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Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0
- ncruces 6mo agoThe original Beads, it seems, used my CGO-free SQLite driver. Seems like I'm back to obscurity. :)
- a_t48 6mo agoYou got relegated to a stack of dirty stacked up crates, according to the genAI article images.
- avaer 6mo agoTBH this post still reads like a clown show.
- righthand 6mo agoYeah but the clown show is now marked 1.0 for release.
- moomin 6mo agoRead some of his earlier stuff. He’s a very informal writer, but he’s a damn good one with good ideas.
- troupo 6mo agoNo. He used to be good with ideas. Now he's drinking too much of his own poison. His blog posts are bloviated monstrosities incapable of coherently describing the very trivial ideas contained in them.
- enraged_camel 6mo agoI don't know, I understood it just fine? Might be a personal problem on your part.
- troupo 6mo agoPlease point me to any place in my text where I said I didn't understand his very trivial ideas?
- WickyNilliams 6mo ago> His blog posts are bloviated monstrosities incapable of coherently describing the very trivial ideas contained in them. That's not true. He coherently and clearly described this crypto pump and dump nonsense he was pushing for a while https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-249b924a621a https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-...
- troupo 6mo agoHa, true! I somehow forgot about this post.
- sph 6mo agoSomeone said to treat it like a piece of performance art and that’s the funniest thing I have ever heard. For one it’s a great way to dismiss any sort of criticism, and makes the positive comments claiming to gave built great stuff with it even funnier.
- giancarlostoro 6mo agoI loved Beads, but kept running into issues because it is so git heavy. One: not every system and project I work on uses git. Two: Sometimes I'd switch branches, and that would screw up Beads state entirely. Three: And this is at least last I used it, there's no safety net, Claude would close a Bead, without validating anything. I wound up building my own with Claude, I made it SQLite first, syncs to GitHub, can pull down from GitHub, and I added "Gates" to stopgap Claude or whatever agent from marking things complete if they've not been: compiled, unit tests run, or simple human testing / confirmation. The Gates concept improved my experience with Claude, all too often it says it finished something, when in fact it did not. Every task must have a gate, and gates must pass before you can close a task. Gates can be reused across tasks, so if "Run unit tests" is one gate, you can reuse it for every task, when it passes, it passes for that one task <-> gate combination. Anyway, I'm happy for Beads, Gas Town not so much my wheelhouse on the other hand.
- javawizard 6mo agoLove this. How did you implement gates? Are they simply tasks Claude itself has to confirm it ran, or are they scripts that run to check that the thing in question actually happened, or do they spawn a separate AI agent to check that the thing happened, or what?
- giancarlostoro 6mo agoClaude or whatever agent will get a message when it tries to close a task, which tells them which gates are not resolved yet, at which point, the agent will instinctively want to read the task. I did run into an issue where I forgot to add gates to a new project, so Claude did smoosh over by making a blanket gate, I have otherwise never had an issue when I defined what the gate is, Claude usually honors it. I havent worked on big updates recently, but I noticed other tools like rtk (Rust Token Killer) will add their own instructions to your claude's instructions.md file, so I think I need to craft one to tack on with sane instructions, including never closing tasks without having the user create gates for them first. In a nutshell, a gate is a entry in the DB with arbitrary text, Claude is good about following whatever it is. Claude trying to close a task will force it to read it. Life's gotten slightly busy, but you can see more on the repo. I've been debating giving it a better name, I feel like GuardRails implies security, when the goal is just to validate work slightly. https://github.com/Giancarlos/GuardRails https://github.com/Giancarlos/GuardRails
- mmastrac 6mo agoSerious question - there's a lot of fluff talking about Gas Town, but has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting? At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.
- rsanheim 6mo ago> has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting? No.
- rbtprograms 6mo agoyou can always fire it up yourself and see what its all about. in my experience it generates a lot of code very quickly, that code is probably only ever supposed to be LLM maintained, not by people.
