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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
by 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 agoThey’re part of Steve’s art project, they just don’t realise it.
- saidarembrace 9mo agoFor better or worse, we are making history.
- Xmd5a 9mo ago> OK! That was like half a dozen great reasons not to use Gas Town. If I haven’t got rid of you yet, then I guess you’re one of the crazy ones. Hang on. This will be a long and complex ride. I’ve tried to go super top-down and simplify as much as I can, but it’s a bit of a textbook.
- michaelcampbell 9mo agoYegge's been around a long, long time and this is about within a standard deviation of his normal writings, at least in style. I haven't read much of his LLM/AI related stuff, but none of Gas Town left me with any sort of "huh" reaction, knowing the author.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- tikhonj 9mo agoA sense of art and whimsy and experimentation is less compelling when it's jumping on the hypest of hype-trains. I'd love to see more folk art in programming, but Gas Town is closer to fucking Beeple than anything charming.
- bdcravens 9mo ago> I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. Fear over what it means if it works.
- mrkeen 9mo agoI work in a typical web app company which does accounting/banking etc. A couple of days ago I was sitting in a meeting of 10-15 devs, discussing our AI agents. People were raising issues and brainstorming ways around the problems with AI. How to make the AI better. Our devs were occupied doing AI things, not accounting/banking things. If the time savings were as promised, we should have been 3 devs (with the remaining devs replaced by 7-10 AI agents) discussing accounting/banking. If Gas Town succeeds, it will just be the next toy we play with instead of doing our jobs.
- square_usual 9mo agoIsn't that fun though? We get paid to fuck around. People say AI is putting devs out of jobs, I say we're getting paid to play with them and see if there's any value there. This is no different from the dev tools boom of the ZIRP era: I remember having several sprints worth of work just integrating the latest dev tool whose sales team won our execs over. This is only partly tongue in cheek :P
- stronglikedan 9mo agoPlaying with new toys is part of doing my job. In my shop, we call them "ooh shiny"'s. Most devs are in the same boat, but I feel bad for those that aren't.
- turtlebits 9mo agoWho wants to do grunt work when you can play architect to a bunch of robots? Its like the ultimate RTS, plus you get paid.
- bdcravens 9mo agoSounds like more of an issue of corporate meeting culture.
- 9mo ago
- tracerbulletx 9mo agoIts because people are treating the experiment like a serious path forward for their business.
- Johnny_Bonk 9mo agoYeah it's unbelievably tiresome, endless complaints from people pushing up their glasses complaining, ITS A PROJECT ABOUT POLECATS CALLED GAS TOWN MADE FOR FUN, read that again, either admire it and enjoy it or quit the umpteenth complaint about vibecoding.
- pydry 9mo ago>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. Remember the days when people experimented with and talked about things that werent LLMs? I used to go to a lot of industry events and I really enjoyed hearing about the diversity of different things people worked on both as a hobby and at work. Now it's all LLMs all the time and it's so goddamn tedious.
- Ronsenshi 9mo ago> I used to go to a lot of industry events and I really enjoyed hearing about the diversity of different things people worked on both as a hobby and at work. I go to tech meetups regularly. The speed at which any conversation end up on the topic of AI is extremely grating to me. No more discussions about interesting problems and creative solutions that people come up with. It's all just AI, agentic, vibe code. At what point are we going to see the loss of practical skills if people keep on relying on LLMs for all their thinking?
- Analemma_ 9mo agoIt's like the entire software industry is gambling on "LLMs will get better faster than human skills will decay, so they will be good enough to clean up their own slop before things really fall apart". I can't even say that's definitely a losing bet-- it could very well happen-- but boy does it seem risky to go all-in on it.
- FeteCommuniste 9mo agoSome of the heads like Altman seem to be putting all their chips in the "AGI in [single-digit number] years" pile.
- FridgeSeal 9mo agoOn one hand, it’s extremely tiring having to put up with that section of our industry. On the other, if a large portion of the industry goes all in, and it _doesn’t_ pay off and craters them, maybe the overhyping will move onto something else and we can go back to having an interesting, actually-nice-to-be-in-industry!
- wrs 9mo agoPerhaps it was his followup post about how people are lining up to throw millions of VC dollars at his bizarre whimsical fever dream that disturbs people? I’m all for arts funding, but…
- square_usual 9mo agoIsn't the point that he refused them? VCs can be dumb (see the crypto hype, even the recent inflated AI raises) so I wouldn't put too much stock in what they think is valuable.
