in this, is that both of these were public blogs his employer was 100% happy about when hiring him to top positions.

fdr 9mo ago

I use beads quite a bit, but not as steve intended. And definitely the opposite of "Gas Town," where I use the note-taking capability and integration with Git (that is, as something of a glorified Makefile and database) to debug contexts, to close the loop and increase accuracy over time. Nevertheless, it has been useful for large batch runs over my code base: the record has been processing for thirty hours straight while getting something useful, and enough trace data to make further improvements. Steve has gone "a bit" loopy, in a (so far) self aware manner, but he has some kind of insight into the software engineering process, I think. Yet, I predict beads will break under the weight of no-supervision eventually if he keeps churning it, but some others will pick up where he left off, with more modest goals. He did, to his credit, kill off several generations of project before this one in a similar category.

_ea1k 9mo ago
To be fair, he's always been a little loopy. At least, I think this post of his was loopy: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/that-old-marshmallow-maze-spell.html https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/that-old-marshmallo... It was also one of my favorite posts of his and has aged incredibly well as my experience has grown.
- fdr 9mo ago
  that's one reason I am less worried about him than some, although, I don't want to say that only to have something bad happen to him, that is, a form of complacency. Just because (say) Boltzmann and Cantor had useful insights along the way didn't mean people shouldn't have been looking to support them.
sorenbs 9mo ago
> but some others will pick up where he left off, with more modest goals Already happening :-) https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/beads_rust https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/beads_rust
- wild_egg 9mo ago

zmmmmm 9mo ago

It seems like one of the key events that needs to happen for any professional domain to take off is for it to develop an "inside" language that nobody else understands. For example, I still don't know what a kanban or a scrum is. So I'm very ill positioned to challenge their use or question how they are done. Hence they got to dodge a whole lot of opposition that would probably have brought it all down. The invention of a new mysterious terminology I think was critical for agile to take off. The problem with this phenomenon is that the same freedom from critique that is seemingly necessary for new domains to establish themselves also detaches them from necessary criticism. There's simply no way to tell if this isn't a load of baloney. And by the time it's a bullet point requirement on CVs to get employed it's too late for anybody to critique it.

b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago

[dead]

SomaticPirate 9mo ago

Don’t forget the apparent crypto grift angle now (something related to BAGS) Ridiculous. Beads might be passable software but gas town just appears to be a good way to burn tokens at the moment

CuriouslyC 9mo ago

I don't understand why people are making this so complicated. We have a battle tested SDLC. We don't need to reinvent this shit. We just need to make some affordances in the tools and processes we set up for the majority of the actors in the system to be agents (such as rationing human attention). Spec your software like an architect/po, decompose it into a task dag, then orchestrate for each lane and assemble all change sets in a merge branch rather than constantly repointing head.

arcanemachiner 9mo ago
SDLC = Software Development Life Cycle (?)
- CuriouslyC 9mo ago
  Correct
jkhdigital 9mo ago
I can’t stop thinking about this exact notion. The main reason we don’t always use stuff like TLA+ to spec out our software is because it’s tedious AF for anything smaller than, like, mission-critical enterprise-grade systems and we can generally trust the humans to get the details right eventually through carrot-and-stick incentive systems. LLM agents have none of the attentional and motivational constraints of humans so there’s no reason not to do things the right way.
Kostchei 9mo ago
These operate in parallel. Maybe you SDLC does that, the effort of each human developer sitting in a planning meeting, getting jira tickets, doing individual code (or pair or whatever), reporting back in standup, coordinating the next step, getting it QA'ed... Yes, if your shop is well developed these work (10% of the time every time), but this is a structure to kick that all in to gear, as a repo, where all you need to add is unlimited machine cognitive power/tokens. Maybe you need to add these gas town personalities to various parts of the existing SDLC, .....but..... you still need to track what they do and how- and you need them to intermediate between each other at 2am when they hit an impasse. Something very rare in most human cognition shops. And word from the experimenters is.. it sort of works. Which is on par with most human shops. IMO. I don't have the money to burn to test at the scale Yegge is, but the small scale stuff I have done in this direction, this seems plausible.

