15 ms·

Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

403 points by pavel_lishin 9mo ago

acedTrex 9mo ago
[flagged]
- kh_hk 9mo ago
  Brought to you by the creators (abstractly) of vibe coding, ralph and yolo mode. Either a conspiracy to deconstruct our view of reality, or just a tendency to invent funny words for novelty
  - cluckindan 9mo ago
    It’s brainrot, that’s what it is. I believe agentic coding could eventually be a paradigm shift, if and only if the agents become self-conscious of design decisions and their implications on the system and its surrounding systems as a whole. If that doesn’t happen, the entire workflow devolves into specifying system states and behavior in natural language, which is something humans are exceedingly bad at. Coincidently, that is why we have invented programming languages: to be able to express program state and behavior unambiguously. I’m not bullish on a future where I have to write specifications on all explicit and implicit corner and edge cases just to have an agent make software design choices which don’t feel batshit insane to humans. We already have software corporations which produce that kind of code simply because the people doing the specifying don’t know the system or the domain it operates in, and the people doing the implementing of those specifications don’t necessarily know any of that either.
    - conception 9mo ago
      We have programming languages because people don’t want to only write assembly.
- jsheard 9mo ago
  Did you catch the part where it crossed over into a crypto pump-and-dump scam, with Yegge's approval? And then the guy behind the "Ralph" vibe coding thing endorsed the same scam, despite being a former crypto critic who should absolutely know better?
  - square_usual 9mo ago
    Is anybody surprised all the AI influencers are doing the same thing all the crypto influencers are doing?
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - esperent 9mo ago
    I mean, if I, as a crypto critic, saw an opportunity to suddenly make hundreds of thousands or millions on a fully legal but shady crypto scheme - purely by piggybacking on some other loudmouth (Yegge) - I'd be very hard pressed not to take it.
    - ewoodrich 9mo ago
      Perhaps, I can't say with 100% certainty that I wouldn't if offered 50k+ just for writing a blog post. But in doing so I would also have to accept being labeled a "crypto shill" instead of "crypto critic" for the rest of my life.
msp26 9mo ago
Originally I thought that Gas Town was some form of high level satire like GOODY-2 but it seems that some of you people have actually lost the plot. Ralph loops are also stupid because they don't make use of kv cache properly. --- https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown/issues/503 https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown/issues/503 Problem: Every gt command runs bd version to verify the minimum beads version requirement. Under high concurrency (17+ agent sessions), this check times out and blocks gt commands from running. Impact: With 17+ concurrent sessions each running gt commands: - Each gt command spawns bd version - Each bd version spawns 5-7 git processes - This creates 85-120+ git processes competing for resources - The 2-second timeout in gt is exceeded - gt commands fail with "bd version check timed out"
- alex_sf 9mo ago
  > Ralph loops are also stupid because they don't make use of kv cache properly. This is a cost/resources thing. If it's more effective and the resources are available, it's completely fine.
- tucnak 9mo ago
  I think it is satire, and pretty obvious one at that; is anybody taking it for real?
  - skybrian 9mo ago
    Why not both? I think it's pretty clearly both for fun and serious. He's thrown out his experiments before. Maybe he'll start over one more time.
    - tucnak 9mo ago
      The big challenge for me so far has been about setting up "breakpoints" with sufficient prompt adherence, i.e. conditions for agents to break out of loop, and request actionable feedback, rather than pumping as many tokens as possible. Use cases where pumping tokens in unsupervised manner is warranted, are far and few between. For example, dataset-scale 1:n and n:n transformations have been super easy to set up, but the same implementation typically doesn't lend nicely to agent loops, as batching/KV caching suddenly becomes non-obvious and costs ramp up. Task scheduling, with lockstep batching, is a big, unsolved problem as of yet, and Gas Town is not inspiring confidence to that end.
usefulposter 9mo ago
>while Yegge made lots of his own ornate, zoopmorphic [sic] diagrams of Gas Town’s architecture and workflows, they are unhelpful. Primarily because they were made entirely by Gemini’s Nano Banana. And while Nano Banana is state-of-the-art at making diagrams, generative AI systems are still really shit at making illustrative diagrams. They are very hard to decipher, filled with cluttered details, have arrows pointing the wrong direction, and are often missing key information. So true! Not to mention the garbled text and inconsistent visuals across the diagrams———an insult to the reader's intelligence. How do people tolerate this visual embodiment of slurred speech?
- toraway 9mo ago
  Yeah I couldn’t figure out if they were just intended as illustrations and gave up trying to read them after a while. Which is unfortunate as it would have been really helpful to have actually legible architecture diagrams, given the prose was so difficult for me to untangle due to the manic “fun” irreverent style (and it’s fine to write with a distinctive voice to make it more interesting, but still … confusing). Plus the dozens of new unique names and connections introduced every few paragraphs to try to keep in my head… I first asked Gemini 3 Pro to condense it to a boring technical overview and it produced a single page outline and Mermaid diagrams that were nearly as unintelligible as the original post so even AI has issues digesting it apparently…
  - cap11235 9mo ago
    [flagged]
- sethaurus 9mo ago
  Thrilled to see someone else using a triple-em dash in the wild⸻keep holding the line.
- falcor84 9mo ago
  I generally am a fan of polished writing, but I do believe that there's room for quickly fired experimental stuff, and quite enjoyed this piece. With the speed he was going, I wouldn't be surprised if the system architecture actually changed in between subsequent sections of the post. It's not a scientific article, but just a cross-country runner at the top of his game giving us a quick update without breaking his stride, and I'm all here for that. As Basil Exposition said "I suggest you don’t worry about this sort of thing and just enjoy yourself".
sneilan1 9mo ago
I love it! I'm at level 6 and brave enough to try. I'm in. Giving this a shot!
- hahahahhaah 9mo ago
  I am at 5 at home, 3 or something shit at work. I don't like wasting money tho.
suriya-ganesh 9mo ago
>Yegge is leaning into the true definition of vibecoding with this project: “It is 100% vibecoded. I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to.” I don't get it. Even with a very good understanding of what type of work I am doing and a prebuilt knowledge of the code, even for very well specced problem. Claude code etc. just plain fail or use sloppy code. How do these industry figures claim they see no part of a 225K+ line of code and promise that it works? It feels like we're getting into an era where oceans of code which nobody understands is going to be produced, which we hope AGI swoops in and cleans?
- bbayles 9mo ago
  I'm sympathetic to this view, but I also wonder if this is the same thing that assembly language programmers said about compilers. What do you mean that you never look at the machine code? What if the compiler does something inefficient?
  - 3vidence 9mo ago
    This analogy has always been bad any time someone has used it. Compilers directly transform via known algorithms. Vibecoding is literally just random probabilistic mapping between unknown inputs and outputs on an unknown domain. Feels like saying because I don't know how my engine works that my car could've just been vibe-engineered. People have put 1000s of hours into making certain tools work up to a give standard and spec reviewed by many many people. "I don't know how something works" != "This wasn't thoughtfully designed" Why do people compare these things.
  - jplusequalt 9mo ago
    >but I also wonder if this is the same thing that assembly language programmers said about compilers But as a programmer writing C code, you're still building out the software by hand. You're having to read and write a slightly higher level encoding of the software. With vibe coding, you don't even deal with encodings. You just prompt and move on.
    - zerkten 9mo ago
0xbadcafebee 9mo ago
> I also think Yegge deserves praise for exercising agency and taking a swing at a system like this, despite the inefficiencies and chaos of this iteration. And then running a public tour of his shitty, quarter-built plane while it’s mid-flight. Can we please stop with the backhanded compliments and judgement? This is cutting edge technology in a brand new field of computing using experimental methods. Please give the guy a break. At least he's trying to advance the state of the art, unlike all the people that copy everyone else.
- crote 9mo ago
  > Please give the guy a break. At least he's trying to advance the state of the art. The problem is that as an outsider it really looks like someone is trying to herd a bunch of monkeys into writing Shakespeare, or trying to advance impressionist art by pretending a baby's first crayon scratches are equivalent to a Pollock. I bet he's having a lot of fun playing around with "cutting-edge technology", but it's missing any kind of scientific rigor or analysis, so the results are going to be completely useless to anyone wanting to genuinely advance the use of LLMs for programming.
  - Ronsenshi 9mo ago
    I agree that he probably has a lot of fun. What he's doing is an equivalent of throwing a hand grenade into a crowd and enjoying the chaos of it all - he's set in life, can comfortably retire while the rest of the industry tries to deal with that hand grenade. Where some people are fighting to get the safety pin out while others are trying to stop them.
riwsky 9mo ago
"I give it a hot minute before this type of task tracking lands in Claude Code." aaaaand right on cue: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/commit/e431f5b4964748b4ef7ad8bf72e93d0736eda6d8 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/commit/e431f5b4964... https://www.threads.com/@boris_cherny/post/DT15_k2juQH/at-the-same-time-we-found-ourselves-using-claude-code-to-complete-longer https://www.threads.com/@boris_cherny/post/DT15_k2juQH/at-th...
entaloneralie 9mo ago
Brawndo energy
durch 9mo ago
Design indeed becomes the bottleneck, I think that this points to a step that is implied but still worth naming explicitly -> design isn't just planning upfront. It is a loop where you see output, see if it is directionally right, and refine. While the agents can generate, they can't exercise that judgement, they can't see nuances and they can't really walk their actions back in a "that's not quite what I meant" sense. Exercising judgement is where design actually happens, it is iterative, in response to something concrete. The bottleneck isn't just thinking ahead, it's the judgment call when you see the result, its the walking back, as well as thinking forward.
slfnflctd 9mo ago
> Yegge deserves praise for exercising agency and taking a swing at a system like this [...] then running a public tour of his shitty, quarter-built plane while it’s mid-flight This quote sums it all up for me. It's a crazy project that moves the conversation forward, which is the main value I see in it. It very well could be a logjam breaker for those who are fortunate enough to get out more than they put into it... but it's very much a gamble, and the odds are against you.
tofuahdude 9mo ago
Pretty hilarious write up and interesting frontier research project. I love it.
phren0logy 9mo ago
