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I agree, I’m one of the Very Serious Engineers and I liked Steve’s post when I thought it was sort of tongue in cheek but was horrified to come to the HN commen

I agree, I’m one of the Very Serious Engineers and I liked Steve’s post when I thought it was sort of tongue in cheek but was horrified to come to the HN comments and LinkedIn comments proclaiming Gastown as the future of engineering. There absolutely is a large contingent of engineers who believe this, and it has a real world impact on my job if my bosses think you can just throw a dozen AI agents at our product roadmap and get better productivity than an engineer. This is not whimsical to me, I’m getting burnt out trying to navigate the absurd expectations of investors and executives with the real world engineering concerns of my day to day job.

meowface 9mo ago
It's a half-joke. No need to take it that seriously or that jokingly. It's mostly only grifters and cryptocurrency scammers claiming it's amazing. I think ideas from it will probably partially inspire future, simpler systems.
- wonnage 9mo ago
  It may be a joke in the same way that brogramming was a joke and somehow became an enduring tech bro stereotype
  - adabyron 9mo ago
    Strong agreement with this. The whimsical, fantasy, fun, light hearted things are great until a large enough group of people take them as a serious life motto & then try to push it on everyone else.
    - leoc 9mo ago
      Taking the example of the cryptocurrency boom (as a whole) as the guide, the problem is the interaction of two realities: big money on the table; and the self-fulfilling-prophecy (not to say Ponzi) dynamic of needing people to keep clapping for Tinker-bell, in greater and greater numbers, to keep the line going up. It corrupts whimsical fun and community spirit, it corrupts idealism, and it corrupts technical curiosity.
- lupire 9mo ago
  stevey already made $300K from cryptocurrency grift on Gas Town. Read his blog post about it.
  - wahnfrieden 9mo ago
    Complete with a "Let’s goooooooo!" And FOMO stories about missing out on Bitcoin when he knew about it, so he doesn't want you to miss out on this new opportunity to get "filthy rich" as an "investor" while you still can.
    - wahnfrieden 9mo ago
      More details on the pump and dump scheme he joined in on promoting and drew money from: 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...
      - JasonADrury 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        meowface 9mo ago
        Because you'd be aiding and abetting a pennystock scam.
        JasonADrury 9mo ago
        The difference between bags.fm and pennystock scams is that bags.fm is very obviously not marketed as an investment, but a crowdfunding tool.
        wahnfrieden 9mo ago
        Yegge write a blog post for his readers where he called it an investment and hoped the investors would get “filthy rich”.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
pstuart 9mo ago
AI is such a fun topic -- the hype makes it easy to loath, but as a coder working with Claude I think it's an awesome tool. Gastown looks like a viable avenue for some app development. One of the most interesting things I've noticed about AI development is that it forces one to articulate desired and prohibited behaviors -- a spec becomes a true driving force. Yegge's posts are always hyperbolic and he consistently presents interesting takes on the industry so I'm willing to cut him a buttload of slack.
- dingnuts 9mo ago
  [dead]
- joquarky 9mo ago
  I find it interesting that waterfall is becoming popular again.
  - ctmnt 9mo ago
    I agree, it is really interesting. I think that the main reason, though, is that instead of a waterfall cycle taking weeks or months, it now takes minutes. So it’s the process of waterfall (speccing things out carefully in advance, committing to the plan, assessing the results based on adherence to the plan, etc), but on the time frame of agile.
lowbloodsugar 9mo ago
I too am a Very Serious Engineer but my shock is in the other direction: of course the ideas behind Gas Town are the future of software development and several VSEs I know are developing a proper, robust, engineering version of it that works. As the author of this article here remarks “yes, but Steve did it first”, and it annoys me that if I had written this post nobody would have read it, but also that, because I intend to use it in Very Serious Business ($bns) my version isn’t ready to a actually be published yet. Bravo to Steve for getting these thoughts on paper and the idea built even in such crude form. But “level 8” is real and there will be 9s and 10s and I am really enjoying building my own.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
csallen 9mo ago
> "Gastown as the future of engineering" Note the word "future" not "present". People are making a prediction of where things will go. I haven't seen a single person saying that Gas Town as it exists today is ready for production-grade engineering project.
jmspring 9mo ago
I think Steve's idea of an agent coordinator and the general model could make sense. There is a lot of discussion (and even work from Anthropic, OpenAI, etc) around multiagent workflows. Is Gas Town the implementation? I'm not sure. What is interesting is seeing how this paradigm can help improve one's workflow. There is still a lot of guidance and structuring of prompts / claude.md / whichever files that need to be carefully written. If there is a push for the equivalent of helm charts and crds for gas town, then I will be concerned.
- storystarling 9mo ago
  I ran into this building a similar workflow with LangGraph. The prompt engineering is definitely a pain, but the real bottleneck with the coordinator model turns out to be the compounding context costs. You end up passing the full state history back and forth, so you are paying for the same tokens repeatedly. Between that and the latency from serial round-trips, it becomes very hard to justify in production.
cthalupa 9mo ago
> horrified to come to the HN comments and LinkedIn comments proclaiming Gastown as the future of engineering. I don't spend much time on LinkedIn, but basically every comment I've read on HN is that, at best, Gas Town can pump out a huge amount of "working" code in short timeframes at obscene costs. The overwhelming majority are saying "This is neat, and this might be the rough shape of what comes next in agentic coding, but it's almost certainly not going to be Gas Town itself." I have seen basically no one say that Gas Town is the The Thing.
spacecadet 9mo ago
"I’m getting burnt out trying to navigate the absurd expectations of investors and executives with the real world engineering concerns of my day to day job." Welcome to being a member of a product team who cares beyond just whats on their screen... Honestly there is a humbling moment coming for everyone, it and Im not sure its unemployment.
Treegarden 9mo ago
If your boss is that bad, the correct long-term move is to leave, not to wish technology didn’t advance.
- pxtail 9mo ago
  Your boss and other ones who are asleep someday will wake up too.
dada216 9mo ago
Embrace and use it to your advantage. Tell them nobody knows and understands how these things will actually work long term, that's why there's stuff like gas town, and that the way you see all of this is you can manage this process. What you bring to the table is making sure it will actually work if the tech is safe and sound, reaping the rewards, or protect the business if the tech fails, protecting the company from catastrophic tech failure, telll them that you are uniquely positioned to carry out the balancing act because you are deep in the tech itself. bonus if you explain the uncertainty framing in the business strategy: "because nobody really understands the tech nobody has an advantage, we are all playing on a leveled field, from the big boys at FAANGs to us peasants in normal non-tech enterprises: I am your advantage here if you give me the tools and leverage I need to make this work". if you play this right you'll get the fat bonus whether the tech actually works or not.
bloppe 9mo ago
I feel that yegge captured the mania of the whole operation rather well. If your bosses commit to the idea that 100 memoryless stochastic "polecats" will deliver a long term sustainable business, then there are probably other leadership issues besides this.