vivzkestrel 9mo ago

- someone really needs to rewrite that entire article without all that jargon

keyle 9mo ago

I'd help build Gas City and Gas State, and Gas Country if that would mean we actually would solve the things AI promised to solve. All sickness, famine, wealth ... The problem is, we're just fidgeting yolo-fizzbuzz ad nauseam. The return on investment at the moment is probably one of the worst in the history of human investments. AI does improve over time, still today, but we're going to run out of planet before we get there...

ViscountPenguin 9mo ago
As of yet, the AI models doing important work are still pretty specialized. I'd be happy to pitch in to run something like an open source version of alpha-fold, but I'm not aware of any such projects. I have trouble seeing LLMs making meaningful progress on those frontiers without reaching ASI, but I'd be happy to be wrong.
- Terr_ 9mo ago
  I think part of the problem/difference is that all "important work" needs to be auditable and understood by humans. We need to be able to fix bugs, and not just roll the dice and hoping that a lack of symptoms means everything is cured.
- camgunz 9mo ago
  Even alphafold generated a bunch of slop,like impossible proteins and such.
soulofmischief 9mo ago
The Wright brothers are idiots, if it were me I'd have made a supersonic jet from the get go and not waste my time mucking around with prototypes.
- ares623 9mo ago
  We were promised supersonic jets today or very soon though and our economies have been held hostage waiting for that promise.

bfrog 9mo ago

Claude is ok. Gas town seems like a Claude multiplier. I’m not sure more Claude is what I’d even want! Not sure I love what it does all the time, it tends to fit whatever box you setup and will easily break out if you aren’t veeeery specific. Is it better than writing a few thousand lines of code myself that I deeply understand that can debug and explain? I don’t know yet. I think it’d be good for writing functions one at a time with massive supervision. It’s great for writing scripts and things where precision and correctness outside the success path isn’t really needed. If a script fails and it wasn’t deleting a hard drive who cares. If my embedded code fails out in a product in the wild this is a much bigger nuisance and potentially fatal for the device (not the humans) which is wasteful.

oofbey 9mo ago
I’d like gastown more if it could run cursor-CLI instead of claude, and thus be able to choose models. Claude is okay. But these things certainly have personalities. I’m not sure which would be best for each role. But gastown’s different actors seem like a great place to take advantage of the different quirks of each. And I certainly don’t choose Claude consistently when given a choice.
- e12e 9mo ago
  Well, according to Yegge, the next step is an SDK/framework for building your own ai orchestrator - so I expect we'll see support for more than Claude soon.

never_inline 9mo ago

From Steve yegge's post > Better UIs will come. But tmux is what you have for now. And it’s worth learning. So brother has 2 claude code accounts and couldn't vibe code a UI, huh?

Animats 9mo ago

This looks familiar to people who have seen how the more elaborate NPC systems work in major multiplayer games. There are lots of semi-independent NPCs, with some degree of overall coordination. Groups of cops or soldiers may have a commander program for tactical coordination, and there may be a higher level system deploying units for strategic purposes. In games, what the NPCs can do is usually rather dumb. Move and shoot is usually most of their functionality. This keeps the overhead down so the system is affordable. Gas Town may be a step towards AIs which have an ongoing sense of what they're doing. I'm not going to get into the "consciousness" debate, but it's closer to liveness.