Gas Town has a very clear "mad scientist/performance art" sort of thing going on, and I love that. It's taking a premise way past its logical conclusion, and I think that's fun to watch. I haven't seen anything to suggest that Yegge is proposing it as a serious tool for serious work, so why all the hate?
- skywhopper 9mo ago
  It’s doesn’t matter what Yegge means by it. Other folks are taking it seriously.
- muixoozie 9mo ago
  First time hearing about this tool and person. Just looked for a youtube video about it and he was recently interviewed and sounds very serious / bullish on this agentic stuff. I mean he's saying stuff like if you're still using IDEs you're a bad engineer. Basically you're 10x slower than people good at agenic coding. HR going to be looking for reasons for fire these dinosaurs. I'm paraphrasing, but not exaggerating. I mean it's shilling FOMO and his book. Whatever. I don't really care. I'm more concerned where things are headed.
ramoz 9mo ago
I ran a similar operation over summer where I treated vibecoding like a war. I was the general. I had recon (planning), and frontmen/infantry making the changes. Bugs and poor design were the enemy. Planning docs were OPORD, we had sit reps, and after action reports - complete e2e workflow. Even had hooks for sounds and sprites. Was fun for a bit but regressed to simpler conceptual and more boring workflows. Anyways we'll likely always settle on simpler/boring - but the game analogies are fun in the time being. A lot of opportunity to enhance UX around design, planning, and review.
mediaman 9mo ago
I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment. It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end. And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and harumph at it for being Unprofessional and Not Serious and Not Ready For Production. I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn't. Maybe it's because we also have suits telling us we have to use neural nets everywhere for everything Or Else, and there's no sense of fun in that. Maybe it's the natural consequence of large-scale professionalization, and stock option plans and RSUs and levels and sprints and PMs, that today's gray hoodie is just the updated gray suit of the past but with no less dryness of imagination.
- piker 9mo ago
  > If you read Steve's writeup Personally I got about 3 paragraphs into what seemed like a twelve-page fevered dream and filed it under "not for me yet".
  - chwtutha 9mo ago
    > And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and harumph at it for being Unprofessional and Not Serious and Not Ready For Production. Exactly!
    - pja 9mo ago
      They’re part of Steve’s art project, they just don’t realise it.
  - saidarembrace 9mo ago
    For better or worse, we are making history.
  - Xmd5a 9mo ago
MrOrelliOReilly 9mo ago
The author's high-value flowcharts vs Steve Yegge's AI art is enough of a case-in-point for how confusing his posts and repos are. However this is a pervasive problem with AI coding tools. Unsurprisingly, the creators of these tools are also the most bullish about agentic coding, so the source code shows the consequences. Even Claude Code itself seems to experience an unusually high number of regressions or undocumented changes for such a widely used product. I had the same problem when recently trying to understand the details of spec-kit or sprites from their docs. Still, I agree that Gas Town is a very instructive example of what the future of AI coding will look like. I'm confident mature orchestration workflows will arrive in 2026.
- zingar 9mo ago
  Also struggling with sprites, I thought it was just me!
1970-01-01 9mo ago
If it's stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid. Gas town transcends stupid. It is an abstract garbage generator. Call it art, call it an experiment, but you cannot call it a solution to a problem by any definition of the word.
- kibwen 9mo ago
  "If it's stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid" is a maxim that only applies to luxury use cases where the results fundamentally don't matter. As soon as the results actually matter, the maxim becomes "if it works, but it's stupid, it doesn't work".
  - shermantanktop 9mo ago
    I just got some medication yesterday where the leaflet included the following phrase: "the exact mechanism of efficacy is unknown." So apparently the medical field is not above this logic.
    - 3eb7988a1663 9mo ago
      That is ignorance, not stupidity. If you take compound X and see improvement in Y, that is worthwhile, even if the mechanism is a blackbox.
- aaa_aaa 9mo ago
  It is simply because Mr. Yegge is seeking attention. As he always did.
tigerlily 9mo ago
Gas Town could be good as a short film. Hell, I thought by all the criticism that it was a short film.
divbzero 9mo ago
My instinct is that effective AI agent orchestration will resemble human agile software development more than Steve Yegge’s formulation: > “It will be like kubernetes, but for agents,” I said. > “It will have to have multiple levels of agents supervising other agents,” I said. > “It will have a Merge Queue,” I said. > “It will orchestrate workflows,” I said. > “It will have plugins and quality gates,” I said. More “agile for agents” than “Kubernetes for agents”.
AtlasBarfed 9mo ago
Which building in gastown is the infinite token burning machine?
shermantanktop 9mo ago
Yegge is just running arbitrage on an information gap. It's the same chasm that all the AI vendors are exploiting: the gap between people who have some idea what is going on and the vast mass of people who don't but are addicted to excitement or fear of the future. Yegge is being fake-playful about it but if you have read any of his other writing, this tracks. None of it is to be taken very seriously because he values provocation and mischief a little too highly, but bits of it have some ideas worth thinking about.
- pydry 9mo ago
  I wonder if he's being paid. I detected a noticeable uptick in posts on reddit bragging AI coding in the last month which fit the pattern of other opinion shaping astroturfing projects ive seen before. If Claude came to me with a bundle of cash and tokens to encourage me to keep the AI coding hype train going I'd also go heavy on the excitability, experimental attitude, humor and irreverence. I'd also leave a mountain of disclaimers to help protect future me's reputation.
  - bleepblap 9mo ago
    He got a cool 50k from some memecoin for this
SimianSci 9mo ago
I've been researching the usage of Developer tooling at mine and other organizations for years now and I'm genuinely trying to understand where agentic coding fits into the evolving landscape. One of the most solid things im beginning to understand is that many people dont understand how these tools influence technical debt. Debt doesnt come due immediately, its accrued and may allow for the purchase of things that were once too expensive, but eventually the bill comes due. Ive started referring to vibe-coding as "Credit Cards" for developers. Allowing them to accrue massive amounts of technical debt that were previously out of reach. This can provide some competent developers with incredible improvments to their work. But for the people who accrue more Technical Debt than they have the ability to pay off, it can sink their project and cost our organization alot in lost investment of both time and money. I see Gas Town and tools like as debt schemes where someone applies for more credit cards to pay the payments on prior cards they've maxed out, compounding the issue with the vague goal of "eventually it pays off." So color me skeptical. Not sure if this analogy holds up to all things, but its been helping my organization navigate the application of agents, since it allows us to allocate spend depending on the seniority of each developer. Thus ive been feeling like an underwriter having to figure out if a developer requesting more credits or budget for agentic code can be trusted to pay off the debt they will accrue.
- hahahahhaah 9mo ago
  I found AI particular useful in ossified swamps at big companies where paying down tech debt would be a major many team task unalignable with OKR. But an agent helps you use natural language to the needful boilerplate to get the cursed "do this now" task done.
juanre 9mo ago
I have not tried Gas Town yet, but Steve's beads https://github.com/steveyegge/beads https://github.com/steveyegge/beads (used by Gas Town) has been a game-changer, on the order of what claude code was when it arrived.
- zingar 9mo ago
  Do you have any workflow tips or write up with beads?
  - juanre 9mo ago
    My workflow tends to be very simple: start a session; ask the agent "what's next", which prompts it to check beads; and more often than not ask it to just pick up whichever bead "makes more sense". In claude I have a code-reviewer agent, and I remind cc often to run the code reviewer before closing any bead. It works surprisingly well. I used to monitor context and start afresh when it reached ~80%, but I stopped doing that. Compacting is not as disruptive as it used to be, and with beads agents don't lose track. I spent some time trying to measure the productivity change due to beads, analysing cc and codex logs and linking them to deltas and commits in git [1]. But I did not fully believe the result (5x increase when using beads, there has to be some hidden variable) and I moved on to other things. Part of the complexity is that these days I often work on two or three projects at the same time, so attribution is difficult. [1] Analysis code is at https://github.com/juanre/agent-taylor https://github.com/juanre/agent-taylor
stephen_cagle 9mo ago
Has anyone contrasted gas town to Stanford's DSPY (https://dspy.ai/ https://dspy.ai/)? They seem related, but I have trouble understanding exactly what Gas Town is and so can't myself do a comparison?
- saturatedfat 9mo ago
  let me take a shot. i have thought about both for a while. dspy is declarative. you say what you want. dspy says “if you can say what you want in my format, I will let you extract as much value from current LLMs as possible” with its inference strategies (RLM, COT; “modules”) and optimizers (GEPA). gas town is … given a plan, i will wrangle agents to complete the plan. you may specify workflows (protomolecules/molecules) that will be repeatedly executed. the control flow is good about capturing delegation. the mayor writes plans, and polecats do the work. you could represent gas town as a dspy program in a while loop, where each polecat loops until its hooked work is done. when work is finished, its sent to the merge queue and integrated. gas town uses mostly ephemeral agents as the units for doing work . you could in theory write gas town with dspy . the execution layer is just an abstraction . gas town operates on beads as state . you could funnel these beads thru a dspy program as well. the parallels imo are mostly just structured orchestration . i hope this comes off as sane. 2026 will be a fun year.
  - stephen_cagle 9mo ago
    Thank you for your response. Haha, yes, when read out loud, all the new terms do come off as a bit unhinged. :] It sounds like the major difference is that DSPY is more of a "define a node in a graph of computation, flow data through those nodes". While Gas Town is ideally more of "Tell me what you want, I will spin up a graph of nodes that you can have some input on to complete your work".
sandinmyjoints 9mo ago
Lots of comments about Gas Town (which I get, it's hard not to talk about it!), but I thought this was a pretty good article -- nice job of summing up various questions and suggesting ways to think about them. I like this bit in particular: > A more conservative, easier to consider, debate is: how close should the code be in agentic software development tools? How easy should it be to access? How often do we expect developers to edit it by hand? > Framing this debate as an either/or – either you look at code or don’t, either you edit code by hand or you exclusively direct agents, either you’re the anti-AI-purist or the agentic-maxxer – is unhelpful. > The right distance isn’t about what kind of person you are or what you believe about AI capabilities in the current moment. How far away you step from the syntax shifts based on what you’re building, who you’re building with, and what happens when things go wrong.