- blahblaher 6mo agoI don't think the op meant Gas Town itself (if they did, my bad), but what has Yegge done with Gas Town? By now it should have released some amazing thing if Gas Town increases productivity so much.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- shermantanktop 6mo agoWhat has Yegge done with Gas Town? Well for one, he has posted a bunch of blog content about it which has generated chatter like this and increased his geek mindshare. Just because he's operating in the realm of smart nerds doesn't mean he is immune to the value-inverting effects of social media.
- coldtea 6mo ago>doesn't mean he is immune to the value-inverting effects of social media. Or those of hype, e.g. AI hype.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- solomatov 6mo agoDoes anyone has any tips for starting with Gastown? I am comfortable with couple of agents running, but not yet comfortable with what Gastown offers.
- peddling-brink 6mo agoSet a budget. Fund an openrouter account with the max you can stomach spending on this test and give it a shot. At least, that’s what I would do, if I had any interest in testing out gastown with my own money. If my employer wants to pay for the testing, that’s another question entirely.
- solomatov 6mo agoI mean not how to do it, it's not that hard, but how to be productive with it.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- bayarearefugee 6mo ago> But no need to wait. At a high level, Gas City is the answer to all your problems. Ha! At least, for certain classes of problem, such as, “How can I bring AI into my company and pass an audit trail,” The important audit at my company is conducted by the FDA. I have a feeling when they ask what processes we followed to mitigate any user harm that could be caused by software changes that "I told an AI-mayor in the form of a cartoon fox what to do and he spit out a bunch of vibecode software written by AI-driven virtual cartoon characters" is not among the answers they want to hear.
- siva7 6mo agoNot yet... but me in 2020 telling you what the HN frontpage 2026 would look like you would have sent me to a mental institution, wouldn't you?
- throwup238 6mo agoSame institution I’d send Steve today. The sanatorium from American Horror Story Asylum comes to mind. Dominique, nique, nique…
- Quarrelsome 6mo agowe can do better than "that man is crazy". Why not pull up a line in his OPENLY AVAILABLE CODE BASE and mock that instead?
- throwup238 6mo agoBeads, his glorified CLI based work tracker, was over several hundred thousand lines of code, last I checked in January. Where do I even begin to mock that except at the source? That’s just absolute insanity.
- Quarrelsome 6mo ago[flagged]
- kitsune1 6mo ago[dead]
- pianopatrick 6mo agoI searched on google about the cost of running Gas Town. The Gemini AI response claimed Gas town costs $100 / hour and can spit out 4000 lines of code per hour, so Gas Town costs 2.5 cents per line of code. I tried tracking down where those numbers came from and the sources were a bit sketchy. Can anybody who has used Gas Town confirm those numbers, or report their personal numbers?
- peddling-brink 6mo agoUsing regular Claude code I can generate 4k lines an hour. Using some bash I can generate 4k lines of code per second. Lines of code per hour is a bad metric. Can it solve a problem using production quality code that doesn’t take four times as long to review? That sounds like something I would pay $100 for.
- tom_ 6mo agoI think the point is that we are given no real idea at all, not even some ballpark figures, about how much actual money actually needs to be spent in order to run Gas Town. The original article had some handwavy stuff about how it cost An Awful Lot, but no actual numbers. Cost per line of code is not an amazing metric, but at least it's an attempt to come up with a figure. (I would also be interested to find out how much it costs to run...)
- peddling-brink 6mo agoI hear what you’re saying, and I agree it would be nice to know, but I’ve also firmly bucketed this as “if you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it”.
- pianopatrick 6mo agoWell, yes ideally we would eventually also have metrics about error rates and reject rates. Like ideally at some point someone could do a study of "for every 100 PRs Gas Town generates, how many are accepted after code review and how many are rejected" or "for every 100 lines of code Gas Town generates, how many coding errors are detected by human reviewers". Unfortunately I think things are moving so fast that by the time such a study was done, we would already be on to newer models and newer versions of gas town.
- throw1234567891 6mo agoDoes this support OpenAI-compatible APIs? Or is it only clowncode, codex and copilot? Love to try it but without OpenAI-compatible APIs it is junk.
