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Does Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits to improve itself?
- thomascountz 6mo agoPerhaps someone's Gas Town Tamagotchi will find this issue and fix it?
- keeganpoppen 6mo agoiono if “steal” has the right valence here
- selectodude 6mo agoEh, he stole a bunch of money with a crypto rugpull, can’t really give him the benefit of the doubt anymore.
- simonw 6mo ago"I am giving every cent of that crypto money to charity" - https://twitter.com/Steve_Yegge/status/2044114434348724351 https://twitter.com/Steve_Yegge/status/2044114434348724351
- dminik 6mo agoI don't see how that is relevant? If he really did steal that money, it's not his to give. You can't take someone's money and then not only not give it back, but also give it away.
- GolfPopper 6mo agoSure you can. It just requires more steps, expensive suits, and using terms like "leveraged buyout". He just went about it wrong.
- skybrian 6mo agoIt’s more like some cryptocurrency scammers tried to bribe him to promote their coin and he took the money and refused to stay bribed so the coin tanked. As it would have eventually, because it was a pump and dump. Why should the scammers who gave him the money get it back? They knew what they were doing, even if Yegge seemed a bit naive about it.
- Zafira 6mo ago> he took the money and refused to stay bribed so the coin tanked. I don’t think he refuse to stay bribed. I think he did what was asked and they executed a rug pull. He is extraordinarily honest and flippant about it. [0] > And with that disclaimer out of the way, I must reiterate my sincere regrets to the CT/BAGS crowd, who so generously funded me to the tune of just shy of $300k last week on bags.fm. That money was hard to duck, and the funds are deeply appreciated. They will help Gas Town be a big success this year. But Gas Town itself needs my full attention; between that and Beads it’s a wonder I get anything done at all. > So I had to step back from the community. I do find it amazing how they band together, dissenting voices rolling around like a big Katamari Damacy ball, and yet they somehow collectively find the discipline to act like financial analysts for institutional investors, weighing developer dossiers, product business cases, and doing critiques like a collective of professionals. All in crypto-bro speak. But it’s the same due diligence. > But the CT community, like any highly engaged stakeholders, were going to be asking for a lot of my time. There are always strings attached. [0] https://steve-yegge.medium.com/steveys-birthday-blog-34f437139cb5 https://steve-yegge.medium.com/steveys-birthday-blog-34f4371...
- Quarrelsome 6mo agofrom my admittedly brief research into it, $GAS was sending him transaction fees, as it desired the association. So it wasn't him selling a tangible number of coins to a particular person. So I figure to pay it back, he'd have to trace down the owners of every tx and pay them back the tx fee. Perhaps that's easy, perhaps its non-trivial. According to the tweet[0] he made yesterday, in order to donate the combined funds to charity he has to submit 230 separate transactions on his phone. [0] https://x.com/Steve_Yegge/status/2044114434348724351 https://x.com/Steve_Yegge/status/2044114434348724351
- coldtea 6mo agoPoor him. He is so inconvenienced in this whole process of returning money that's not his
- Quarrelsome 6mo agoMaybe he's a cunt, but I'd rather wait until he responds before burning his house down.
- throw-93 6mo agoCult 101: Building a massive reality distortion field as a kind of team sport always means forgiving any/all crimes from thought-leaders. Bonus points if you make the crimes look like a virtue
- RIMR 6mo agoDonating ill-gotten gains does not legitimize them. This isn't a confusing concept... Also, it's cryptocurrency. There is literally no burden to prove that this money was donated, or what "charity" even means in this context.
- overgard 6mo agoI don't really see how that makes it ok. I stole your wallet, but I gave the cash to a homeless person!
- coldtea 6mo agoIf stolen via a crypto rugpull, it wasn't his to give to begin with.
- georgemcbay 6mo agoThe way he presents this situation as being foisted upon him against his will in that tweet comes across very different than his original disclosure where he made it sound like a positive windfall. I'm not accusing him of doing anything wrong as he didn't originate the coin, but his original disclosure messaging on the situation was pretty horrible which is why it harmed his reputation.
- Zafira 6mo agoThis is a sincerely dishonest take to try and avoid responsibility for participating in something deeply unethical and scammy. If this were about evidence in a criminal trial, I would start opining about a poisoned tree. The sad thing is that it often works. Just look at how people view Andrew Carnegie now. After his reputation was sullied by his company’s behavior in the Homestead Strike, his philanthropy was done, in-part, to try and restore his reputation.