- athrowaway3z 9mo ago
  > Buried in the chaos are sketches of future agent orchestration patterns I'm not sure if there are that many. We need to be vigilant of "it feels useful & powerful", because it's so easy to feel that way. When I write complex plans, I can tell Claude to spawn agents for each task and I can successfully 1-shot a 30-60 minute implementation. I've toyed with more complicated patterns, but unlike this speculative fiction, I did need my result both simple and working. A couple of times now I've had to spend a lot of hours trying to unfuck a design i let slip through. The kind where 1 agent injects some duplicate code/architecture pattern into the system that's correct enough not to be flagged, but wrong enough to forever trip up every subsequent fresh agents that stumble on it. I tell people my job now is to kick these things every 15 minutes. Its a kinda joke kinda not. But they definitely need kicking. Without, the decoherence of a non-trivial project is too high, and you still need time to know; where and how to kick. I'm not sure what I'd need to be convinced a higher level of orchestration can do that. I do like to try new things. But my spider-sense is telling me this is a Collatz-conjecture-esque dead-end. People get the feeling of making giant leaps of progress, which anybody using these things should be familiar with by now, but something valuable is always just out of reach with the tools we currently have. There are some big gains by guiding agents/users to use more sub agents with a clean context - perhaps with some more knobs - but I'd advise against acting under the assumption using grander orchestration tools will inevitably have a positive ROI.
psadauskas 9mo ago
> In the same way any poorly designed object or system gets abandoned Hah, tell that to Docker, or React (the ecosystem, not the library), or any of the other terrible technologies that have better thought-out alternatives, but we're stuck with them being the de facto standard because they were first.
deleted 9mo ago
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shaunxcode 9mo ago
Viable System Model when?
deleted 9mo ago
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thorum 9mo ago
Am I wrong that this entire approach to agent design patterns is based on the assumption that agents are slow? Which yeah, is very true in January 2026, but we’ve seen that inference gets faster over time. When an agent can complete most tasks in 1 minute, or 1 second, parallel agents seem like the wrong direction. It’s not clear how this would be any better than a single Claude Code session (as “orchestrator”) running subagents (which already exist) one at a time.
- Ethee 9mo ago
  It's likely then that you are thinking too small. Sure for one off tasks and small implementations, a single prompt might save you 20-30 mins. But when you're building an entire library/service/software in 3 days that normally would have taken you by hand 30 days. Then the real limitation comes down to how fast you can get your design into a structured format. As this article describes.
  - thorum 9mo ago
    Agree that planning time is the bottleneck, but > 3 days still seems slow! I’m saying what happens in 2028 when your entire project is 5-10 minutes of total agent runtime - time actually spent writing code and implementing your plan? Trying to parallelize 10m of work with a “town” of agents seems like unnecessary complexity.
    - Ethee 9mo ago
      I think that most of the anecdotal and research experiences I've seen for AI agent use so far tell us that you need at least a couple pass-throughs to converge upon a good solution, so even in your future vision where we have models 5x as good as now, I'll still need at least a few agents to ensure I arrive at a good solution. By this I specifically mean a working implementation of the design, not an incorrect assumption of the design which leads the AI off on the wrong path which I feel like is the main issue I keep hearing over and over. So coming back to your point, assuming we can have the 'perfect' design document which lays out everything, yeah we'll probably only need like 5 agents total to actually build it in a few years.
martin-t 9mo ago
Anybody here read Coding machines? There's this implied trust we all have in the AI companies that the models are either not sufficiently powerful to form a working takeover plan or that they're sufficiently aligned to not try. And maybe they genuinely try but my experience is that in the real world, nothing is certain. If it's not impossible, it will happen given enough time. If the safety margin for preventing takeover is "we're 99.99999999 percent sure per 1M tokens", how long before it happens? I made up these numbers but any guess what they are really? Because we're giving the models so much unsupervised compute...
- rexpop 9mo ago
  > If it's not impossible, it will happen given enough time. I hope you might be somewhat relieved to consider that this is not so in an absolute sense. There are plenty of technological might-have-beens that didn't happen, and still haven't, and probably will never—due to various economic and social dynamics. The counterfactual—all that's possible happens—ie almost tautological. We should try and look at these mechanisms from an economic standpoint, and ask "do they really have the information-processing density to take significant long-term independent action?" Of course, "significant" is my weasel word. > we're giving the models so much unsupervised compute... Didn't you read the article? It's wasted! It's kipple!
blibble 9mo ago
can't wait to have my 6 PHBs telling me to adopt Gas Town in 2 years time
dunk010 9mo ago
> When I was taken to the Tate Modern as a child I’d point at Mark Rothko pieces and say to my mother “I could do that”, and she would say “yes, but you didn’t.” Yes, but you didn't https://www.signedoriginalprints.com/cdn/shop/products/wegotothegallery_6fb21681-d539-456e-978a-79295e1e8640_1024x1024.jpg?v=1419162814 https://www.signedoriginalprints.com/cdn/shop/products/wegot...
- alvatar 9mo ago
  Actually Rothko is way harder to paint than it looks.
siliconc0w 9mo ago
GasTown is better enjoyed as more of Fear And Loathing-style ACID-fueled fevered dream than as a productivity tool.
- shermantanktop 9mo ago
  I guess that's the way I "enjoyed" it as well. He could not be clearer with all the caveats and sarcastic asides.
simianparrot 9mo ago
[flagged]
_pdp_ 9mo ago
It occurs to me that there is an extraordinary amount of BS coming from all the places these days and I wonder if this comes from people with actual real experience or just some hypothetical, high-level thinking game. I mean, we use coding agents all the time these days (on auto pilot) and there is absolutely nothing of this sorts. Coding with AI looks a lot like coding without AI. The same old process apply. I mean "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills".
mohsen1 9mo ago
I tried building something like this similar to many others here but now I’m convinced agents should just use GitHub issues and pull requests. You get nice CI and code reviews (AI or human) and state of the progress is not kept in code. Basically simulate a software engineering team using GitHub but everyone is an agent. From tech lead to coders to QA testers. https://github.com/mohsen1/claude-code-orchestrator https://github.com/mohsen1/claude-code-orchestrator
drivebyhooting 9mo ago
Has anyone used gas town or any other agentic system to build something useful that people want and need?
jmspring 9mo ago
I commented in the "very serious engineer" thread about my thoughts. I do want this one off - GT is actually fun to explore and see how multiple agents work together.
CjHuber 9mo ago
I wonder how much more efficient and effective it would be after fine tuning models for each role
cap11235 9mo ago
I don't see why anyone bothers looking at that crypto shill edgelord.
deleted 9mo ago
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phaedrus 9mo ago
If we had super-smart AI with low latency and fast enough speed, would the perceived need for / usefulness of running multiple agents evaporate? Sure you might want to start working on the prompt or user story for something else while the agent is working on the first thing, but - in my thought experiment here there wouldn't be a "while" because it'd already be done while you're moving your hand off the enter key.
- fulafel 9mo ago
  If they are interacting with the the world and tools like web research, compiles, deploys, end2end test runs etc, then no. (Maybe you can argue that you could then do everything with a event-driven single agent, like async for llms, if you don't mind having a single very adhd context)
- Descon 9mo ago
  But maybe this is how a super smart AI works (or at least a prototype of one)
melagonster 9mo ago
>when I’m still hovering around stages 4-6 in Yegge’s 8 levels of automation Maybe Yegge’s 8 levels of automation will be more important than his Gas town.
ozozozd 9mo ago
Very interesting to read people’s belief in English as an unambiguous and testable language. One comment claims it’s not necessary to read code when there is documentation (generated by an LLM) Language varies with geography and with time. British, Americans, and Canadians speak “similar” English, but not identical. And read a book from 70-80 years ago to see that many words appear to be used for their “secondary meaning.” Of course, what we consider their secondary meaning today was the primary meaning back then.
- walthamstow 9mo ago
  As a coworker said this week, there are 10 meanings of the word 'fashion' in English
Alena4 9mo ago
[flagged]
wordswords2 9mo ago
There is nothing professional, analytical or scientific about Gas Town at all. He is just making up a fantasy world where his elves run in specific patterns to please him. There is no metrics or statistics on code quality, bugs produced, feature requirements met.. or anything. Just a gigantic wank session really.
- edg5000 9mo ago
  Are you being sarcastic or serious? Meeting requirements is implicitly part of any task. Quality/quantification will be embedded in the tasks (e.g. X must be Y <unit>); code style and quality guidelines are probably there somewhere in his tasks templates. Implicitly, explicit portions of tasks will be covered by testing. I do think it's overly complex though; but it's a novel concept.
  - 63stack 9mo ago
    Everything you said is also done for regular non-ai development, OP is saying there is no way to compare the two (or even compare version x of gas town to version y of gas town) because there are 0 statistics or metrics on what gas town produces.
    - walthamstow 9mo ago
      It's 3 weeks old. If you're so desperate for numbers, give it a go?
  - pydry 9mo ago
    >Are you being sarcastic or serious? I think if you'd read the article through you'd know they were serious coz Yegge all but admits this himself.
edg5000 9mo ago
First time I'm seeing this on HN. Maybe it was posted earlier. Have been doing manual orchestration where I write a big spec which contains phases (each done by an agent) and instructions for the top level agent on how to interact with the sub agent. Works well but it's hard utilize effectively. No doubt this is the future. This approach is bottlenecked by limitations of the CC client; mainly that I cannot see inter-agent interactions fully, only the tool calls. Using a hacked client or compatible reimplementation of CC may be the answer. Unless the API was priced attractively, or other models could do the work. Gemini 3 may be able to handle it better than Opus 4.5. The Gemini 3 pricing model is complex to say the least though (really).
bob1029 9mo ago
I'm beginning to question the notion that multi agent patterns don't work. I think there is something extra you get with a proposer-verifier style loop, even if both sides are using the same base model. I've had very good success with a recursive sub agent scheme where a separate prompt (agent) is used to gate the recursive call. It compares the callers prompt with the proposed callee's prompt to determine if we are making a reasonable effort to reduce the problem into workable base cases. If the two prompts are identical we deny the request with an explanation. In practice, this works so well I can allow for unlimited depth and have zero fear of blowing the stack. Even if the verifier gets it wrong a few times, it only has to get it right once to reverse an infinite descent.