- vessenes 6mo agoNice timing. I was just noting that beads in an old repo, just ... worked. Updates worked, I didn't have super weird errors to track down... I was like "nice!" Beads bumping to 1.0 is great. I haven't used gas town in a month or so, but a stable gas town sounds very valuable. I think Yegge's instincts that making a programmable / editable coordination layer (he calls this gas city) is a great idea. Gas town early days was definitely a wild experience in terms of needing to watch carefully lest your system be destroyed, and then I put that energy into OpenClaw - I'll probably spin up Gas City and see what it can do soon though. Very cool.
- cdrnsf 6mo agoAn apt name for something doing it's part to spike energy consumption and accelerate the climate crisis.
- Quarrelsome 6mo agoThe climate crisis is primarily a consequence of fossil fuels, not necessarily energy demand. I feel like its a poor conflation, despite it possibly being a truism depending on where the datacentre is based and what power source feeds it.
- cdrnsf 6mo agoIf we're keeping gas and coal plants online to power this or using gas generators to power data centers, I'd consider that a wasteful contributing factor.
- Quarrelsome 6mo agobut we could also argue that not investing in extra non-fossil fuel capacity is the issue here. OR not investing in more research on super conductors and/or storage. Iceland could possibly export considerable amounts of renewable energy if we licked those problems. I mean, under the same logic couldn't we kinda argue that TV has ruined the planet? A lot of energy for something of debatable physical value. OR Motor racing, football, The Olympic games? All that energy and waste just to find out who can throw a stick the furthest every four years.
- cdrnsf 6mo agoI suppose one could, but none of those are primary economic drivers with dim prospects for turning a profit (well, I suppose that may be true of TV).
- sailingparrot 6mo agoGas Town really feels not just vibe coded but also vibe designed. I looked into it, to see whether multi agent setups really made a difference, the entire design philosophy feels like it was « let’s add one more layer of agent and surely this time it will work » about 10 times in a row. So now you have agents of type mayor, polecats, witnesses, deacons, dogs etc plus a slew of Unneeded constructs with incomprehensible names. In one of the blog post for gas town I remember reading something by the author along the lines of « it’s super inefficient, but because you burn so many tokens, you still get what you want at the end! » clearly this is also the design philosophy behind this project, just (get your ai to) throw more random abstractions and more agent types until you feel like it kinda works, don’t bother asking yourself if they actually contribute anything. This gave me the very clear feeling that most of the complexity of gas town is absolutely not needed and probably detrimental. Ended up building my own thing that is 10x simpler, just a simple main agent you talk to, that can dispatch subagents, they all communicate, wake each other up and keep track of work through a simple CLI. No « refinery » or « wasteland » or « molecule » or « convoys » or « deacons » or …
- rspeele 6mo ago> Ended up building my own thing that is 10x simpler, just a simple main agent you talk to, that can dispatch subagents, they all communicate, wake each other up and keep track of work through a simple CLI. No « refinery » or « wasteland » or « molecule » or « convoys » or « deacons » or … You won't get 10k stars and a blog post out of that. Obviously you need some Stoats who have Conferences with the Stump Lord to determine whether they are needed at the Silo or the Bilge. They'll then regroup at the appropriate Decision Epicenter and delegate to the Weasels and Chipmunks who actually do the coding (antiquated term) in the Salt Mine. The Stump Lord is an owl.
- cachius 6mo agoReminds me of Urbit the completely exotic computer network
- actionfromafar 6mo ago
- winstonp 6mo ago[flagged]
- dang 6mo agoPlease don't post personal attacks to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. Thoughtful critique is of course fine but there's no need to be personal, and it should be something we can learn from. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- karmakaze 6mo agoDoes the apparent rugpull on the $GAS meme coin[0] qualify? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge#Vibe_coding_and_cryptocurrency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge#Vibe_coding_and_cr...