- hyperpape 9mo ago> If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment: So, Steve has the big scary "YOU WILL DIE" statements in there, but he also has this: > I went ahead and built what’s next. First I predicted it, back in March, in Revenge of the Junior Developer. I predicted someone would lash the Claude Code camels together into chariots, and that is exactly what I’ve done with Gas Town. I’ve tamed them to where you can use 20–30 at once, productively, on a sustained basis. "What's next"? Not an experiment. A prediction about how we'll work. The word "productively"? "Productively" is not just "a big fun experiment." "Productively" is what you say when you've got something people should use. Even when he's giving the warnings, he says things like "If you have any doubt whatsoever, then you can’t use it" implying that it's ready for the right sort of person to use, or "Working effectively in Gas Town involves committing to vibe coding.", implying that working effectively with it is possible. Every day, I go on Hacker News, and see the responses to a post where someone has an inconsistent message in their blog post like this. If you say two different and contradictory things, and do not very explicitly resolve them, and say which one is the final answer, you will get blamed for both things you said, and you will not be entitled to complain about it, because you did it to yourself.
- drewbug01 9mo ago> If you say two different and contradictory things, and do not very explicitly resolve them, and say which one is the final answer, you will get blamed for both things you said, and you will not be entitled to complain about it, because you did it to yourself. Our industry is held back in so many ways by engineers clinging to black-and-white thinking. Sometimes there isn’t a “final” answer, and sometimes there is no “right” answer. Sometimes two conflicting ideas can be “true” and “correct” simultaneously. It would do us a world of good to get comfortable with that.
- AtlasBarfed 9mo agoYeah where he probably Burns like a million dollars of money. Just for fun!
- walthamstow 9mo agoHe's paying $600 a month for 3x Claude Max subs. It's in his article.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- toraway 9mo ago…and now funded by a $GAS crypto coin on the BAGS platform so it even pays for itself! https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-249b924a621a https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-...
- walthamstow 9mo agoWhat a tasty disclosure section that is
- SomaticPirate 9mo agoIt isn't though. It crossed the chasm when Steve (who I would like to think is somewhat comfortable after writing a book, holding a director level position at several startups) decided to endorse an outright crypto pump and dump. When he decided to monetize the eyeballs on the project instead of anything related to the engineering. Which, of course, Steve isn't smart enough to understand (in his own words) and he recommends you not buy but he still makes a tidy profit from it. Its a memecoin now... that has a software project attached to it. Anything related to engineering died the day he failed to disavow the crypto BS and instead starting shrilling it. What happened to engineers not calling out BS as BS.
- ewoodrich 9mo agoOkay yeah, not great... https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-249b924a621a https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-...
- lovich 9mo agoMy favorite part about that is gas town is supposedly so productive that this guys sleep patterns are affected by how much work he’s doing, but he took the time to physically go to a bank to get a 5 figure payout. It makes it difficult to believe that gas town is actually producing anything of value. I also lol at his bitching about how the bank didn’t let him do the transactions instantly as he describes himself how much of a scam this seems and how the worst thing is his bank account being drained, like banks don’t have a self interest in protecting their clientele from such scams.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- CuriouslyC 9mo agoI like gastown's moxie, it's fun, and seems kind of tongue in cheek. What I don't like is people me-tooing gastown as some breakthrough in orchestration. I also don't like how people are doing the same thing for ralph. In truth, what I hate is people dogpiling thoughtlessly on things, and only caring about what social media has told them to care about. This tendency makes me get warm tingles at the thought of the end of the world. Agent smith was right about humanity.
- FuckButtons 9mo agoI mean, isn’t the whole point of Ralph that it’s an allusion to “I’m in danger” because Claude in a for loop can do your job?
- CuriouslyC 9mo agoI believe the intent was that he's dumb but persistent.
- aprilthird2021 9mo agoNo, Ralph is famously dumb and needs lots of hand-holding and explanations of things most people think are very simple and can hold very little in his head at once. But that's often enough to loop over and over again and eventually finish a task
- JamesTRexx 9mo ago"our industry has lost its sense of whimsy" The first thing I thought as I read his post and saw the images of the weasels was that he should make a game of it. Maybe name it Bitborn.
- itsafarqueue 9mo agoIt’s not the whimsy. It’s that the whimsy is laced with casual disdain, a touch too much “let me buy you a stick of gum and show you how to chew it”, a frustrated tenor never stated but dog whistled “you dumb fucks”. A soft sharp stink of someone very smart shoving that fact in your face as they evangelise “the obvious truth” you’re too stupid to see. And maybe he’s even right. But the reaction is to the flavour of chip on the shoulder delivery mixed into an otherwise fun piece.