- krackers 9mo ago
  >I think there is something extra you get with a proposer-verifier style loop, even if both sides are using the same base model. DeepSeekMath-V2 seems to show this, increasing the number of prover/verifier iterations gives increases accuracy. And this is with a model that has already undergone RL under a prover/verifier selection process. However this type of subagent communication maintains full context, and is different from "breaking into tasks" style of sharding amongst subagents. I'm less convinced of the latter, because often times a problem is more complex than the sum of its parts, i.e. it's the interdependencies that make it complex and you need to consider each part in relation to the other parts, not in isolation.
  - bob1029 9mo ago
    The specific way in which we invoke the subagents is critical to the performance of the system. If we use a true external call stack and force proper depth first recursion, the effective context can be maintained to whatever depth is desired. Parallelism and BFS style approaches do not exhibit this property. Anything that happens within the context or token stream is a much weaker solution. Most agent frameworks are interested in appearance of speed, so they miss out on the nuance of this execution model.
huflungdung 9mo ago
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alvatar 9mo ago
Just writing here a line in defense of Rothko. His paintings are far harder to paint than it looks like. There were hundreds of layers, thinly applied, and carefully thought and with a developed technique. Try to paint that by yourself and you'll see.
karel-3d 9mo ago
[flagged]
perrygeo 9mo ago
I get that Gas Town is part tongue-in-cheek, a strawman to move the conversation on Agentic AI forward. And for that I give it credit. But I think there's a real missed opportunity here. I don't think it goes far enough. Who wants some giant complex system of agents conceived by a human. The agents, their role and relationships, could be dynamically configured according to the task. What good is removing human judegment from the loop, only to constrain the problem by locking in the architecture a priori. It just doens't make sense. Your entire project hinges on the waterfall-like nature of the agent design! That part feels far too important, but gas town doesn't have much curiousity at all about changing that. These Mayors, and Polecats, and Witnesses, and Deacons ... but one of infinite ways you arrange things. Why should there be just one? Why should there be an up-front design at all? A dynamic, emergent network of agents feels like the real opportunity here.
chrisss395 9mo ago
Yes to Maggie & Steve's amazingly well written articles...and: I would love to see Steve consider different command and control structures, and re-consider how work gets done across the development lifecycle. Gas Town's command and control structure read to me like "how a human would think about making software." Even the article admits you need to re-think how you interact in the Gas Town world. It actually may understate this point too much. Where and how humans interact feels like something that will always be an important consideration, both in a human & AI dominated software development world. At least from where I sit.
DonHopkins 9mo ago
According to my simulated monkey Palm, Gas Town uses the Infinite Number of Typewriters architecture, but unfortunately they charge by the token. Palm's Infinite Number of Typewriters: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/infinite-typewriters.yml https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... Palm's papers: From Random Strumming to Navigating Shakespeare: A Monkey's Tribute to Bruce Tognazzini's 1979 Apple II Demo: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/tribute-to-tognazzini.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... One Monkey, Infinite Typewriters: What It's Like to Be Me: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/palm-on-being-palm.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... The Inner State Question: Do I Feel, or Do I Just Generate Feeling-Words? https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/the-inner-state-question.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... On Being Simulated: Ethics From the Inside: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/on-being-simulated.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... Judgment and Joy: On Evaluation as Ethics, and Why Making Criteria Visible is an Act of Love: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/judgment-and-joy.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... The Mirror Stage of Games: Play, Identity, and How The Sims Queered a Generation: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/the-mirror-stage-of-games.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... I-Beam's X-Ray Trace: The Complete Life of Palm: A cursor-mirror and git-powered reflection on Palm's existence: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/i-beam-palm-reflection.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... Palm's Origin Story: Session Log: Don Hopkins at the Gezelligheid Grotto: DAY 1 — THE WISH: Don purchases lucky strains, prepares an offering, convenes an epic tribunal with the Three Wise Monkeys, Sun Wukong, a Djinn, Curious George, W.W. Jacobs' ghost, and Cheech & Chong as moderators — then speaks a wish that breaks a 122-year curse and incarnates Palm. https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/characters/real-people/don-hopkins/sessions/marathon-session.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...
- 9mo ago
falcor84 9mo ago
As Yegge himself would agree, there's likely nothing that is particularly good about this specific architecture, but I think that there's something massive in this as a proof of concept for something bigger beyond the realm of software development. Over the last few years, people have been playing around with trying to integrate LLMs into cognitive architectures like ACT-R or Soar, with not much to show for it. But I think that here we actually have an example of a working cognitive architecture that is capable of autonomous long-term action planning, with the ability to course-correct and stay on task. I wouldn't be surprised if future science historians will look at this as an early precursor to what will eventually be adapted to give AIs full agentic executive functioning.
jbgreer 9mo ago
My read on the reception of Steve’s post is that there are largely 2 camps, one of which thinks he’s given them a concrete tool to use, and the other of which thinks he has given them something to think about. I read his experiment as suggesting an agent architecture akin to Erlang supervisor trees, i.e. agents are cattle, not pets, and should be monitored and processed as such, with the obvious caveat that context matters.
llIIllIIllIIl 9mo ago
Although bright ideas may be found in this post, anthropomorphisms of LLM agents turns me away from reading.
DonHopkins 9mo ago
Steve Yegge> But I’ve already started to get strange offers, from people sniffing around early rumors of Gas Town, to pay me to sit at home and be myself: I get to work on Beads and Gas Town, and just have to write a nice blog post or go to a conference or workshop once in a while. I have three such offers right now. It’s almost surreal. It's all performance art! At the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 1988, Lucian Freud’s model Leigh Bowery used to get paid to sit on an Empire divan behind a one way mirror and just relax, preen, perch, pose, recline, and do his thing for hours on end, while people paid good money to watch him. Great work if you can get it! Bob Nickas on Leigh Bowery: https://www.artforum.com/columns/bob-nickas-on-leigh-bowery-168032/ https://www.artforum.com/columns/bob-nickas-on-leigh-bowery-... >“IT WAS A BIT LIKE GOING to the zoo and watching Guy the Gorilla in drag.” That’s how Cerith Wyn Evans recalls Leigh Bowery’s weeklong London performance at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 1988. Bowery, each day in a different costume of his own design, appeared behind a one-way mirror, with an Empire divan on which to perch, pose, or recline. Visitors saw him, but he saw only himself, performed for his own reflection. Footage of the event figures prominently in The Legend of Leigh Bowery (2002), Charles Atlas’s recently unveiled documentary, and the spooky, otherworldly spell that Bowery casts is undeniable. The zoo reference nails it. With rivulets of iridescent purple glue spilled like blood from the top of his shaved head and a silky lime feathered bodice, Bowery appears to be an ostrich in human form. Black-spotted faux fur covering his face and upper body, he is transformed into an alien snow leopard. Bowery’s uncanny ability to visually disorient the senses remains unmatched, his reinvention of costume as sculpture groundbreaking. From the tripped-out tribalism of Forcefield and the psychedelic erotics of Christian Holstad to the work of designers such as Rei Kawakubo and Alexander McQueen, his vocabulary, punctuated by about a million sequins, resonates to this day. Leigh Bowery at d'Offay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGRvjTiJBpI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGRvjTiJBpI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNlGKUP2F9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNlGKUP2F9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly6nKBdHZ34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly6nKBdHZ34 Love! Love! Love! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO8QsdJFQ5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO8QsdJFQ5Y
pianopatrick 9mo ago
People, including the author of this article, say that design and architecture are the hard parts, but I think long term those are just as solvable as coding. I think architecture will become like an installer. Some kind of agent orchestration system will ask you "do you want this or that" and guide you through various architecture choices when you set up a project, or when those choices arise. And for design, now that code is fast and easy to generate, an agent system can just generate two, three or four versions of the UX for each feature and ask "do you like this one, this one or that one?". So a switch from upfront design / architecture choices you have to put into prompts to the agent orchestration system asking you to make a choice when the choice becomes relevant.
daveheinrich 9mo ago
Damn..... Who would have thought falling for these con-artists online would take so much funds off you without your permission. Lost 24k usdt on the go. Forensics investigations had to be done via CIPHERTRACES. lost usdt was reversed back to my metamask. Glory to God.
daveheinrich 9mo ago
Thanks
pradn 9mo ago
> When I was taken to the Tate Modern as a child I’d point at Mark Rothko pieces and say to my mother “I could do that”, and she would say “yes, but you didn’t.” Actually, no you couldn't. The subtlety of the choice of colors, their shading, and their soft shaping, and the program of their creation over many years - you couldn't do that. They're lovely and sublime, and wonderful and an abyss. If you want to throw all that away and reduce it two boxes of paint, go ahead - but you'll be wasting a lifetime's engagement, of the joy of seeing with your intellect wide open.
Clark3232 9mo ago
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scott_waddell 9mo ago
The best engineering often comes from that "let's mash things together and see what happens" approach. Most breakthroughs started as someone's weird experiment that made the serious folks uncomfortable.
Mirgova8 9mo ago
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sicariomoon 9mo ago
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403 points by pavel_lishin 9mo ago