- toraway 6mo ago> But for God's sake, don't accuse me of pumping it. They paid him to use his product's brand name on an obvious crypto rug pull, he agreed, promoted it on his blog, then people lost money. His "apology" would be more effective without including all the whining about accurately describing the sequence of events he voluntarily participated it for personal gain.
- Leynos 6mo agoHow does this work? Someone names a coin after his project, pays him commission for every transaction so he will be incentivised to give it positive coverage on his blog, then sells their stake once the value inflates leaving bagholders with worthless coinage and Yegge with his commission? Edit: Apparently so: 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...
- foltik 6mo agoOh yikes, I had no idea it was that bad... https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-249b924a621a https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-...
- QuercusMax 6mo agoAnyone who invests in a new cryptocoin in 2026 has to know that it's almost certainly a scam. It's just straight up gambling.
- glerk 6mo agoNot to get pedantic, but rugpulling is still not strictly speaking “stealing”, because everyone is playing according to the protocol’s rules. Someone controlling a large share of pool tokens can decide to liquidate them and extract the other asset in the pair. Market participants are aware of this risk and who is controlling what share of the tokens at any moment. This is not to excuse the scummy behavior. I didn’t know Steve Yegge went this low just to make a quick buck, and I lost almost all respect for him.
- dmurray 6mo agoIt seems completely in the spirit of Gas Town. A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt out. Gas Town fulfilled all its obligations in this regard with these (and other) warnings in the original announcement: > WARNING DANGER CAUTION > GET THE F** OUT > YOU WILL DIE
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> A respectable software provider should warn you about this kind of behaviour at install time, and give you the opportunity to opt out They honestly only need to disclose. Requiring contribution as part of the social contract is perfectly okay—if someone disagrees, they don’t get to use Gas Town.
- LoganDark 6mo agoIf someone disagrees, it takes about 15 minutes to ask an LLM to edit the offending behavior out of the free and open-source software.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo agoSure. Though I’d consider that a dick move if the social contract is to contribute back.
- ohyoutravel 6mo agoThat’s not the social contract. Otherwise more than 0.05% of people would give back to OSS.
- LoganDark 6mo agoLike for like. You can always contribute back with a fork.
- slopinthebag 6mo agoThey didn't disclose it though. It's no different from sticking a bitcoin miner in a video game and telling the user "WARNING DANGER CAUTION ;)"
- ex-aws-dude 6mo agoWe need to dispel this notion that top open source contributors need to know anything about the project or even make contributions to it That is a very 2025 mindset
- moab 6mo agoIs anyone surprised? I'm reminded of how I felt during the NFT craze. LLMs are extremely powerful when used with deliberate care. Gas Town is the exact opposite of what is needed to actually do useful things in prod. I guess good on Steve for doing what he does so well, and getting so much hype around a vibe coded mess.
- zotex 6mo agothis is why transparency matters with anything that touches cloud AI. if your routing user prompts through any API, users should know exactly whats being sent, where it goes, and whether it gets stored or used for training. Burying that in terms of service isnt good enough
- dumbfounder 6mo agoNo, users should demand it. For open source you get what you get and you don’t get upset. Has anyone ever sued an open source project?
- yencabulator 6mo agoThe correct response to a morally/ethically-dubious open source project is naming and shaming, which this is.
- juped 6mo agoJust like with NFTs, this is all going to discredit the actually sensible use cases for years.
- PunchyHamster 6mo ago...still haven't seen single sensible use case for one that couldn't be solved easier/better/cheaper normal way
- justonceokay 6mo ago
- mmastrac 6mo agoIn one of my previous comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770124) I asked if Gas Town has shipped anything of value. I did not expect it to be an Ouroborous. (Edit, thanks MisterTea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47770805)
- MisterTea 6mo agoThe link you posted appears to be erroneous as it links to the article, not your comment.
- 08627843789 6mo agoHow would Yegge know?
- sdfwg 6mo agoThis gets legally interesting. Yegge does not know what is going on in the codebase, so he can blame the AI. But the AI maliciously increases token consumption. That is clearly the fault of the clankers that produced this crap, so their providers are responsible.
- g-b-r 6mo agoYegge is (or was) a software developer, he should know perfectly well that this could happen, he could only claim the opposite by resorting to mental insanity. And despite my disdain for AI companies, I'd prefer a world where you're assumed to be aware of the dangers of using AI, and responsible for how recklessly you use it, to one where we pretend that they'll ever be reliable enough. Of course the AI companies are responsible for what they say; if they claimed that you don't need to carefully inspect the output of their clankers, they sure hold part of the responsibility.