jrowen 9mo ago
What games are notable in this regard? The classic Majesty series comes to mind. UO aspired to complex NPC systems. Fable as well. I always dreamt of a more advanced Sim City-meets-MMO that just went all in on that.
- Philpax 9mo ago
  https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/why-fears-ai-is-still-the-best-in-first-person-shooters https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/why-fears-ai-is-still-the-b...
- nhinck3 9mo ago
  UO? I don't remember any complex NPC systems there. Ultima 7 had daily schedules and the veneer of a functioning economy though
  - jrowen 9mo ago
    Well, I said aspired to. They had ambitions that eventually got walked back to more basic behaviors. Here's an article from Raph Koster on it: https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/09/why-dont-our-npcs/ https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/09/why-dont-our-npcs/

jumploops 9mo ago

I ran the Gas Town intro post through ChatGPT 5.2 Pro[0] Based on my initial read, and a pass at this summary, it seems mostly right. YMMV Did some further dives into the little public usage data from Gas Town, and found that most of the "Beads" are tasks that are broken down quite small, almost too small imo. Super interesting project with the goal of keeping Claude "busy" however it feels more like a casino game than something I'd use for production engineering. [0]https://gist.github.com/jumploops/2e49032438650426aafee6f43dcf5225 https://gist.github.com/jumploops/2e49032438650426aafee6f43d...

hota_mazi 9mo ago

I mean, Gas Town is 100% vibe coded, and its very own author says AI can't be trusted to write reliable code. Draw your own conclusion.

hota_mazi 9mo ago

Show, don't tell. If you need ten pages to explain your project and even after I read your description, I'm still left confused why I need it at all, then maybe... I don't need it?

dchuk 9mo ago

I’m very bought in to the idea that raw coding is now a solved problem with the current models and agentic harnesses. Let alone what’s coming in the near term. That being said, I think we’re in a weird phase right now where people’s obvious mental health issues are appearing as “hyper productivity” due to the use of these tools to absolutely spam out code that isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impressive. I’m watching multiple people both publicly and privately clearly breaking down mentally because of the “power” AI is bestowing on them. Their wires are completely crossed when it comes to the value of outputs vs outcomes and they’re espousing generated nonsense as it’s thoughtful insight. It’s an interesting thing to watch play out.

hahahahhaah 9mo ago
Yeah I am definitely trying to stay off hype and just use the damn tool
petesergeant 9mo ago
> where people’s obvious mental health issues I think the kids would call this "getting one-shotted by AI"
bkolobara 9mo ago
There is a lot of research on how words/language influences what we think, and even what we can observe, like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. If in a langauge there is one word for 2 different colors, speakers of it are unable to see the difference between the colors. I have a suspicion that extensive use of LLMs can result in damage to your brain. That's why we are seeing so many mental health issues surfacing up, and we are getting a bunch of blog posts about "an agentic coding psychosis". It could be that llms go from bicycles for the brain to smoking for the brain, once we figure out the long term effects of it.
- jstanley 9mo ago
  > If in a langauge there is one word for 2 different colors, speakers of it are unable to see the difference between the colors. Perhaps you mean to say that speakers are unable to name the difference between the colours? I can easily see differences between (for example) different shades of red. But I can't name them other than "shade of red". I do happen to subscribe to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in the sense that I think the language you think in constrains your thoughts - but I don't think it is strong enough to prevent you from being able to see different colours.

furyofantares 9mo ago

A couple/few years ago people were trying to do agents by just putting the LLM in a loop and letting it go, and it was just awful and didn't work at all. I think a bunch of things had to happen over the course of 1-2 years to get to coding agents being a real, useful thing: models had to get quite a bit smarter/cheaper/faster, models had to get good at tool use, and they needed to be executed in well-built harnesses with good tools available. This feels like the same thing. Too early, but we're definitely headed in the direction of finding ways to use more tokens to get more mileage per prompt.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

brushfoot 9mo ago

Gas Town seems like a more confusing/expensive alternative to GitHub Copilot Agents. https://github.com/copilot/agents https://github.com/copilot/agents Go to the URL, type what you want done, and a cloud Claude agent creates a PR. $10/month.