- actionfromafar 6mo agoTo me, no, not quite. I'll give him one free pass. More like "I'll coast on this pulled rug to see what happens" than that he did the rug pull. Not a very wise thing to do, but not malicious either.
- 0xbadcafebee 6mo agoThe description on Wikipedia looks like somebody else created a memecoin in his honor, sent him the profits, and he accepted them? And the only people harmed were people who invest in random memecoins? I don't understand the problem.
- nl 6mo agoGetting sucked into a crypto scam and then deciding to get out, despite the death threats(!)[1] is not a rug pull. To be clear, the BAGS scam coin he got sucked into is a extractive zero-sum game where someone else creates a coin named after him, offers him trading commission to talk about it and then makes money off the hype. He did the correct thing by leaving. (I worked for a bit at a Web3 place. Went in with an open mind and now have opinions) [1] https://x.com/Steve_Yegge/status/2043127887059210470 https://x.com/Steve_Yegge/status/2043127887059210470
- dbbk 6mo agoI tried Beads and it kept breaking in such frustratingly random ways that I just added a Linear MCP server and called it a day. That's really all you need.
- CharlesW 6mo agoI've been using Beads for 5 different projects, and Beads and/or Dolt failures have been a regular thing. It's own "doctor" feature is sort of disturbing, in that it (1) tells me that my Beads setups are always at least a little bit broken, but (2) can never fix all of the issues. Hopefully the 1.0 designation means that Steve is out of "throw shit at the wall" mode. Beads is fine as a replacement for Markdown files, but I'll never go near Gas Town because of my experience with it.
- asd88 6mo agoAgreed. I kinda concluded that the expected `doctor` usage is to have an agent run it for you and then they can try to figure it out when `doctor` can’t fix the issues.
- michaelbarton 6mo agoI think there’s other HN threads reporting multiple issues with it. Can’t remember which thread I read it but someone said it’s very hard to uninstall because agents will keep reinstalling it once it’s part of a project. YMMV but this seems like a simpler port: https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/beads_rust https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/beads_rust
- asd88 6mo agoI tried both Beads and Gas Town and had the same experience. These fully vibe coded tools seem to have near zero QA. The fact that they ship with a `doctor` command that you regularly need to run (even if you didn’t change anything about your environment) tells you all you need to know.
- munificent 6mo ago> I’ve been saying since last year that by the end of 2026, people will be mostly programming by talking to a face. There’s absolutely NO reason to type with the Mayor. You should be able to chat with them like a person. You’ll have a cartoon fox there onscreen, in costume, building and managing your production software, and showing you pretty status updates whenever you ask for one. This is the end state for IDEs. This is a desirable end state for highly social but perhaps slightly sociopathic extroverts who want to spend all day talking even though they aren't talking to a person. For anyone else, it's hard to imagine considering that a desirable way to spend eight hours a day.
- kami23 6mo agoEh there's also introverts like me that find typing too slow and having a conversation with a computer is my ideal interaction :)
- selimthegrim 6mo agoThis sounds like PaulHoule wrote it.
- cindyllm 6mo ago[dead]
- chao- 6mo ago>This is a desirable end state for [a category of people] who want to spend all day talking even though they aren't talking to a person. When I am not in actual meetings, I do already spend all day talking to anthropomorphized facets of my personality that represent software architecture, security paranoia, operational practicality, user experience, etc. Often not by speaking aloud, but it's a conversation nonetheless. So yes, this sounds absolutely grand. EDIT: But I don't think it should be forced on everyone! Having the option to use the tools that work best for you should be the goal.
