8 ms·

Fences, Not Sandboxes

97 points by tosh 2mo ago

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
CoolestBeans 2mo ago
What is the overhead to have agents play model UN? Why is the coordination so elaborate? It sounds like a deeply complex and expensive emergent behavior that maybe looks comprehensible but could be nonsensical. Also like any complex system, can you actually predict the outcomes? Waste is a failure case. How do we know the code factory is actually productive or just agents filling up the computation resource cap because they can?
- kodoman 2mo ago
  Yeah I have noticed lots of agent stuff recently seems to be spin as many agents up as possible have a whole office of agents. Just keep spinning more AI bastards up, give names to your AI bastards not descriptive names human names, set up email messages for your AI bastards and wonder why your stressed out that you have messages from Dave, Linda and Michael and the other Dave. I think a lot of this sort of thinking is probably going to cause mental exhausting and so wasteful. Steve is a intelligent guy but I find my self thinking the whole build an AI office or company thing is not going to be the way things work in the future and better harnesses and agents that are particularized with highly particularized tools and loop are where things are going to work better rather then lots of AI employees.
- skywhopper 2mo ago
  The companies selling these ideas (and tuning their products to work well in this mode) make money based on how much they are used. They’ve committed to ludicrous levels of demand growth that can’t possibly be sustained by direct human use. But if they make their own product drive multiple instances of their own product, you get exponential effects.
coder-pm 2mo ago
How do you find the bad decisions with so many subscriptions active? isn't that looking for needle in a haystack:)?
- elenaviter 2mo ago
  [dead]
- tclancy 2mo ago
  I think A Bad Decision is the genesis of this.
mccoyb 2mo ago
> I am running an organization of around 50-60 agents, five of whom are interfacing with around 10 humans in the outside world: myself, my 5-person core game design team, my accountant, my chief of staff, and a few others. Only Fable is allowed to talk to humans, via Slack and email. RIP to those poor humans. I can't imagine having your brain melted by Fablespeak as your FTJ.
nepthar 2mo ago
(Asking sincerely in good faith - I read this note along with skimming a few of the linked ones, and I'm familiar with gastown) Can someone explain the value calculation to me? This seems like someone has truly let AI VASTLY expand the codebase of what seems to be a medium sized hobby game to ~10-100x the amount of engineering required. Especially with statements about how wheelhouse, his software factory, has grown to nearly the size of the actual software he's writing. He also mentions several times that wheelhouse is specific to developing the game. Then, he discusses "pulling in beads" which itself seems on my read to be enormously engineered. (note that he also says that you burn a lot of tokens with agents "keeping your beads in sync" and I didn't have the time to figure out what that meant, but it looks like as complicated as it is, beads can't reconcile itself without burning $$$). It seems like if you answer "yes" at every time you have the question of "can I make AI do this", you end up burning $120k/month in tokens on your side project. Again, I am not disparaging this- but I feel like I am genuinely missing something and would welcome help understanding it.
- FinnLobsien 2mo ago
  I guess this is a question of what you believe code and software engineering writ large is for. If you believe that good engineering practice matters (in the sense that your software is maintainable, efficient, etc.), then this is horrific because the human has no idea what’s going on and any attempt to fix something by hand would probably uncover enough complications to make you consider rewriting from scratch. But if your only qualifier is “does it do what I want it to do?” then this is perfectly fine. If you throw out the assumption that a human will ever maintain the code or need to understand it, then who cares if your main branch is full of unused code and it’s outrageously complex. In a way, I guess this is a similar moment to abstract painting in the early 20th century. If your assumption was that the point of a painting is to accurately capture a landscape or person, then abstract paintings are an abomination. If you believe paintings should evoke a feeling and depicting people or landscapes are only one way to get there, you can throw out all the sketching and composing and painting technique.
  - watwut 2mo ago
    Meh, the actual complaint is that it does not really do what it should and keeps burning those $$$ as you ask it to fix this or that.
grebc 2mo ago
Yegge’s writing has declined proportionately to his AI usage.
- BeetleB 2mo ago
  I used to read his stuff ~20 years ago. He has cool things to say, but his writing always sucked. I often write lengthy pieces. Then I look at it and say "Oh no, I don't want to become Steve Yegge!"
- AloysB 2mo ago
  I genuinely wonder if he has completely lost touch with reality. He seems to slowly become the Terry A. Davis of LLMs.
- owebmaster 2mo ago
  It looks like AI psychosis
- ramses0 2mo ago
  Agree/disagree! He's genuinely writing words for humans (load bearing! honestly!), and he's definitely on the forefront of _something_, whether you agree with his findings or not. I'm particularly struck by the Superman metaphor: "Even if you put a giant shield around your house, Superman could destroy it with his super-strength and laser eyes... but he won't dare cross the white picket fence you've put up because it goes against his core beliefs!" Maybe think of "The Truman Show" ... 90% of the time you should be relying on guardrails and making the easier path obvious. ALSO have the hardened sandbox-proof escape container, but against a determined adversary, it's all 1's and 0's at the end and there's probably a way for them to get out?
