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Welcome to Gas City
- mmastrac 6mo agoThere still hasn't been anything concrete and useful built with this yet, right? Perhaps the gas is from fermentation.
- airstrike 6mo agoI find it somewhat damning that the examples are ChatGPT image slop and a massively long blog post no one can be arsed to read. It makes it feel a little like Gas Town 2: Electric Boogaloo
- eab- 6mo agois there examples of the sort of things that's been built with these systems? it often feels like complication and abstraction for its own sake
- apsurd 6mo agoHe's very transparent about his addiction to agentic coding. He's doing it for the giggles as far as I can tell. Trolling and being a personality. I don't mean that in a bad kind of assessment. He's said as much.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> his addiction to agentic coding Why would it be an addiction versus obsession? Getting obsessed with something and building things around it, even if it's nonsense, is artistically genuine.
- apsurd 6mo agoyeah that's true. i used the word addiction because i remember reading him using that exact word. and including tokens and llms alongside the rise of gambling and such. but i could be wrong.
- dyauspitr 6mo agoI don’t know. I have coding so much I got into technology management a decade ago. But I can’t read myself away from personal projects, it’s addictive in a way.
- bigyabai 6mo agoIt could be either. The bigger critique that people have is that the entire thing is an obvious LARP. None of this is "built for enterprise" or deployed in common ops. This is a zero-risk, zero-judgement project where vanity PRs are encouraged so that another agent can take credit for the vanity fix.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> the entire thing is an obvious LARP Eh, plenty of people play with Sims. Having them do something that feels even tangentially useful has an understandable appeal.
- bigyabai 6mo agoThat's fine, I also have side projects that do absolutely nothing useful. Most people are taking issue with the deluded "it's all so obvious" rhetoric used in Yegge's writing.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago> Most people are taking issue with the deluded "it's all so obvious" rhetoric used in Yegge's writing Thanks. This is helpful.
- conception 6mo agoDolelite is the only thing I could find.
- q3k 6mo agoi just want to write code, man
- hootz 6mo agoHell yeah! Another episode of my favorite AI coding psychosis series!
- JumpCrisscross 6mo agoIs there a good overview source on what this is? I don't want a takedown. And I don't want to be sold. I just want a solid explainer.
- hootz 6mo agoI don't know about any ready made explanation, but it is basically multi-agent orchestration, but with lore and role-playing created by a mind deep in AI psychosis. You know how agents can call sub agents? That, but with dozens of different layers and calling things different names for extreme anthropomorphization beyond mortal comprehension. I recommend going deep into the Gas Town rabbit hole, it's really funny and a bit worrisome. He has like a federated system for random people's "towns" to connect to and he drains his wallet on multiple Claude accounts to build software with virtual polecats.
- JumpCrisscross 6mo ago[dead]
- esafak 6mo agoCoders can get high too, see!
- thurn 6mo agoI really fundamentally do not understand what problem Gas City solves that is not already solved by normal subagent orchestration patterns. If you want to call your main LLM session the "mayor" and have it delegate its work out to planners and coders and reviewers and QA and so on, this is already a thing you can do! If you want to do this in a reusable way you can create skills and subagent definitions and use /commands, etc. Why do we need hundreds of thousands of lines of opaque Go code to accomplish any of this?
- conception 6mo agoAdmittedly, this project started before that was possible with the standard coding agents.
- DonHopkins 6mo agoNo it didn't!
- conception 5mo agoClaude Code released agent teams in Feb. that was the first of the major players to have separate process/context agent orchestration that I know of. Who did it before that of the major IDEs?
- refulgentis 6mo agoI'm trying to make the phrase "AI DDOSing" happen. ex. someone's GitHub repo with a ton of code and a README written by AI claiming fantastical features not present in the code. Or, more subtle someone, "self-DDOS'ing via AI" - thats for when "LLM psychosis" is too strong, i.e. for "I went too far down a rabbit hole with the interactive chatbot for a month and now I have 1M LOC and 95% test coverage and an app that I don't understand" I quit my job at Google in 2023 and have spent 2.5 years working on an LLM-based agentic app. To me, this looks like an unfortunate self-AI-DDOS'ing by someone with even more runway than my seemingly infinite runway. It's well-meaning, like, in 2030 I'm fairly sure we'll have a meta-layer and simplistic "here's a bug, read files, edit, fix" will seem slow/strangled. But he's at least a couple years ahead of the models, and whatever metalayer exists won't have the bizarre UX model.
- thot_experiment 6mo agoIs this just urbit all over again? Making up a bunch of terms and abstractions to make a mundane thing seem novel? At least in this case it seems more like psychosis than grift. In any case, I will be interested to see if this tooling yields any actual results, doesn't seem like it so far (except maybe more tooling lol).
- rzzzt 6mo agoThe Acting Ambassador will telegraph the Nurse to summon a Pharaoh to the Barracks if it finds the Smoke Stack empty.
- sureglymop 6mo agoBasically.