- jasonmp85 6mo ago[dead]
- 0xbadcafebee 6mo agoBeads is cool, but I tried to use it, and the backend didn't really make sense. I have to run an sql database in the background? How does it sync with Git? (I didn't see any files/objects committed to the repo) Plus, Dolt ended up using a constant 3-30kB/s of i/o in the background, while nothing was actually going on. That and Beads has a lot of features I'm not gonna use. All of this was just too complicated for my tiny brain. So I slapped together my own Beads implementation (https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/dingles https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/dingles) over a day or two. Probably has bugs, and I'm sure race conditions if you tried to use with Gas Town, and likely does not scale. But it has the minimum functionality needed to create and track issues and sync them (locally and remotely, either via normal merge, or a dedicated ticket branch). No SQL, no extra features, just JSONL and Git. Threw a whole large software project at it, and the AI took to it like a duck to water, used it to make epics for the whole project, methodically worked through them all, dependencies first, across multiple context sessions. The paradigm of making tools the AI wants to use is clearly a winner.
- phist_mcgee 6mo agoAgreed that beads seems way over engineered for an issue tracker.
- chaostheory 6mo agoIt was ok until he bolted on Dolt
- sowbug 6mo agoGlad I'm not the only one using Gastown as a space heater. I filed an issue here and hope to find some time this week to research more: https://github.com/dolthub/dolt/issues/10849 https://github.com/dolthub/dolt/issues/10849
- sroerick 6mo agoI did the same thing, and had the same experience, but it also gave more of an appreciation for Beads' architecture. I think the weird redundancies actually made a lot of sense when I began to understand some of the edge cases where agents crap the bed.
- pron 6mo agoDoes Yegge really think that building production software this way is a good idea? Let's assume that managing context well is a problem and that this kind of orchestration solves it. But I see another problem with agents: When designing a system or a component we have ideas that form invariants. Sometimes the invariant is big, like a certain grand architecture, and sometimes it's small, like the selection of a data structure. Eventually, though, you want to add a feature that clashes with that invariant. At that point there are usually three choices: * Don't add the feature. The invariant is a useful simplifying principle and it's more important than the feature; it will pay dividends in other ways. * Add the feature inelegantly or inefficiently on top of the invariant. Hey, not every feature has to be elegant or efficient. * Go back and change the invariant. You've just learnt something new that you hadn't considered and puts things in a new light, and it turns out there's a better approach. Often, only one of these is right. Usually, one of these is very, very wrong, and with bad consequences. But picking among them isn't a matter of context. It's a matter of judgment and the models - not the harnesses - get this judgment wrong far too often (they go with what they know - the "average" of their training - or they just don't get it). So often, in fact, that mistakes quickly accumulate and compound, and after a few bad decisions like this the codebase is unsalvageable. Today's models are just not good enough (yet) to create a complete sustainable product on their own. You just can't trust them to make wise decisions. Study after study and experiement after experiment show this. Now, perhaps we make better judgment calls because we have context that the agent doesn't. But we can't really dump everything we know, from facts to lessons, and that pertains to every abstraction layer of the software, into documents. Even if we could, today's models couldn't handle them. So even if it is a matter of context, it is not something that can be solved with better context management. Having an audit trail is nice, but not if it's a trail of one bad decision after another.
- wolttam 6mo agoI think a lot of it comes down to the training objective, which is to fulfill the user’s request. They have knowledge about how programs can be structured in ways that improve overall maintainability, but little room to exercise that knowledge over the course of fulfilling the user’s request to add X feature. They can make changes which lead to an improvement to the code base itself (without adding features); they just need to be asked explicitly to do so. I’d argue the training objective should be tweaked. Before implementing, stop to consider the absolutely best way to approach it - potentially making other refactors to accommodate the feature first.
- 8593376393 6mo ago[dead]
- siliconc0w 6mo agoMy experience is that Agentic Coding can legitimately get you mostly-working software. You do, however, still need to spend a few days groking, validating, and usually nudging/whacking it to conform to the shape you intended vs what the agent inferred. It is pretty magical to go from brainstorming an idea in the evening, having ChatGPT Pro spit out a long list of beads to implement it, leaving it running over night in a totally empty repo and waking up to a mostly-implemented project.
- pron 6mo agoIt's magical until you start going through the code carefully, line by line, and find yourself typing at the agent: YOU DID WHAT NOW? Then, when you read a few more lines and realise that neither AI nor human will be able to debug the codebase once ten more features are added you find yourself typing: REVERT. EVERYTHING.