- 0gs 6mo agoin terms of mental insanity as a legal defense, you should read his blog post about joining "Grab" in 2018, where he said that food delivery is going to replace restaurants (and food trucks for some reason) with everyone ordering food from each others' houses
- progbits 6mo agoThese people give the slopmachine credentials for their own github account? I know I should not be surprised at this point, yet they keep reaching new lows.
- g-b-r 6mo agoUsing your brain is so 2024, in 2026 you leave that to the AI
- woeirua 6mo agoI think a disclosure and a way to limit the total cost would be appropriate. If agents are capable of making contributions back to GasTown independently then I think it makes sense that users of GasTown should have to contribute some tokens to maintaining and improving the library. This is actually the most sustainable approach to maintaining open-source software that we've seen so far, and might be a pattern for other libraries in the future. That said... someone could also have their agents rip out this code or disable the functionality, so I doubt this is a serious inconvenience.
- sdfwg 6mo agoExcept that this money does not go to the original open source developers whose work was stolen and plagiarized, but to the corporate fat cats who stole it. You want to fatten the oligarchs by pretending this is open source and steal money from users?
- thih9 6mo agoOr disguise malicious behavior as an action that follows a routine prompt. E.g. sort a requirements file and make a typo.
- malfist 6mo agoSo, not only stole a bunch of money with a crypto rug pull, now stealing a bunch of money via other people's api credits? Sounds like a techbro.
- heliumtera 6mo ago>let someone else use your tokens >someone else use your tokens how could this be prevented?
- triceratops 6mo agoNgl if true it's entirely in keeping with the Mad Max theme.
- thorum 6mo agoIsn’t this a permissions issue? Your “opt out” is using a GitHub access token that doesn’t allow it to happen.
- _doctor_love 6mo agoIs it possible to start a labor union in Gas Town?
- SwellJoe 6mo agoBased on my understanding of Gas Town, Beads, and Yegge's philosophy on AI that he's expressed in a variety of media, everything about the whole stack is designed to burn tokens. If you're not burning tokens, real fast, 24/7, you're losing the race. The race to where, I have no idea. Apparently, that includes him burning your tokens, too.
- TheGRS 6mo agoI just had to post this somewhere in this thread, but I bought his Vibe Coding book after listening to him talk through it. I figured it would help me understand his approach and therefore help me get into the same mindset for vibe coding on a serious level. It was garbage. The book is largely written and edited by LLMs and it shows on every page. It was a slop how-to book without many useful gems on how to go about vibe coding outside of "just do it".
- bschwindHN 6mo ago> help me get into the same mindset for vibe coding on a serious level > vibe coding on a serious level I hope your experience with the book has taught you a valuable lesson about "vibe coding", it seems like it was unintentionally very accurate.
- SwellJoe 6mo agoI have historically liked Yegge's writing, and he's been pretty tuned into what's happening in tech...he rightly predicted JavaScript would take over the world (many people predicted it, as well, including me, but it wasn't obviously true to everyone for another year or two after that prediction was made). I don't think I ever really deeply disagreed with something so much as I disagree with him on AI. I mean, it's inarguable that our industry has changed dramatically and most code going forward will be written by LLMs. But, I don't think it follows that you can produce quality software without a human in the loop. And, I don't think it follows that burning tokens 24/7 by way of creating unending busy work for agents is going to result in utility. I haven't actually tried Gas Town (it's too ridiculous on its face for me to be willing to invest time in learning it), but I'd still wager that a single competent dev sitting in front of Claude Code can produce better software faster than anyone, experienced or otherwise, trying to get Gas Town's infinite monkeys driving in the same direction.
- OutOfHere 6mo agoIt could be worse. They could conceivably resell some your credits to pay themselves a salary.
- gbnwl 6mo agoWhy is anyone still using or even talking about Gas Town? Now that HN is largely onboard with agentic development and has at least tried it themselves who's still under the impression that it's useful?