- Aboutplants 6mo agoLet me guess what comes next, Gas State? Where it’s just another larger iteration of the same thing
- hootz 6mo agoDeploy packs of Gas Cities with Gas Country! All of that inside our new Gas Planet, where multiple sovereign Gas Countries can cooperate or go to war with each other! All hail our Great Comrade Polecatius of Gasoland, the greatest coding leader of Gas Planet.
- yallpendantools 6mo agoYou know there are software which are so marvelously monumental, they inspire me to improve in my craft. Among them in no particular order - The Witcher 3 (honorable mention, for all its jank, Skyrim) - Sublime Text and vim - Krita and Procreate - Early Google Chrome - Redis and Postgres Seeing "steve-yegge.medium.com" on the HN frontpage averts me by reflex. Like, I'm suddenly inspired to learn more about agriculture. Or contracting, I heard that could be lucrative. Heck, I'd even go full hipster and open a bookshop in this economy. Steve, you probably don't give a shit about my opinion but I just want to know from which Jamaican zip codes do you source your supply.
- dyauspitr 6mo agoWhat jank does Skyrim have. The whole thing is like 6 GB.
- lexicality 6mo agoYou're thinking of bloat, jank is things like putting a cauldron on your head and the physics engine firing you into the stratosphere.
- rzzzt 6mo agoJank is the third derivative of bloat.
- i_think_so 5mo agoDuuuude. That is *deep*!
- cindyllm 5mo ago[dead]
- DonHopkins 5mo agoAnd wank is the derivative of jank. GTA had Hot Coffee. The Sims almost had Hot Potty! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30359560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30359560 The other nasty bug involving pixelization that we did manage to fix before shipping, but that I unfortunately didn't save any video of, involved the maid NPC, who was originally programmed by a really brilliant summer intern, but had a few quirks: A Sim would need to go potty, and walk into the bathroom, pixelate their body, and sit down on the toilet, then proceed to have a nice leisurely bowel movement in their trousers. In the process, the toilet would suddenly become dirty and clogged, which attracted the maid into the bathroom (this was before "privacy" was implemented). She would then stroll over to toilet, whip out a plunger from "hammerspace" [1], and thrust it into the toilet between the pooping Sim's legs, and proceed to move it up and down vigorously by its wooden handle. The "Unnecessary Censorship" [2] strongly implied that the maid was performing a manual act of digital sex work. That little bug required quite a lot of SimAntics [3] programming to fix!
- galoisscobi 6mo agoThis is so misguided, I don't even know where to begin. If you think that throwing more tokens at a problem with your agents cos-playing whatever fiction you cook up is the road to reliability, robustness and good design, you deserve all the misery that comes your way. If you want people to take this seriously, ground your ideas with rigorous data to prove that this works better than the state of the art. Until then, this is just irresponsible planet burning, token burning propaganda.
- SimianSci 6mo agoIf I want to create a furnace into which I can shovel tokens (ie: money) I dont think I can do it quite as elegantly as Gas City. Its novel and funny, but the hype around agentic coding is bad enough for some engineers to think this represents the pinnacle of current software development practices.
- bb88 6mo agoCompanies are mulling about how many software engineers they can get rid of and replace with AI instead.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- xantronix 6mo agoI can't tell if this is the Piss Christ of the software (I hesitate to call it "development") world, or if we are watching a GG Allin show. It's sobering to watch people uncritically take cues from these Steve Yegge artifacts as though the software development enterprise had always been like this.
- hvs 6mo agoCame here to say that a lot of these LLM posts make me feel like I was hit by a hammer and I can't understand the world anymore. Thankfully, the HN comments confirm that this is as insane as I thought it was.
- femto 6mo agoI think it's because LLM output tends to be snippets of truth, connected in such a way as to be subtly false. It leaves you disoriented because it is in the uncanny valley of truth: you know it's not right, but can't put your finger on why it is not right. It's made worse buy its asymmetric nature: it takes seconds to generate pages of words and hours to figure out what is wrong with them, for little to no gain to the reader.
- i_think_so 5mo ago"The uncanny valley of truth". That's a brilliant way of putting it. Thank you. > It's made worse buy its asymmetric nature: it takes seconds to generate pages of words and hours to figure out what is wrong with them, for little to no gain to the reader. I think you've just formalized the best argument for the Real Butlerian Jihad we're ever going to get.
- 0gs 6mo agoi feel like the only way this post isn't depressing is if it's supposed to be funny
- amysox 6mo agoI feel like this should have had a warning like the one on the Epiphyte business plan in Cryptonomicon. "EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING: Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets."
- JohnMakin 6mo ago> So you should never just have one coding agent managing a piece of infrastructure. Not even for a low-stakes part of your business. You should always have at least two or three working together on a little crew. I know why people think this, and I went down this route early on, but I’m not sure this logic follows. Teams of agents, even adversarial ones reviewing work, are prone to the same types of mistakes as the problem they’re attempting to fix. In fact, mistakes at the adversarial/approval layer are so much worse, because the next stage assumes it was correct, and the error cascades. Maybe enough agents and tokens and context bring the probability of “correctness” closer to 1, but what is the judge of what is correct? what if that criteria is hallucinated? I’m not sure this concept has been proven. I’ve certainly been unable to prove it to myself, and I’ve tried very hard.