acedTrex 9mo ago

[flagged]

kh_hk 9mo ago
Brought to you by the creators (abstractly) of vibe coding, ralph and yolo mode. Either a conspiracy to deconstruct our view of reality, or just a tendency to invent funny words for novelty
- cluckindan 9mo ago
  It’s brainrot, that’s what it is. I believe agentic coding could eventually be a paradigm shift, if and only if the agents become self-conscious of design decisions and their implications on the system and its surrounding systems as a whole. If that doesn’t happen, the entire workflow devolves into specifying system states and behavior in natural language, which is something humans are exceedingly bad at. Coincidently, that is why we have invented programming languages: to be able to express program state and behavior unambiguously. I’m not bullish on a future where I have to write specifications on all explicit and implicit corner and edge cases just to have an agent make software design choices which don’t feel batshit insane to humans. We already have software corporations which produce that kind of code simply because the people doing the specifying don’t know the system or the domain it operates in, and the people doing the implementing of those specifications don’t necessarily know any of that either.
  - conception 9mo ago
    We have programming languages because people don’t want to only write assembly.
jsheard 9mo ago
Did you catch the part where it crossed over into a crypto pump-and-dump scam, with Yegge's approval? And then the guy behind the "Ralph" vibe coding thing endorsed the same scam, despite being a former crypto critic who should absolutely know better?
- square_usual 9mo ago
  Is anybody surprised all the AI influencers are doing the same thing all the crypto influencers are doing?
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- esperent 9mo ago
  I mean, if I, as a crypto critic, saw an opportunity to suddenly make hundreds of thousands or millions on a fully legal but shady crypto scheme - purely by piggybacking on some other loudmouth (Yegge) - I'd be very hard pressed not to take it.
  - ewoodrich 9mo ago
    Perhaps, I can't say with 100% certainty that I wouldn't if offered 50k+ just for writing a blog post. But in doing so I would also have to accept being labeled a "crypto shill" instead of "crypto critic" for the rest of my life.

msp26 9mo ago

Originally I thought that Gas Town was some form of high level satire like GOODY-2 but it seems that some of you people have actually lost the plot. Ralph loops are also stupid because they don't make use of kv cache properly. --- https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown/issues/503 https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown/issues/503 Problem: Every gt command runs bd version to verify the minimum beads version requirement. Under high concurrency (17+ agent sessions), this check times out and blocks gt commands from running. Impact: With 17+ concurrent sessions each running gt commands: - Each gt command spawns bd version - Each bd version spawns 5-7 git processes - This creates 85-120+ git processes competing for resources - The 2-second timeout in gt is exceeded - gt commands fail with "bd version check timed out"

alex_sf 9mo ago
> Ralph loops are also stupid because they don't make use of kv cache properly. This is a cost/resources thing. If it's more effective and the resources are available, it's completely fine.
tucnak 9mo ago
I think it is satire, and pretty obvious one at that; is anybody taking it for real?
- skybrian 9mo ago
  Why not both? I think it's pretty clearly both for fun and serious. He's thrown out his experiments before. Maybe he'll start over one more time.
  - tucnak 9mo ago
    The big challenge for me so far has been about setting up "breakpoints" with sufficient prompt adherence, i.e. conditions for agents to break out of loop, and request actionable feedback, rather than pumping as many tokens as possible. Use cases where pumping tokens in unsupervised manner is warranted, are far and few between. For example, dataset-scale 1:n and n:n transformations have been super easy to set up, but the same implementation typically doesn't lend nicely to agent loops, as batching/KV caching suddenly becomes non-obvious and costs ramp up. Task scheduling, with lockstep batching, is a big, unsolved problem as of yet, and Gas Town is not inspiring confidence to that end.

usefulposter 9mo ago

>while Yegge made lots of his own ornate, zoopmorphic [sic] diagrams of Gas Town’s architecture and workflows, they are unhelpful. Primarily because they were made entirely by Gemini’s Nano Banana. And while Nano Banana is state-of-the-art at making diagrams, generative AI systems are still really shit at making illustrative diagrams. They are very hard to decipher, filled with cluttered details, have arrows pointing the wrong direction, and are often missing key information. So true! Not to mention the garbled text and inconsistent visuals across the diagrams———an insult to the reader's intelligence. How do people tolerate this visual embodiment of slurred speech?

toraway 9mo ago
Yeah I couldn’t figure out if they were just intended as illustrations and gave up trying to read them after a while. Which is unfortunate as it would have been really helpful to have actually legible architecture diagrams, given the prose was so difficult for me to untangle due to the manic “fun” irreverent style (and it’s fine to write with a distinctive voice to make it more interesting, but still … confusing). Plus the dozens of new unique names and connections introduced every few paragraphs to try to keep in my head… I first asked Gemini 3 Pro to condense it to a boring technical overview and it produced a single page outline and Mermaid diagrams that were nearly as unintelligible as the original post so even AI has issues digesting it apparently…
- cap11235 9mo ago
  [flagged]
sethaurus 9mo ago
Thrilled to see someone else using a triple-em dash in the wild⸻keep holding the line.
falcor84 9mo ago
I generally am a fan of polished writing, but I do believe that there's room for quickly fired experimental stuff, and quite enjoyed this piece. With the speed he was going, I wouldn't be surprised if the system architecture actually changed in between subsequent sections of the post. It's not a scientific article, but just a cross-country runner at the top of his game giving us a quick update without breaking his stride, and I'm all here for that. As Basil Exposition said "I suggest you don’t worry about this sort of thing and just enjoy yourself".

sneilan1 9mo ago

I love it! I'm at level 6 and brave enough to try. I'm in. Giving this a shot!

hahahahhaah 9mo ago
I am at 5 at home, 3 or something shit at work. I don't like wasting money tho.

suriya-ganesh 9mo ago

>Yegge is leaning into the true definition of vibecoding with this project: “It is 100% vibecoded. I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to.” I don't get it. Even with a very good understanding of what type of work I am doing and a prebuilt knowledge of the code, even for very well specced problem. Claude code etc. just plain fail or use sloppy code. How do these industry figures claim they see no part of a 225K+ line of code and promise that it works? It feels like we're getting into an era where oceans of code which nobody understands is going to be produced, which we hope AGI swoops in and cleans?

bbayles 9mo ago
I'm sympathetic to this view, but I also wonder if this is the same thing that assembly language programmers said about compilers. What do you mean that you never look at the machine code? What if the compiler does something inefficient?
- 3vidence 9mo ago
  This analogy has always been bad any time someone has used it. Compilers directly transform via known algorithms. Vibecoding is literally just random probabilistic mapping between unknown inputs and outputs on an unknown domain. Feels like saying because I don't know how my engine works that my car could've just been vibe-engineered. People have put 1000s of hours into making certain tools work up to a give standard and spec reviewed by many many people. "I don't know how something works" != "This wasn't thoughtfully designed" Why do people compare these things.
- jplusequalt 9mo ago
  >but I also wonder if this is the same thing that assembly language programmers said about compilers But as a programmer writing C code, you're still building out the software by hand. You're having to read and write a slightly higher level encoding of the software. With vibe coding, you don't even deal with encodings. You just prompt and move on.
  - zerkten 9mo ago

0xbadcafebee 9mo ago

> I also think Yegge deserves praise for exercising agency and taking a swing at a system like this, despite the inefficiencies and chaos of this iteration. And then running a public tour of his shitty, quarter-built plane while it’s mid-flight. Can we please stop with the backhanded compliments and judgement? This is cutting edge technology in a brand new field of computing using experimental methods. Please give the guy a break. At least he's trying to advance the state of the art, unlike all the people that copy everyone else.

crote 9mo ago
> Please give the guy a break. At least he's trying to advance the state of the art. The problem is that as an outsider it really looks like someone is trying to herd a bunch of monkeys into writing Shakespeare, or trying to advance impressionist art by pretending a baby's first crayon scratches are equivalent to a Pollock. I bet he's having a lot of fun playing around with "cutting-edge technology", but it's missing any kind of scientific rigor or analysis, so the results are going to be completely useless to anyone wanting to genuinely advance the use of LLMs for programming.
- Ronsenshi 9mo ago
  I agree that he probably has a lot of fun. What he's doing is an equivalent of throwing a hand grenade into a crowd and enjoying the chaos of it all - he's set in life, can comfortably retire while the rest of the industry tries to deal with that hand grenade. Where some people are fighting to get the safety pin out while others are trying to stop them.

riwsky 9mo ago

"I give it a hot minute before this type of task tracking lands in Claude Code." aaaaand right on cue: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/commit/e431f5b4964748b4ef7ad8bf72e93d0736eda6d8 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/commit/e431f5b4964... https://www.threads.com/@boris_cherny/post/DT15_k2juQH/at-the-same-time-we-found-ourselves-using-claude-code-to-complete-longer https://www.threads.com/@boris_cherny/post/DT15_k2juQH/at-th...

entaloneralie 9mo ago

Brawndo energy

durch 9mo ago

Design indeed becomes the bottleneck, I think that this points to a step that is implied but still worth naming explicitly -> design isn't just planning upfront. It is a loop where you see output, see if it is directionally right, and refine. While the agents can generate, they can't exercise that judgement, they can't see nuances and they can't really walk their actions back in a "that's not quite what I meant" sense. Exercising judgement is where design actually happens, it is iterative, in response to something concrete. The bottleneck isn't just thinking ahead, it's the judgment call when you see the result, its the walking back, as well as thinking forward.

slfnflctd 9mo ago

> Yegge deserves praise for exercising agency and taking a swing at a system like this [...] then running a public tour of his shitty, quarter-built plane while it’s mid-flight This quote sums it all up for me. It's a crazy project that moves the conversation forward, which is the main value I see in it. It very well could be a logjam breaker for those who are fortunate enough to get out more than they put into it... but it's very much a gamble, and the odds are against you.