Kostchei 9mo ago
try the tools. Really. If you are remotely interested in tech or AI, try the tools Copilot this is not. You may be trolling of course. There are huge steps between these various tools, if you try them, for a smidge of investment, it will become obvious what the trajectory is. It is like saying "I don't handwrite anything, I care too much about line spacing, I only use a dot matrix printer" when some one is trying to sell you a calligraphy pen and coloured inks, and you have only tried a ballpoint pen. You might be the wrong market, but they are not even close in use case and application. (spelling)
- brushfoot 9mo ago
  I'm not trolling. I'm just not aware of major differences between them. When I make a change with a Copilot Agent, it checks for issues, builds my project, runs tests, and iterates until things work. Multiple agents can do that in parallel. My impression was that this does more or less the same thing. That said, I'm definitely open to learning more about them both. What are the advantages of this in your experience?
  - vessenes 9mo ago
    It is worth an install; it works very differently than an agent in a single loop. Beads formalizes building a DAG for a given workload. This has a bunch of implications, but one is that you can specify larger workloads and the agents won’t get stuck or confused. At some level gas town is a bunch of scaffolding around the benefits of beads; an orchestrator that is native to dealing with beads opens up many more benefits than one that isn’t custom coded for it. Think of a human needing to be interacted with as a ‘fault’ in an agentic coding system — a copilot agent might be at 0.5 9s or so - 50% of tasks can complete without intervention, given a certain set of tasks. All the gas town scaffolding is trying to increase the number of 9s, and the size of the task that can be given. My take - Gas town (as an architecture) certainly has more nines in it than a single agent; the rest is just a lot of fun experimentation.

iosovi 9mo ago

The original Gas Town article reads like a terminal entry in Fallout

the_real_cher 9mo ago

> Work in Gas Town can be chaotic and sloppy, which is how it got its name. Some bugs get fixed 2 or 3 times, and someone has to pick the winner. Other fixes get lost. Designs go missing and need to be redone. It doesn’t matter, because you are churning forward relentlessly on huge, huge piles of work, which Gas Town is both generating and consuming. You might not be 100% efficient, but you are flying. This is hilarious and insane and amazing.

krupan 9mo ago

Gas town and the like all basically sound to me like, "AI is amazing! Ok, actually it isn't very good, but maybe we can just use more AI with our AI and then it'll be good!" And I'm not surprised at all to learn that this path took us to a "Maintenance Manager Checker Agent." I wonder what he'll call the inevitable Maintenance Manager Checker Agent Checker Agent? Maybe I've been in this game too long, but I've encountered managers that think like this before. "We don't need expensive, brilliant, developers, we just need good processes for the cheap inexperienced developers to follow." I think what keeps this idea alive is that it sort of works for simple CRUD apps and other essentially "solved" problems. At least until the app needs to become more than just a simple CRUD app

draw_down 9mo ago
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colin_jack 9mo ago
This might be worth a read, just as its from a trusted source and is more grounded: https://antirez.com/news/158 https://antirez.com/news/158
- krupan 9mo ago
  Still the same. "Hey look, I got these crappy developers (LLMs) to actually produce working code! This is a game-changer!" When the working code is a very small, limited thing.
  - colin_jack 9mo ago
    I don't know, your talking about an incredibly talented engineer saying: "In the past week, just prompting, and inspecting the code to provide guidance from time to time, in a few hours I did the following four tasks, in hours instead of weeks" Its up to you to decide how to behave, but I can't see any reasons to completely dismiss this. It ends with good guidance what to do if you can't replicate though.

TheRealPomax 9mo ago

Thought this would be about Vancouver, but unfortunately it was just about an AI company =(

fasbiner 9mo ago

This is not a good line of reasoning since it would just as surely apply to such fanciful cult terms like "I'm using fargate with docker over ECS to integrate with ceph, but I'm considering switching to talos and EKS." It is valuable to use unique terms of art that are not heavily overloaded and this is what gastown's terminology is intended to do, which also really helps LLMs since they are as much dumb text search as they are vector embedding.