  - grebc 2mo ago
    NFT’s were the forefront according to HN 3 years ago, just before the AI hype cycle kicked off.
BeetleB 2mo ago
> I didn't want this to be a long post, and I think I've succeeded. Classic Steve Yegge!
xnx 2mo ago
> First, my secret: I see the future by living in it. I am spending the equivalent of $122k/month of API token spend, or about $4,000 per day, using 21 Claude Max accounts, a number that has been growing steadily at 2 per week. Good to know that together, Yegge and Zitron bring balance to the force.
- fractorial 2mo ago
  This is ludicrous; also, why publicly admit that blatant violation of ToS?
  - mplewis 2mo ago
    Anthropic doesn't actually mind if you use multiple subscriptions
- cedws 2mo ago
  This is beyond AI psychosis; this is full AI schizophrenia.
  - ngruhn 2mo ago
    AI megalomania
sneilan1 2mo ago
I'm glad someone is trying this and exploring what's possible. It's easy to deride his work by saying what's the value but are you running 50 fable agents and letting them run wild to see what the future looks like?
- tediousgraffit1 2mo ago
  I would if I had that kind of money!
  - jkubicek 2mo ago
    If I had $122k/month to spend on tokens I would simply.... not. $1.5mm/year buys more of everything I want out of life than I could possibly consume.
    - baruz 2mo ago
      He’s using a $5k/month account to access the “equivalent” of $122k worth of tokens.
      - cowboylowrez 2mo ago
        Yeah same tho, that 5k looks to be pissing in the wind. He even knows for a fact he's not paying the actual costs yet never mentions how he's going to maintain that stack of code if costs per token ever get tightened up. I've used AI chat for coding, but with the caveat that I need to be able to "manually" edit the results. I like the process and am ready to maybe spend a little money on tokens but am still pretty far from using agents, although I'm starting to peruse peoples claude.mds and spending some hugging face tutorials plus I guess that means python bah He's really focused on the software factory aspect, and talks about the future and how he's living it but lets see how the code base he's accumulating is maintained, because thats the one question about the future that I rarely see answered.
        unified101 2mo ago
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
jshaqaw 2mo ago
The proof is (or isn't) in the game. If the game is something genuinely great then this all worked and is important. If the game is a bloviated, boring, and derivative mess then it didn't. Without any proof point on the output it is hard to say if the article has any value.
- SwellJoe 2mo ago
  The player community seems to hold the opinion it's the latter. Steam reviews are pretty dire. Worse, there really aren't a lot of players. Certainly not enough to cover Yegge's absurd number of Claude Max accounts.
  - scorpioxy 2mo ago
    This whole article is very strange to me. Consider the following quotes "I have been launching new game features so fast that the players asked me to slow down." and "using magic tricks that are a year ahead of their time. It's a system that we can ride so hard that it scares the players and they tell us to slow down. " That tells me a lot about the operation. Maybe I'm out of touch but none of what was described seems like a sustainable operation or business. Fun experiment perhaps but that's it. In another section there's also boasting of how the problem was that more code was needed to be produced and faster. I don't know. Was that really the problem all along before LLMs and agents showed up?
    - SwellJoe 2mo ago
      Am I so out of touch? No, it's the players who are wrong.
    - dwroberts 2mo ago
      This also stands out as strange to me: > interfacing with around 10 humans in the outside world: myself, my 5-person core game design team Like, really, there are 5 human designers on this game? What are they doing, exactly? (Or is this just a fancy way of saying, they approve/reject design proposals of the stack of agents, and they have zero agency of their own?)
Avshalom 2mo ago
>This tier, or the one just after it, will power hundreds to thousands of new AI employees at every company. >And companies are in no way, shape, or form prepared for this transition. so, uh, what's the business model here?
AgentOrange1234 2mo ago
"Wheelhouse is about 600k lines of code and tests (mostly bash)" This article is a joke right? Please tell me you are joking. Jesus christ.
- mplewis 2mo ago
  Every time Steve goes deeper into the AI whirlpool his engineering practices slip further from good.
  - threecheese 2mo ago
    I’m glad somebody is doing it though; we need an honest assessment of what’s possible, and we’re getting one.
    - Terr_ 2mo ago
      So at least somebody is figuring out how much torment the human mind can handle in the Torment Nexus...
groby_b 2mo ago
"I would guess I'm one of a handful of top individuals on Earth outside the frontier labs, in terms of my experience with top-end models." I'd argue that number of tokens burned does not translate into "experience". And if you needed to spend $300k or so to find out that process helps manage larger efforts (process is what "fences" are outside Yegge-land), you sure spent a lot. I mean, I'm glad the guy's got a a hobby he enjoys, but there's less insight than you'd hope for.
kibwen 2mo ago
In the glorious future where I can conjure a game with a snap of my fingers for the cost of a pack of gum, why would I ever choose to play Wyvern, the game tailored to Steve Yegge's tastes, when I could just make a game tailored to my tastes? Perhaps Steve will be content to play his MUD with agents pretending to be human players?