meowface 9mo ago

It's a half-joke. No need to take it that seriously or that jokingly. It's mostly only grifters and cryptocurrency scammers claiming it's amazing. I think ideas from it will probably partially inspire future, simpler systems.

wonnage 9mo ago
It may be a joke in the same way that brogramming was a joke and somehow became an enduring tech bro stereotype
- adabyron 9mo ago
  Strong agreement with this. The whimsical, fantasy, fun, light hearted things are great until a large enough group of people take them as a serious life motto & then try to push it on everyone else.
  - leoc 9mo ago
    Taking the example of the cryptocurrency boom (as a whole) as the guide, the problem is the interaction of two realities: big money on the table; and the self-fulfilling-prophecy (not to say Ponzi) dynamic of needing people to keep clapping for Tinker-bell, in greater and greater numbers, to keep the line going up. It corrupts whimsical fun and community spirit, it corrupts idealism, and it corrupts technical curiosity.
lupire 9mo ago
stevey already made $300K from cryptocurrency grift on Gas Town. Read his blog post about it.
- wahnfrieden 9mo ago
  Complete with a "Let’s goooooooo!" And FOMO stories about missing out on Bitcoin when he knew about it, so he doesn't want you to miss out on this new opportunity to get "filthy rich" as an "investor" while you still can.
  - wahnfrieden 9mo ago
    More details on the pump and dump scheme he joined in on promoting and drew money from: 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...
    - JasonADrury 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      - meowface 9mo ago
        Because you'd be aiding and abetting a pennystock scam.
        JasonADrury 9mo ago
        The difference between bags.fm and pennystock scams is that bags.fm is very obviously not marketed as an investment, but a crowdfunding tool.
        wahnfrieden 9mo ago
        Yegge write a blog post for his readers where he called it an investment and hoped the investors would get “filthy rich”.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

pstuart 9mo ago

AI is such a fun topic -- the hype makes it easy to loath, but as a coder working with Claude I think it's an awesome tool. Gastown looks like a viable avenue for some app development. One of the most interesting things I've noticed about AI development is that it forces one to articulate desired and prohibited behaviors -- a spec becomes a true driving force. Yegge's posts are always hyperbolic and he consistently presents interesting takes on the industry so I'm willing to cut him a buttload of slack.