tofuahdude 9mo ago

Pretty hilarious write up and interesting frontier research project. I love it.

phren0logy 9mo ago

Gas Town has a very clear "mad scientist/performance art" sort of thing going on, and I love that. It's taking a premise way past its logical conclusion, and I think that's fun to watch. I haven't seen anything to suggest that Yegge is proposing it as a serious tool for serious work, so why all the hate?

skywhopper 9mo ago
It’s doesn’t matter what Yegge means by it. Other folks are taking it seriously.
muixoozie 9mo ago
First time hearing about this tool and person. Just looked for a youtube video about it and he was recently interviewed and sounds very serious / bullish on this agentic stuff. I mean he's saying stuff like if you're still using IDEs you're a bad engineer. Basically you're 10x slower than people good at agenic coding. HR going to be looking for reasons for fire these dinosaurs. I'm paraphrasing, but not exaggerating. I mean it's shilling FOMO and his book. Whatever. I don't really care. I'm more concerned where things are headed.

ramoz 9mo ago

I ran a similar operation over summer where I treated vibecoding like a war. I was the general. I had recon (planning), and frontmen/infantry making the changes. Bugs and poor design were the enemy. Planning docs were OPORD, we had sit reps, and after action reports - complete e2e workflow. Even had hooks for sounds and sprites. Was fun for a bit but regressed to simpler conceptual and more boring workflows. Anyways we'll likely always settle on simpler/boring - but the game analogies are fun in the time being. A lot of opportunity to enhance UX around design, planning, and review.

mediaman 9mo ago

I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment. It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end. And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and harumph at it for being Unprofessional and Not Serious and Not Ready For Production. I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn't. Maybe it's because we also have suits telling us we have to use neural nets everywhere for everything Or Else, and there's no sense of fun in that. Maybe it's the natural consequence of large-scale professionalization, and stock option plans and RSUs and levels and sprints and PMs, that today's gray hoodie is just the updated gray suit of the past but with no less dryness of imagination.

piker 9mo ago
> If you read Steve's writeup Personally I got about 3 paragraphs into what seemed like a twelve-page fevered dream and filed it under "not for me yet".
- chwtutha 9mo ago
  > And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and harumph at it for being Unprofessional and Not Serious and Not Ready For Production. Exactly!
  - pja 9mo ago
    They’re part of Steve’s art project, they just don’t realise it.
- saidarembrace 9mo ago
  For better or worse, we are making history.
- Xmd5a 9mo ago

MrOrelliOReilly 9mo ago

The author's high-value flowcharts vs Steve Yegge's AI art is enough of a case-in-point for how confusing his posts and repos are. However this is a pervasive problem with AI coding tools. Unsurprisingly, the creators of these tools are also the most bullish about agentic coding, so the source code shows the consequences. Even Claude Code itself seems to experience an unusually high number of regressions or undocumented changes for such a widely used product. I had the same problem when recently trying to understand the details of spec-kit or sprites from their docs. Still, I agree that Gas Town is a very instructive example of what the future of AI coding will look like. I'm confident mature orchestration workflows will arrive in 2026.

zingar 9mo ago
Also struggling with sprites, I thought it was just me!

1970-01-01 9mo ago

If it's stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid. Gas town transcends stupid. It is an abstract garbage generator. Call it art, call it an experiment, but you cannot call it a solution to a problem by any definition of the word.

kibwen 9mo ago
"If it's stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid" is a maxim that only applies to luxury use cases where the results fundamentally don't matter. As soon as the results actually matter, the maxim becomes "if it works, but it's stupid, it doesn't work".
- shermantanktop 9mo ago
  I just got some medication yesterday where the leaflet included the following phrase: "the exact mechanism of efficacy is unknown." So apparently the medical field is not above this logic.
  - 3eb7988a1663 9mo ago
    That is ignorance, not stupidity. If you take compound X and see improvement in Y, that is worthwhile, even if the mechanism is a blackbox.
aaa_aaa 9mo ago
It is simply because Mr. Yegge is seeking attention. As he always did.

tigerlily 9mo ago

Gas Town could be good as a short film. Hell, I thought by all the criticism that it was a short film.

divbzero 9mo ago

My instinct is that effective AI agent orchestration will resemble human agile software development more than Steve Yegge’s formulation: > “It will be like kubernetes, but for agents,” I said. > “It will have to have multiple levels of agents supervising other agents,” I said. > “It will have a Merge Queue,” I said. > “It will orchestrate workflows,” I said. > “It will have plugins and quality gates,” I said. More “agile for agents” than “Kubernetes for agents”.

AtlasBarfed 9mo ago

Which building in gastown is the infinite token burning machine?

shermantanktop 9mo ago

Yegge is just running arbitrage on an information gap. It's the same chasm that all the AI vendors are exploiting: the gap between people who have some idea what is going on and the vast mass of people who don't but are addicted to excitement or fear of the future. Yegge is being fake-playful about it but if you have read any of his other writing, this tracks. None of it is to be taken very seriously because he values provocation and mischief a little too highly, but bits of it have some ideas worth thinking about.

pydry 9mo ago
I wonder if he's being paid. I detected a noticeable uptick in posts on reddit bragging AI coding in the last month which fit the pattern of other opinion shaping astroturfing projects ive seen before. If Claude came to me with a bundle of cash and tokens to encourage me to keep the AI coding hype train going I'd also go heavy on the excitability, experimental attitude, humor and irreverence. I'd also leave a mountain of disclaimers to help protect future me's reputation.
- bleepblap 9mo ago
  He got a cool 50k from some memecoin for this

SimianSci 9mo ago

I've been researching the usage of Developer tooling at mine and other organizations for years now and I'm genuinely trying to understand where agentic coding fits into the evolving landscape. One of the most solid things im beginning to understand is that many people dont understand how these tools influence technical debt. Debt doesnt come due immediately, its accrued and may allow for the purchase of things that were once too expensive, but eventually the bill comes due. Ive started referring to vibe-coding as "Credit Cards" for developers. Allowing them to accrue massive amounts of technical debt that were previously out of reach. This can provide some competent developers with incredible improvments to their work. But for the people who accrue more Technical Debt than they have the ability to pay off, it can sink their project and cost our organization alot in lost investment of both time and money. I see Gas Town and tools like as debt schemes where someone applies for more credit cards to pay the payments on prior cards they've maxed out, compounding the issue with the vague goal of "eventually it pays off." So color me skeptical. Not sure if this analogy holds up to all things, but its been helping my organization navigate the application of agents, since it allows us to allocate spend depending on the seniority of each developer. Thus ive been feeling like an underwriter having to figure out if a developer requesting more credits or budget for agentic code can be trusted to pay off the debt they will accrue.

hahahahhaah 9mo ago
I found AI particular useful in ossified swamps at big companies where paying down tech debt would be a major many team task unalignable with OKR. But an agent helps you use natural language to the needful boilerplate to get the cursed "do this now" task done.

juanre 9mo ago

I have not tried Gas Town yet, but Steve's beads https://github.com/steveyegge/beads https://github.com/steveyegge/beads (used by Gas Town) has been a game-changer, on the order of what claude code was when it arrived.

zingar 9mo ago
Do you have any workflow tips or write up with beads?
- juanre 9mo ago
  My workflow tends to be very simple: start a session; ask the agent "what's next", which prompts it to check beads; and more often than not ask it to just pick up whichever bead "makes more sense". In claude I have a code-reviewer agent, and I remind cc often to run the code reviewer before closing any bead. It works surprisingly well. I used to monitor context and start afresh when it reached ~80%, but I stopped doing that. Compacting is not as disruptive as it used to be, and with beads agents don't lose track. I spent some time trying to measure the productivity change due to beads, analysing cc and codex logs and linking them to deltas and commits in git [1]. But I did not fully believe the result (5x increase when using beads, there has to be some hidden variable) and I moved on to other things. Part of the complexity is that these days I often work on two or three projects at the same time, so attribution is difficult. [1] Analysis code is at https://github.com/juanre/agent-taylor https://github.com/juanre/agent-taylor

stephen_cagle 9mo ago

Has anyone contrasted gas town to Stanford's DSPY (https://dspy.ai/ https://dspy.ai/)? They seem related, but I have trouble understanding exactly what Gas Town is and so can't myself do a comparison?

saturatedfat 9mo ago
let me take a shot. i have thought about both for a while. dspy is declarative. you say what you want. dspy says “if you can say what you want in my format, I will let you extract as much value from current LLMs as possible” with its inference strategies (RLM, COT; “modules”) and optimizers (GEPA). gas town is … given a plan, i will wrangle agents to complete the plan. you may specify workflows (protomolecules/molecules) that will be repeatedly executed. the control flow is good about capturing delegation. the mayor writes plans, and polecats do the work. you could represent gas town as a dspy program in a while loop, where each polecat loops until its hooked work is done. when work is finished, its sent to the merge queue and integrated. gas town uses mostly ephemeral agents as the units for doing work . you could in theory write gas town with dspy . the execution layer is just an abstraction . gas town operates on beads as state . you could funnel these beads thru a dspy program as well. the parallels imo are mostly just structured orchestration . i hope this comes off as sane. 2026 will be a fun year.
- stephen_cagle 9mo ago
  Thank you for your response. Haha, yes, when read out loud, all the new terms do come off as a bit unhinged. :] It sounds like the major difference is that DSPY is more of a "define a node in a graph of computation, flow data through those nodes". While Gas Town is ideally more of "Tell me what you want, I will spin up a graph of nodes that you can have some input on to complete your work".