- andrekandre 6mo agoyes, this is an issue i see too... also fixing it up takes alot of time (sometimes more if i just 'one-shotted' it myself)... idk these tools are useful, but i feel like we are going too far with 'just let the ai do everything'...
- iwontberude 6mo agoI really need to huff more chemicals to keep up with the state of this insane type of engineering
- phpnode 6mo agoI'm pretty excited about agentic coding myself, but this does appear to be an extended ai-psychosis (i'm not super comfortable with this phrase, but it is becoming pretty recognisable). I think he's boxed himself in by continually layering more complexity on his approach, rather than stepping back and questioning the fundamentals or the overall direction. All of the steps Gas Town or Gas City etc are taking are towards reducing human oversight and control. This is profoundly misguided! In a world of infinite cheap software it is precisely this human decision making and control that matters. > There will be nothing like it. You are going to want to use Gas City. No. I do not want to talk to the mayor of my software factory, as its cartoonish minions build an infinite mountain of slop. Unreviewable, both in terms of code and the finished product. Instead, I want to precisely capture human ideas, have those ideas questioned, challenged, improved, and then I want to bring those ideas to life, keeping the human in the loop whenever they want. Neither Beads, Gas Town, nor Gas City or anything like them are required for that.
- antonvs 6mo agoI’ve wondered whether this is all supposed to be a satire on the industry. But unintentional self-parody is also a possibility.
- sailingparrot 6mo ago[deleted]
- 2001zhaozhao 6mo ago> All of the steps Gas Town or Gas City etc are taking are towards reducing human oversight and control. This is profoundly misguided! I mostly agree with you other than this one sentence. Let's say you're building the literal antithesis of Gastown: an AI agent software specifically designed to be human reviewed and monitored. How to you make this as efficient as possible? Well, it's by ensuring high quality results from human oversight and control while spending the least amount of time. Which to be precise, is still reducing human oversight and control per unit of useful work done.
- coldtea 6mo agoBeads is needlessly overengineered. Puts me off from checking Gas Town.
- _doctor_love 6mo agoI'm a long-time Steve Yegge fan but a major Gas Town hater (now Gas City too, I guess). It's doubling down on all the wrong metaphors. I also simply detest how Gas Town is modeled fundamentally on an extractive and destructive metaphor, the 19th century factory. I want to live in a verdant software garden, not a dystopian industrialist hellscape. In my view the StrongDM guys are on the right long-term path.
- enraged_camel 6mo ago>> I also simply detest how Gas Town is modeled fundamentally on an extractive and destructive metaphor, the 19th century factory. I actually think the naming is apt because we are on the starting stages of a second Industrial Revolution.
- sph 6mo agoSteve Yegge, quite simply, has jumped the shark. He’s gone meta. The line between genius and utter lunacy is very thin.
- _doctor_love 6mo agoHa! https://github.com/gastownhall/gastown/issues/3649 https://github.com/gastownhall/gastown/issues/3649 downvoters get rekt
- selimthegrim 6mo agoAlso I chuckled at the AI-generated "The Overseer is Alnays Right | Vacation Approved" poster in the background of the split image where the mayor is reading so you can supervise. This has strong Boondocks Catcher Freeman vibes. I want to hear the polecats/badgers' version.
- slopinthebag 6mo agoI can't believe people give this any air time at all. If it was just some rando producing slop people wouldn't give it the time of day. I think we need to take a hard line with AI stuff like this, and put the onus on the creator to prove these ideas have merit.