- cap11235 9mo agoDon't forget a bit of crypto! People are being way to nice going "I don't understand, but ...". Fuck him.
- ares623 9mo agoIt's a "let them eat cake" write up.
- NedF 9mo ago[dead]
- freedomben 9mo agoLinks to Steve's writeup for Gas Town for those who don't have them yet: [Medium post]: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04 https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d... [HN Discussion]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46458936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46458936
- matkoniecz 9mo agoAnd https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-249b924a621a https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-... where you can read about its author scamming people
- FergusArgyll 9mo agoI don't understand what's "scammy" about a rugpull. What did the "investors" expect? That lolcoin would become a cash flow positive business and disburse dividends?
- matkoniecz 9mo agoThe part where you lie to people and falsely describe it as investing and promise/imply/mention profits. Rugpull is a scam by definition, being confused why scam is scammy seems weird.
- ludicity 9mo agoI thought it was harmless(ish) fun, but David Gerard put out a post stating that Yegge used Gas Town to push out a crypto project that rug pulled his supporters, while he personally walked away with something between $50K to $100K from memory. I suppose that has little to do with the technical merits of the work, but it's such a bad look, and it makes everyone boosting this stuff seem exactly as dysregulated/unwise as they've appeared to many engineers for a while. I met Sean Goedecke for lunch a few weeks ago, who uses LLMs a bunch, and is clearly a serious adult, but half the folks being shoved in front of everyone are behaving totally manic and people are cheering them on. Absolutely blows my mind to watch. https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vibe-coding-goes-crypto-scam/ https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vib...
- skybrian 9mo agoThat was very weird. In the post where he was arguably "shilling," he seems to have signposted pretty well that it was dumb, but he will take the money they offered: > $GAS is not equity and does not give you any ownership interest in Gas Town or my work. This post is for informational purposes only and is not a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any token. Crypto markets are volatile and speculative — do not risk money you can’t afford to lose. ... > Note: The next few sections are about online gambling in all its forms, where “investing” is the buy-and-hold long-form “acceptable” form of gambling because it’s tied to world GDP growth. Cryptocurrencies are subject to wild swings and spikes, and the currency tied to Gas Town is on a wild swing up. But it’s still gambling, and this stuff is only for people who are into that… which is not me, and should probably not be you either. In the next post he said he wasn't going to shill it any more, and then the price collapsed and people sent him death threats on Twitter. It probably would have collapsed anyway. Perhaps there was supposedly some implicit bargain that he shouldn't take the money if he wasn't going to shill? Well, there's certainly no rule saying you have to do that. I think he's not very much to blame for taking the money from degenerate gamblers, and the cryptocurrency idiots are mostly to blame for their own mistakes.
- dpatterbee 9mo agoI'm fairly certain those disclaimers were added after he got some pushback from the original post.
- Barrin92 9mo ago>it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative There's no art (or engineering) in this and the only provocative thing about it is that Yegge apparently decided to turn it into a crypto scam. I like the intersection of engineering and art but I prefer if it includes both actual engineering and art, 100 rabbits (100r.co) is a good example of it, not a blog post with 15 AI generated images in it that advocates some unholy combination of gambling, vibe coding and cryptocurrency crap.
- guelo 9mo agoThis is just not true. Yegge is serious and thinks Gas Town is the next big thing.
- sailfast 9mo agoI didn't read this article as hate at all, FWIW. It was a pretty measured review of what it is and what it isn't with some much clearer diagrams of the mental models.
- cap11235 9mo ago[flagged]
- q3k 9mo agoIt reads like the ramblings of a smart person experiencing a psychotic episode.
- wahnfrieden 9mo agoFirst Yegge read?
- antonvs 9mo agoThe best thing about LLMs is that they can summarize Yegge posts to extract any actually useful content.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- rulelet 9mo agoWe have a different take than Gastown. If AI behaves unreliably and unpredictably, maybe the problem is the ask. So we looked at backend code and decided it was time to bring in more declarative programming. We are already halfway there with declarative frontend (React) and declarative database (SQL). Functional programming is an answer, but functional programming didnt replace object oriented programming because of practical reasons. So even if the super serious engineers are serious, they should watch their back. Eventually enough guardrails will be created or even the ask will change enough for a lot of automation to happen. And make no mistake, it is automation no different than having automated testing replace armies of manual testing or code generation or procedural generation or any other machine method. And who is going to be left with jobs? People who embrace the change, not people who lament for the good old days or who can't adapt. Sucks but just how the world works. Sit on the bleeding edge or be burned. Yes there is an "enough" but I suspect enough is around people willing to look at Gastown or even make their own Gastown, not the other side.