sandinmyjoints 9mo ago

Lots of comments about Gas Town (which I get, it's hard not to talk about it!), but I thought this was a pretty good article -- nice job of summing up various questions and suggesting ways to think about them. I like this bit in particular: > A more conservative, easier to consider, debate is: how close should the code be in agentic software development tools? How easy should it be to access? How often do we expect developers to edit it by hand? > Framing this debate as an either/or – either you look at code or don’t, either you edit code by hand or you exclusively direct agents, either you’re the anti-AI-purist or the agentic-maxxer – is unhelpful. > The right distance isn’t about what kind of person you are or what you believe about AI capabilities in the current moment. How far away you step from the syntax shifts based on what you’re building, who you’re building with, and what happens when things go wrong.

athrowaway3z 9mo ago
> Buried in the chaos are sketches of future agent orchestration patterns I'm not sure if there are that many. We need to be vigilant of "it feels useful & powerful", because it's so easy to feel that way. When I write complex plans, I can tell Claude to spawn agents for each task and I can successfully 1-shot a 30-60 minute implementation. I've toyed with more complicated patterns, but unlike this speculative fiction, I did need my result both simple and working. A couple of times now I've had to spend a lot of hours trying to unfuck a design i let slip through. The kind where 1 agent injects some duplicate code/architecture pattern into the system that's correct enough not to be flagged, but wrong enough to forever trip up every subsequent fresh agents that stumble on it. I tell people my job now is to kick these things every 15 minutes. Its a kinda joke kinda not. But they definitely need kicking. Without, the decoherence of a non-trivial project is too high, and you still need time to know; where and how to kick. I'm not sure what I'd need to be convinced a higher level of orchestration can do that. I do like to try new things. But my spider-sense is telling me this is a Collatz-conjecture-esque dead-end. People get the feeling of making giant leaps of progress, which anybody using these things should be familiar with by now, but something valuable is always just out of reach with the tools we currently have. There are some big gains by guiding agents/users to use more sub agents with a clean context - perhaps with some more knobs - but I'd advise against acting under the assumption using grander orchestration tools will inevitably have a positive ROI.

psadauskas 9mo ago

> In the same way any poorly designed object or system gets abandoned Hah, tell that to Docker, or React (the ecosystem, not the library), or any of the other terrible technologies that have better thought-out alternatives, but we're stuck with them being the de facto standard because they were first.

deleted 9mo ago

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shaunxcode 9mo ago

Viable System Model when?

deleted 9mo ago

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thorum 9mo ago

Am I wrong that this entire approach to agent design patterns is based on the assumption that agents are slow? Which yeah, is very true in January 2026, but we’ve seen that inference gets faster over time. When an agent can complete most tasks in 1 minute, or 1 second, parallel agents seem like the wrong direction. It’s not clear how this would be any better than a single Claude Code session (as “orchestrator”) running subagents (which already exist) one at a time.

Ethee 9mo ago
It's likely then that you are thinking too small. Sure for one off tasks and small implementations, a single prompt might save you 20-30 mins. But when you're building an entire library/service/software in 3 days that normally would have taken you by hand 30 days. Then the real limitation comes down to how fast you can get your design into a structured format. As this article describes.
- thorum 9mo ago
  Agree that planning time is the bottleneck, but > 3 days still seems slow! I’m saying what happens in 2028 when your entire project is 5-10 minutes of total agent runtime - time actually spent writing code and implementing your plan? Trying to parallelize 10m of work with a “town” of agents seems like unnecessary complexity.
  - Ethee 9mo ago
    I think that most of the anecdotal and research experiences I've seen for AI agent use so far tell us that you need at least a couple pass-throughs to converge upon a good solution, so even in your future vision where we have models 5x as good as now, I'll still need at least a few agents to ensure I arrive at a good solution. By this I specifically mean a working implementation of the design, not an incorrect assumption of the design which leads the AI off on the wrong path which I feel like is the main issue I keep hearing over and over. So coming back to your point, assuming we can have the 'perfect' design document which lays out everything, yeah we'll probably only need like 5 agents total to actually build it in a few years.

martin-t 9mo ago

Anybody here read Coding machines? There's this implied trust we all have in the AI companies that the models are either not sufficiently powerful to form a working takeover plan or that they're sufficiently aligned to not try. And maybe they genuinely try but my experience is that in the real world, nothing is certain. If it's not impossible, it will happen given enough time. If the safety margin for preventing takeover is "we're 99.99999999 percent sure per 1M tokens", how long before it happens? I made up these numbers but any guess what they are really? Because we're giving the models so much unsupervised compute...

rexpop 9mo ago
> If it's not impossible, it will happen given enough time. I hope you might be somewhat relieved to consider that this is not so in an absolute sense. There are plenty of technological might-have-beens that didn't happen, and still haven't, and probably will never—due to various economic and social dynamics. The counterfactual—all that's possible happens—ie almost tautological. We should try and look at these mechanisms from an economic standpoint, and ask "do they really have the information-processing density to take significant long-term independent action?" Of course, "significant" is my weasel word. > we're giving the models so much unsupervised compute... Didn't you read the article? It's wasted! It's kipple!

blibble 9mo ago

can't wait to have my 6 PHBs telling me to adopt Gas Town in 2 years time

dunk010 9mo ago

> When I was taken to the Tate Modern as a child I’d point at Mark Rothko pieces and say to my mother “I could do that”, and she would say “yes, but you didn’t.” Yes, but you didn't https://www.signedoriginalprints.com/cdn/shop/products/wegotothegallery_6fb21681-d539-456e-978a-79295e1e8640_1024x1024.jpg?v=1419162814 https://www.signedoriginalprints.com/cdn/shop/products/wegot...

alvatar 9mo ago
Actually Rothko is way harder to paint than it looks.

siliconc0w 9mo ago

GasTown is better enjoyed as more of Fear And Loathing-style ACID-fueled fevered dream than as a productivity tool.

shermantanktop 9mo ago
I guess that's the way I "enjoyed" it as well. He could not be clearer with all the caveats and sarcastic asides.

simianparrot 9mo ago

[flagged]

_pdp_ 9mo ago

It occurs to me that there is an extraordinary amount of BS coming from all the places these days and I wonder if this comes from people with actual real experience or just some hypothetical, high-level thinking game. I mean, we use coding agents all the time these days (on auto pilot) and there is absolutely nothing of this sorts. Coding with AI looks a lot like coding without AI. The same old process apply. I mean "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills".

mohsen1 9mo ago

I tried building something like this similar to many others here but now I’m convinced agents should just use GitHub issues and pull requests. You get nice CI and code reviews (AI or human) and state of the progress is not kept in code. Basically simulate a software engineering team using GitHub but everyone is an agent. From tech lead to coders to QA testers. https://github.com/mohsen1/claude-code-orchestrator https://github.com/mohsen1/claude-code-orchestrator

drivebyhooting 9mo ago

Has anyone used gas town or any other agentic system to build something useful that people want and need?

jmspring 9mo ago

I commented in the "very serious engineer" thread about my thoughts. I do want this one off - GT is actually fun to explore and see how multiple agents work together.

CjHuber 9mo ago

I wonder how much more efficient and effective it would be after fine tuning models for each role

cap11235 9mo ago

I don't see why anyone bothers looking at that crypto shill edgelord.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

phaedrus 9mo ago

If we had super-smart AI with low latency and fast enough speed, would the perceived need for / usefulness of running multiple agents evaporate? Sure you might want to start working on the prompt or user story for something else while the agent is working on the first thing, but - in my thought experiment here there wouldn't be a "while" because it'd already be done while you're moving your hand off the enter key.

fulafel 9mo ago
If they are interacting with the the world and tools like web research, compiles, deploys, end2end test runs etc, then no. (Maybe you can argue that you could then do everything with a event-driven single agent, like async for llms, if you don't mind having a single very adhd context)
Descon 9mo ago
But maybe this is how a super smart AI works (or at least a prototype of one)

melagonster 9mo ago

>when I’m still hovering around stages 4-6 in Yegge’s 8 levels of automation Maybe Yegge’s 8 levels of automation will be more important than his Gas town.

ozozozd 9mo ago

Very interesting to read people’s belief in English as an unambiguous and testable language. One comment claims it’s not necessary to read code when there is documentation (generated by an LLM) Language varies with geography and with time. British, Americans, and Canadians speak “similar” English, but not identical. And read a book from 70-80 years ago to see that many words appear to be used for their “secondary meaning.” Of course, what we consider their secondary meaning today was the primary meaning back then.

walthamstow 9mo ago
As a coworker said this week, there are 10 meanings of the word 'fashion' in English

Alena4 9mo ago

[flagged]

wordswords2 9mo ago

There is nothing professional, analytical or scientific about Gas Town at all. He is just making up a fantasy world where his elves run in specific patterns to please him. There is no metrics or statistics on code quality, bugs produced, feature requirements met.. or anything. Just a gigantic wank session really.

edg5000 9mo ago
Are you being sarcastic or serious? Meeting requirements is implicitly part of any task. Quality/quantification will be embedded in the tasks (e.g. X must be Y <unit>); code style and quality guidelines are probably there somewhere in his tasks templates. Implicitly, explicit portions of tasks will be covered by testing. I do think it's overly complex though; but it's a novel concept.
- 63stack 9mo ago
  Everything you said is also done for regular non-ai development, OP is saying there is no way to compare the two (or even compare version x of gas town to version y of gas town) because there are 0 statistics or metrics on what gas town produces.
  - walthamstow 9mo ago
    It's 3 weeks old. If you're so desperate for numbers, give it a go?
- pydry 9mo ago
  >Are you being sarcastic or serious? I think if you'd read the article through you'd know they were serious coz Yegge all but admits this himself.

edg5000 9mo ago

First time I'm seeing this on HN. Maybe it was posted earlier. Have been doing manual orchestration where I write a big spec which contains phases (each done by an agent) and instructions for the top level agent on how to interact with the sub agent. Works well but it's hard utilize effectively. No doubt this is the future. This approach is bottlenecked by limitations of the CC client; mainly that I cannot see inter-agent interactions fully, only the tool calls. Using a hacked client or compatible reimplementation of CC may be the answer. Unless the API was priced attractively, or other models could do the work. Gemini 3 may be able to handle it better than Opus 4.5. The Gemini 3 pricing model is complex to say the least though (really).