- wenc 6mo agoI feel Gastown is an attempt at answering: what if i push the multi-agent paradigm to its chaotic end? But I think the point that Yegge doesn't address and that I had to discover for myself is: getting many agents working in parallel doing different things -- while cool and exciting (in an anthromorphic way) -- might not actually be solving the right problem. The bottleneck in development isn't workflow orchestration (what Gastown does) -- it's actually problem decomposition. And Beads doesn't actually handle the decomposed problem well. I thought it did. But all it is is a task-graph system. Each bead is task, and agents can just pick up tasks to work on. That looks a lot like an SDE picking up a JIRA ticket right? But the problem is embedding just enough context in the task that the agent can do it right. But often it doesn't, so the agent has to guess missing context. And it often produces plausible code that is wrong. Devolving a goal into the smaller slices is really where a lot of difficulty lies. You might say, oh, "I can just tell Claude to write Epics/Stories/Tasks, and it'll figure it out". Right? But without something grounding it like a spec, Claude doesn't do a good job. It won't know exactly how much context to provide to each independent agent. What I have found useful is spec-driven development, especially of the opinionated variety that Kiro IDE offers. Kiro IDE is a middling Cursor, but an excellent spec generator -- in fact one of the best. It generates 3 specs at 3 levels of abstraction. It generates a Requirements doc in EARS/INCOSE (used at Rolls Royce and Boeing for reducing spec ambiguity), and then generate a Design doc (commonly done at FAANG), and... then generates a Task list, which cross-references the sections of the requirements/design. This kind of spec hugely limits the degrees of freedom. The Requirements part of the spec actually captures intent, which is key. The Design part mocks interfaces, embeds glossaries, and also embeds PBTs (property-based tests using Hypothesis -- maybe eventually Hegel?) as gating mechanisms to check invariants. The Task list is what Beads is supposed to do -- but Beads can't do a good job because it doesn't have the other two specs. I've deployed 4 products now using Kiro spec-driven dev (+ Simon Willison's tip "do red/green tdd") and they're running in prod and so far so good. They're pressure-tested using real data. Spec-driven development isn't perfect but I feel its aim is the correct one -- to capture intentions, to reduce the degrees of freedom, and to constrain agents toward correctness. I tried using Claude Code's /plan mode but it's nowhere as rigorous, and there's still spec drift in the generated code. It doesn't pin down the problem sufficiently. Gastown/Beads are solutions for workflow orchestration problem (which is exciting for tech bros), but at its core, it's not the most important problem. Problem decomposition is. Otherwise you're just solving the wrong problem, fast.
- guybedo 6mo agoi've experimented quite a lot with multi agent setups and orchestrations. In the end, it didn't feel worth it mostly because of high token overhead (inter agent communications, agents re reading same code, etc...) and synchronization / cooperation issues (who should do what). What actually works for me and provides good results: multi step workflows with clearly defined steps and strong guidance for the agent.
- ethanlew-is 6mo agoGas Town has always struck me as more of a performance art piece than a tool that was actually meant to be used, even among the recent hyped AI projects. If you’re using it for real, what are you using it for?
- rcarmo 6mo agoI cannot really get behind Gas Town or any other “agent swarm” setup. They always seem to waste an incredible amount of tokens on passing the buck around as half-finished specs, and even with a healthy amount of tokens pre-allocated they burn money faster than setting my wallet on fire…
- thedevilslawyer 6mo agoFor "hacker" news, this group is reacting like its "labor" news. I get it - this will have an impact on the current ways of building software getting deprecated. But this is genuinely cutting-edge, new paradigm of building software. Something that will iron it's kinks out, and potentially be the way of developing software in the new Era. That's worth some curious and exploratory discussion, rather than more comments about not being the "true way of software development". (Sorry, was put off by the crab-pulling down discussion.)
- erelong 6mo agoI feel this way too, HN has a lot of negative posters for some reason, I'd really like to find another forum with a better vibe or see the vibe improve here Reading about Gas Town has been fun, it's definitely an experiment and may not be practical and doesn't have to be; it does seem to be a possible correct vision of the future of coordinating agents to code with (it's just not fully there yet as it is on the cutting edge of seeing what's possible)
- spprashant 6mo agoI don't know if Gastown will work out. But it is quite a bold take. I am interested to see how it plays out. I suspect they will eventually roll back some of the stringent "no code reading" approach in favor of observability as the community grows.
- hackingonempty 6mo agoHow does this compare to G-Stack?