- DonHopkins 9mo agoHi mediaman! I'm totally there with you and Steve on the whimsy and experimentation! And your tolerant attitude gives me the Dutch courage to post this. I've been reading Yegge since the "Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™" days -- his rantings on Lisp, Emacs, and the Eval Empire shaped how I approach programming. His pro-LLM-coding rants were direct inspiration for my own work on MOOLLM. The guy has my deep respect, and I'm intrigued by his recent work on Sourcegraph and Gas Town. Gas Town and MOOLLM are siblings from that same Eval Empire -- both oriented along the Axis of Eval, both transgressively treating LLMs as universal interpreters. MOOLLM immanentizes Eval Incarnate -- https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/eval/EVAL-INCARNATE-FRAMEWORK.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/eval/E... -- where skills are programs, the LLM is eval(), and play is but the first step of the "Play Learn Lift" methodology: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/play-learn-lift https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/play-le.... The difference is resource constraints. Yegge has token abundance; I'm paying out of pocket. So where Gas Town explores "what if tokens were free?" (20-30 Claude instances overnight), MOOLLM explores "what if every token mattered?" Many agents, many turns, one LLM call. To address wordswords2's concern about "no metrics or statistics" -- I agree that's a gap in Gas Town. MOOLLM makes falsifiable claims with receipts. Last night I ran an Amsterdam Fluxx Marathon stress test: 116+ turns, 4 characters (120+ character-turns per LLM call), complex social dynamics on top of dynamic rule-changing game mechanics. Rubric-scored 94/100. The run files exist. Anyone can audit. qcnguy's critique ("same thing multiplied by ten thousand") is exactly the kind of specific feedback that helps systems improve. I wrote a detailed analysis comparing the two approaches -- intellectual lineage (Self, Minsky's K-lines, The Sims, LambdaMOO), the "vibecoded" problem (MOOLLM is LLM-generated but rigorously iterated, not ship-and-hope), and why "carrier pigeon" IPC architecture is a dark pattern when LLMs can simulate many agents at the speed of light. an0malous raises a real fear about bosses thinking "throw agents at it" replaces engineering. Both systems agree: design becomes the bottleneck. Gas Town says "keep the engine fed with more plans." MOOLLM says "design IS the point -- make it richer." Different answers, same problem. lowbloodsugar mentions building a "proper, robust, engineering version" -- I'd love to compare notes. csallen is right that "future" doesn't mean "production-grade today." Analysis: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/GASTOWN-VS-MOOLLM-ANALYSIS.md https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/GASTOW... MOOLLM repo: https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm Happy to discuss tradeoffs or hear where my claims don't hold up. Falsifiable criticism welcome -- that's how systems improve.
- vanderZwan 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. Because I actually have an arts degree and I know the equivalent of a con artist in a rich people arts gallery bullshitting their way into money when I see one. And the "pushing and crossing boundaries" argument has been abused as a pathetic defense to hide behind shallowness in the art world for longer than anyone in this discussion board has been alive. It's not provocative when it's utterly predictable, and in this case the "art" is "take the most absurd parody of AI culture and play it straight". Gee whiz how "creative" and "provocative".
- DonHopkins 9mo agoHey, I didn't get a harumph out of that VSE crossing his arms at me! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2Bp8SqYrnE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2Bp8SqYrnE
- joquarky 9mo ago> 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. The gold rush brogrammers took over. They only care about money and they have displaced most of the more whimsical (but competent) "nerds" over the past decade.
- PKop 9mo ago> it's clear that this is a big fun experiment. No it's not clear, because at every turn we're told we're supposed to take it seriously, that there's something there there and that's it's a very real hint at some very real future not whimsical nonsense made for a laugh. You can see this in Steve's writing, calling out the non-believers. Then when you call the bluff, well "it's just a prank bro chill out." > It pushes and crosses boundaries What does this mean? This is fluff talk nonsense. Something that's burning through thousands of dollars, producing what exactly?, is deserving of our respect why?
- HDThoreaun 9mo agoWhy can't you take experiments seriously? It's a prediction of what the future could look like, not a production ready tool. If youre problem with it is "they took our jobs" sure that makes sense, but if youre problem is that it is a crappy tool then youre not looking at it correctly.
- inadequatespace 9mo ago> 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. Yes, and using it a justification to offshore/ layoff