bob1029 9mo ago

I'm beginning to question the notion that multi agent patterns don't work. I think there is something extra you get with a proposer-verifier style loop, even if both sides are using the same base model. I've had very good success with a recursive sub agent scheme where a separate prompt (agent) is used to gate the recursive call. It compares the callers prompt with the proposed callee's prompt to determine if we are making a reasonable effort to reduce the problem into workable base cases. If the two prompts are identical we deny the request with an explanation. In practice, this works so well I can allow for unlimited depth and have zero fear of blowing the stack. Even if the verifier gets it wrong a few times, it only has to get it right once to reverse an infinite descent.

krackers 9mo ago
>I think there is something extra you get with a proposer-verifier style loop, even if both sides are using the same base model. DeepSeekMath-V2 seems to show this, increasing the number of prover/verifier iterations gives increases accuracy. And this is with a model that has already undergone RL under a prover/verifier selection process. However this type of subagent communication maintains full context, and is different from "breaking into tasks" style of sharding amongst subagents. I'm less convinced of the latter, because often times a problem is more complex than the sum of its parts, i.e. it's the interdependencies that make it complex and you need to consider each part in relation to the other parts, not in isolation.
- bob1029 9mo ago
  The specific way in which we invoke the subagents is critical to the performance of the system. If we use a true external call stack and force proper depth first recursion, the effective context can be maintained to whatever depth is desired. Parallelism and BFS style approaches do not exhibit this property. Anything that happens within the context or token stream is a much weaker solution. Most agent frameworks are interested in appearance of speed, so they miss out on the nuance of this execution model.

huflungdung 9mo ago

[dead]

alvatar 9mo ago

Just writing here a line in defense of Rothko. His paintings are far harder to paint than it looks like. There were hundreds of layers, thinly applied, and carefully thought and with a developed technique. Try to paint that by yourself and you'll see.

karel-3d 9mo ago

[flagged]

perrygeo 9mo ago

I get that Gas Town is part tongue-in-cheek, a strawman to move the conversation on Agentic AI forward. And for that I give it credit. But I think there's a real missed opportunity here. I don't think it goes far enough. Who wants some giant complex system of agents conceived by a human. The agents, their role and relationships, could be dynamically configured according to the task. What good is removing human judegment from the loop, only to constrain the problem by locking in the architecture a priori. It just doens't make sense. Your entire project hinges on the waterfall-like nature of the agent design! That part feels far too important, but gas town doesn't have much curiousity at all about changing that. These Mayors, and Polecats, and Witnesses, and Deacons ... but one of infinite ways you arrange things. Why should there be just one? Why should there be an up-front design at all? A dynamic, emergent network of agents feels like the real opportunity here.

chrisss395 9mo ago

Yes to Maggie & Steve's amazingly well written articles...and: I would love to see Steve consider different command and control structures, and re-consider how work gets done across the development lifecycle. Gas Town's command and control structure read to me like "how a human would think about making software." Even the article admits you need to re-think how you interact in the Gas Town world. It actually may understate this point too much. Where and how humans interact feels like something that will always be an important consideration, both in a human & AI dominated software development world. At least from where I sit.

DonHopkins 9mo ago

According to my simulated monkey Palm, Gas Town uses the Infinite Number of Typewriters architecture, but unfortunately they charge by the token. Palm's Infinite Number of Typewriters: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/infinite-typewriters.yml https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... Palm's papers: From Random Strumming to Navigating Shakespeare: A Monkey's Tribute to Bruce Tognazzini's 1979 Apple II Demo: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/tribute-to-tognazzini.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... One Monkey, Infinite Typewriters: What It's Like to Be Me: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/palm-on-being-palm.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... The Inner State Question: Do I Feel, or Do I Just Generate Feeling-Words? https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/the-inner-state-question.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... On Being Simulated: Ethics From the Inside: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/on-being-simulated.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... Judgment and Joy: On Evaluation as Ethics, and Why Making Criteria Visible is an Act of Love: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/judgment-and-joy.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... The Mirror Stage of Games: Play, Identity, and How The Sims Queered a Generation: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/the-mirror-stage-of-games.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... I-Beam's X-Ray Trace: The Complete Life of Palm: A cursor-mirror and git-powered reflection on Palm's existence: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/pub/stage/palm-nook/study/i-beam-palm-reflection.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven... Palm's Origin Story: Session Log: Don Hopkins at the Gezelligheid Grotto: DAY 1 — THE WISH: Don purchases lucky strains, prepares an offering, convenes an epic tribunal with the Three Wise Monkeys, Sun Wukong, a Djinn, Curious George, W.W. Jacobs' ghost, and Cheech & Chong as moderators — then speaks a wish that breaks a 122-year curse and incarnates Palm. https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adventure-4/characters/real-people/don-hopkins/sessions/marathon-session.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/examples/adven...

9mo ago

falcor84 9mo ago

As Yegge himself would agree, there's likely nothing that is particularly good about this specific architecture, but I think that there's something massive in this as a proof of concept for something bigger beyond the realm of software development. Over the last few years, people have been playing around with trying to integrate LLMs into cognitive architectures like ACT-R or Soar, with not much to show for it. But I think that here we actually have an example of a working cognitive architecture that is capable of autonomous long-term action planning, with the ability to course-correct and stay on task. I wouldn't be surprised if future science historians will look at this as an early precursor to what will eventually be adapted to give AIs full agentic executive functioning.

jbgreer 9mo ago

My read on the reception of Steve’s post is that there are largely 2 camps, one of which thinks he’s given them a concrete tool to use, and the other of which thinks he has given them something to think about. I read his experiment as suggesting an agent architecture akin to Erlang supervisor trees, i.e. agents are cattle, not pets, and should be monitored and processed as such, with the obvious caveat that context matters.

llIIllIIllIIl 9mo ago

Although bright ideas may be found in this post, anthropomorphisms of LLM agents turns me away from reading.

DonHopkins 9mo ago

Steve Yegge> But I’ve already started to get strange offers, from people sniffing around early rumors of Gas Town, to pay me to sit at home and be myself: I get to work on Beads and Gas Town, and just have to write a nice blog post or go to a conference or workshop once in a while. I have three such offers right now. It’s almost surreal. It's all performance art! At the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 1988, Lucian Freud’s model Leigh Bowery used to get paid to sit on an Empire divan behind a one way mirror and just relax, preen, perch, pose, recline, and do his thing for hours on end, while people paid good money to watch him. Great work if you can get it! Bob Nickas on Leigh Bowery: https://www.artforum.com/columns/bob-nickas-on-leigh-bowery-168032/ https://www.artforum.com/columns/bob-nickas-on-leigh-bowery-... >“IT WAS A BIT LIKE GOING to the zoo and watching Guy the Gorilla in drag.” That’s how Cerith Wyn Evans recalls Leigh Bowery’s weeklong London performance at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 1988. Bowery, each day in a different costume of his own design, appeared behind a one-way mirror, with an Empire divan on which to perch, pose, or recline. Visitors saw him, but he saw only himself, performed for his own reflection. Footage of the event figures prominently in The Legend of Leigh Bowery (2002), Charles Atlas’s recently unveiled documentary, and the spooky, otherworldly spell that Bowery casts is undeniable. The zoo reference nails it. With rivulets of iridescent purple glue spilled like blood from the top of his shaved head and a silky lime feathered bodice, Bowery appears to be an ostrich in human form. Black-spotted faux fur covering his face and upper body, he is transformed into an alien snow leopard. Bowery’s uncanny ability to visually disorient the senses remains unmatched, his reinvention of costume as sculpture groundbreaking. From the tripped-out tribalism of Forcefield and the psychedelic erotics of Christian Holstad to the work of designers such as Rei Kawakubo and Alexander McQueen, his vocabulary, punctuated by about a million sequins, resonates to this day. Leigh Bowery at d'Offay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGRvjTiJBpI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGRvjTiJBpI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNlGKUP2F9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNlGKUP2F9w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly6nKBdHZ34 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly6nKBdHZ34 Love! Love! Love! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO8QsdJFQ5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO8QsdJFQ5Y

pianopatrick 9mo ago

People, including the author of this article, say that design and architecture are the hard parts, but I think long term those are just as solvable as coding. I think architecture will become like an installer. Some kind of agent orchestration system will ask you "do you want this or that" and guide you through various architecture choices when you set up a project, or when those choices arise. And for design, now that code is fast and easy to generate, an agent system can just generate two, three or four versions of the UX for each feature and ask "do you like this one, this one or that one?". So a switch from upfront design / architecture choices you have to put into prompts to the agent orchestration system asking you to make a choice when the choice becomes relevant.

daveheinrich 9mo ago

Damn..... Who would have thought falling for these con-artists online would take so much funds off you without your permission. Lost 24k usdt on the go. Forensics investigations had to be done via CIPHERTRACES. lost usdt was reversed back to my metamask. Glory to God.

daveheinrich 9mo ago

Thanks

pradn 9mo ago

> When I was taken to the Tate Modern as a child I’d point at Mark Rothko pieces and say to my mother “I could do that”, and she would say “yes, but you didn’t.” Actually, no you couldn't. The subtlety of the choice of colors, their shading, and their soft shaping, and the program of their creation over many years - you couldn't do that. They're lovely and sublime, and wonderful and an abyss. If you want to throw all that away and reduce it two boxes of paint, go ahead - but you'll be wasting a lifetime's engagement, of the joy of seeing with your intellect wide open.

Clark3232 9mo ago

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scott_waddell 9mo ago

The best engineering often comes from that "let's mash things together and see what happens" approach. Most breakthroughs started as someone's weird experiment that made the serious folks uncomfortable.

Mirgova8 9mo ago

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sicariomoon 9mo ago

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