dingnuts 9mo ago
[dead]
joquarky 9mo ago
I find it interesting that waterfall is becoming popular again.
- ctmnt 9mo ago
  I agree, it is really interesting. I think that the main reason, though, is that instead of a waterfall cycle taking weeks or months, it now takes minutes. So it’s the process of waterfall (speccing things out carefully in advance, committing to the plan, assessing the results based on adherence to the plan, etc), but on the time frame of agile.

lowbloodsugar 9mo ago

I too am a Very Serious Engineer but my shock is in the other direction: of course the ideas behind Gas Town are the future of software development and several VSEs I know are developing a proper, robust, engineering version of it that works. As the author of this article here remarks “yes, but Steve did it first”, and it annoys me that if I had written this post nobody would have read it, but also that, because I intend to use it in Very Serious Business ($bns) my version isn’t ready to a actually be published yet. Bravo to Steve for getting these thoughts on paper and the idea built even in such crude form. But “level 8” is real and there will be 9s and 10s and I am really enjoying building my own.

deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

csallen 9mo ago

> "Gastown as the future of engineering" Note the word "future" not "present". People are making a prediction of where things will go. I haven't seen a single person saying that Gas Town as it exists today is ready for production-grade engineering project.

jmspring 9mo ago

I think Steve's idea of an agent coordinator and the general model could make sense. There is a lot of discussion (and even work from Anthropic, OpenAI, etc) around multiagent workflows. Is Gas Town the implementation? I'm not sure. What is interesting is seeing how this paradigm can help improve one's workflow. There is still a lot of guidance and structuring of prompts / claude.md / whichever files that need to be carefully written. If there is a push for the equivalent of helm charts and crds for gas town, then I will be concerned.

storystarling 9mo ago
I ran into this building a similar workflow with LangGraph. The prompt engineering is definitely a pain, but the real bottleneck with the coordinator model turns out to be the compounding context costs. You end up passing the full state history back and forth, so you are paying for the same tokens repeatedly. Between that and the latency from serial round-trips, it becomes very hard to justify in production.

cthalupa 9mo ago

> horrified to come to the HN comments and LinkedIn comments proclaiming Gastown as the future of engineering. I don't spend much time on LinkedIn, but basically every comment I've read on HN is that, at best, Gas Town can pump out a huge amount of "working" code in short timeframes at obscene costs. The overwhelming majority are saying "This is neat, and this might be the rough shape of what comes next in agentic coding, but it's almost certainly not going to be Gas Town itself." I have seen basically no one say that Gas Town is the The Thing.

spacecadet 9mo ago

"I’m getting burnt out trying to navigate the absurd expectations of investors and executives with the real world engineering concerns of my day to day job." Welcome to being a member of a product team who cares beyond just whats on their screen... Honestly there is a humbling moment coming for everyone, it and Im not sure its unemployment.

Treegarden 9mo ago

If your boss is that bad, the correct long-term move is to leave, not to wish technology didn’t advance.

pxtail 9mo ago
Your boss and other ones who are asleep someday will wake up too.

dada216 9mo ago

Embrace and use it to your advantage. Tell them nobody knows and understands how these things will actually work long term, that's why there's stuff like gas town, and that the way you see all of this is you can manage this process. What you bring to the table is making sure it will actually work if the tech is safe and sound, reaping the rewards, or protect the business if the tech fails, protecting the company from catastrophic tech failure, telll them that you are uniquely positioned to carry out the balancing act because you are deep in the tech itself. bonus if you explain the uncertainty framing in the business strategy: "because nobody really understands the tech nobody has an advantage, we are all playing on a leveled field, from the big boys at FAANGs to us peasants in normal non-tech enterprises: I am your advantage here if you give me the tools and leverage I need to make this work". if you play this right you'll get the fat bonus whether the tech actually works or not.

bloppe 9mo ago

I feel that yegge captured the mania of the whole operation rather well. If your bosses commit to the idea that 100 memoryless stochastic "polecats" will deliver a long term sustainable business, then there are probably other leadership issues besides this.