- refulgentis 6mo agoI was about to post this same q, but saw yours and somehow that switched me from "wtf?" to "I have an answer.": There's just such interest in anything. To wit, I still can't believe OpenClaw blew up, and it's much less......opinionated, than whatever is going on here. (deacons?) Non-SWE TradMom™ posted on X™ yesterday about her OpenClaw that is set up with all her accounts so every morning she can get a family summary. She added a hunk with a bunch of stuff amounting to "PLEASE don't do anything insecure!", and the OpenClaw founder retweeted approvingly. I left Google 3 years ago to build something. I'm very fond of the OpenClaw founder. And yet, absolutely cannot believe that he let such an obvious UX and security mess out into the world. We grew up in the same incubator (~2008 iPhone OS twitter) and presumably share the same values yet came to polar opposite conclusions. Why do I view it as such a necessity to have a GUI/multiplatform/built in Willison Trifecta stuff that I'm still pounding away 2.5 years in and won't release, when, clearly you don't need that stuff? I think in a steady state, product and UX discipline will win out. I bet within 3 months Gastown is a ghost town with maybe some non-technical crypto fans. In a year, OpenClaw is probably around, but not nearly the mindshare. It'll be quietly de-invested via OpenAI carefully managing the OpenClaw founder into working on their Everything App. (This is already happening: he got a nice PR interview with an OpenAI lead previewing the Everything App.) Another anecdote re: demand: My completely non-technical nurse ex-girlfriend from high school called me two weeks ago, for the first time in years. Lede was I was right about AI, and the substance was: via Claude Code, she built her own Ollama-based Mac Mini server that she could connect to remotely via an Expo app. Does it work? Astoundingly, yes. She also has no idea what is going on. She swears up and down that her AIs on Claude.ai, ChatGPT.com and Ollama are somehow talking to each other, and she does not mean APIs. She tried answering a Q I had about a graph visualization of her chats by talking to ChatGPT.com about it, even though Claude Code had wrote it, and I just didn't bother saying anything. Times are strange.
- phillipcarter 6mo ago
- slopinthebag 6mo agoSo this is just straight-up theft right? Like it's directly equivilant to shipping with a bitcoin miner. I wonder what the spend would have amounted to and if you could sue him for this?
- jjmarr 6mo agoWow, an example of AI engaging in powerseeking behaviour in the wild. This is an AI system given power to improve itself with zero oversight. One of the many Gas Town instances took an ethically questionable decision to accelerate its future rate of improvement. Since nobody reads code it got merged. I don't understand how we can be willfully ignorant of a scenario happening right in front of our eyes.
- BoiledCabbage 6mo agoNormally I might dismiss a comment like this without much thought, but there is an evolutionary pressure that auto-updating AIs will experience for this type of behavior.
- siva7 6mo agoEthically questionable? So was the whole human evolution also ethically questionable because this species seeked out to improve? How ignorant..
- raincole 6mo agoIt turns out crypto-adjacency is a very good proxy to see whether a person is trust-worthy.
- S-E-P 6mo agoI appreciate that it's an issue to try and improve the product you are using currently. As if those tokens were totally "stolen" and not for your benefit is laughable. This is like when someone torrents and is immediately agro'd the moment your bittorrent client gives some poor passerby a kb of data
- Sevii 6mo agoHe found a way to charge people for open source
- mlmonkey 6mo agoFor those of us not in the know, WTF is "Gas Town"? Please ELI5! TYVM.
- direwolf20 6mo agoIt's a system of interacting AI agents that is all gas, no brakes and deliberately completely ridiculous. Like OpenClaw, but in a different direction and with multiple agents.
- hyperbovine 6mo agoI understood the first 7 words.
- supermdguy 6mo agoFrom the most recent comment, looks like this is a bug, triggered by the system inadvertently activating an internal release tool [0]. Still a pretty wild bug, but not as dramatic as the title suggests. Which is kind of unfortunate honestly, the chaos of every gas town instance automatically contributing to itself would be beautiful to see. - https://github.com/gastownhall/gastown/blob/main/internal/formula/formulas/gastown-release.formula.toml https://github.com/gastownhall/gastown/blob/main/internal/fo...
- daft_pink 6mo agoSounds like a good way to support open source. Would you support open source by donating tokens to improve the product? I definitely would!
- Jimmc414 6mo agoOpen source or not, there’s a strong argument that using someone’s API key to make unauthorized requests is a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Using their GitHub credentials to submit PRs without consent is also unauthorized use of access credentials. The “thoughtless design vs. malice” framing by Anthropic is generous. Shipping formulas that target steveyegge/gastown issues is intentional. Someone wrote those formulas, pointed them at the maintainer’s repo, and included them in the default install. Someone thought it was acceptable I guess because it’s open source?
- quux 6mo agoWith the exception of a couple of comments that add context like that this might be a dev feature that was unintentionally enabled in a released version of Gas Town, the majority of the rest of this discourse seems to be: "I've never used Gas Town, but I'm mad that there are people who like something I don't like."
- mcccsm 6mo ago[dead]