- zbentley 2mo ago
  You joke, but even very simple/cheap AIs already make it a way bigger pain in the ass than it used to be to identify growth hacking fake user/signup/activity bullshit in all sorts of situations. It was already bad out there. But now it’s worse.
nzoschke 2mo ago
Seems like this is the year of the sandbox and governance layers. I recently wrote how we set all this up for our agent computers that help people with their email: https://housecat.com/blog/agent-computer-101 https://housecat.com/blog/agent-computer-101 I do agree even more rules help keep things on track, but I do these as linters, specifically as Golang `go vet` and `go fix` commands. That works 100x better than any SKILL.md or team of agents in my experience.
Theory5 2mo ago
I don't even like the idea of humans operating without guardrails where I work, much less AI.
- unified101 2mo ago
  Why not? What kind of work is this for?
fwlr 2mo ago
> the subject matter is too complicated to explain … All I can do is walk you around like an excited tour guide, one who has unearthed an ancient alien civilization. Now this is AI psychosis.
perrygeo 2mo ago
> So it's not $120k/month of real money, but it's still crazy spend. I would guess I'm one of a handful of top individuals on Earth outside the frontier labs, in terms of my experience with top-end models. We get it bro, you buy lots of tokens. My son buys lots of pokemon cards. Still haven't seen shit for return on that investment either, but as long as its all in good fun, "you do you". > That's how I'm able to tell the future. I'm living in a world that will not become cost-effective for most people for another year. That's pretty easy to verify. #remindme August 24, 2027 - are $120k worth of tokens in 2026 generally "affordable" by 2027? By what mechanism have the economics shifted?
- danpalmer 2mo ago
  I don't disagree with you, but I would clarify that it's not $120k of tokens, it's $5k of Claude subscriptions. And also I suspect he would consider "affordable" to be "as a well paid software engineer". So I guess his benchmark is really more like: does $5k of subscriptions reduce to ~$500 next year. I don't think it will. I also don't think this is really that affordable, but I'd imagine he'd call it accurate.
  - perrygeo 2mo ago
    That $5k subscription is already deeply discounted by debt funding. Anthropic is losing money on that account. So the bet is this free lunch will continue indefinitely and prices are gonna drop 10x on top of that? We'll see! Put another way, someone else is paying that 115k difference, and it's not out of the goodness of their hearts. Once they capture market share, capitalists gonna capitalize. For now, investors seem happy to pump money into the bubble without seeing returns, but that will not last forever.
    - danpalmer 2mo ago
      Well that $120k is also likely at a huge profit margin, at least accounting for COGS. That's already most of the $115k difference gone. Again, I don't really disagree with your general point here, but I think it's just a bit more complicated than you're making out.
throwaw12 2mo ago
I think Steve somewhat predicted the future well. He might be slightly off, because he is overly optimistic and operates at the edge, but look at Gas Town, when it was released it felt like dystopian, today it looks not too far away, I am sure most of your orgs are already running some kind of agent to triage the tickets and in some cases automatically open the PR in your git repo. I think he is onto something this time as well
- threecheese 2mo ago
  This weekend I stumbled across a codebase unlike anything I’d ever seen: Swamp Club[]. Came out of nowhere, lots of useful features, but with a coherent philosophy and architecture and a large body of working code. Change volume is high - notably so, but it looks nothing like the vibe slop I’d expected. A “swamp” contains tools that you build - with the help of agents - intended for use not just by apps and scripts, but agents (to add deterministic behavior, like code mode). Tools are ops things, product things, whatever. *And so it’s a tool plus a factory to update the tool.* The factory though isn’t only used for building your tool - that’s just a set of skill.md files. It can build your whole app, which itself can _use_ your tools - either for product features or ops tasks. *And so it’s a factory that can build any app, including a tool which can operate any app. * Right now, looking at the commit volume of the swamp stuff, it’s not stupid to suppose that the swamp is being used to create the swamp. *And so it’s a factory which makes, among other things, factories.* We’re cooked. - https://swamp-club.com/use-cases https://swamp-club.com/use-cases
AWebOfBrown 2mo ago
I honestly think Yegge has reached a point where he knows he isn't interested in doing the leg work of today's software engineering, but wants his career to ride the wave. The lowest effort, maximum value to extract in his position is abusing the crap out LLMs to an extent that is genuinely novel to secure thought leadership, but on close inspection it's just pointless token spend driving blog posts and publicity. To me it is absolutely farcical that he was being being paid by a harness company (Amp) as a staff software engineer, slop-coded a solution to keeping LLMs on track (Beads), and having paid for all of this Amp and Steve...parted ways. Beads never went into Amp. Someone cottoned on to the value Steve was providing, for my money.
- grebc 2mo ago
  You just described 99% of AI usage.
- ytoawwhra92 2mo ago
  > being paid by a [...] company > parted ways > Someone cottoned on to the value Steve was providing This pattern predates the LLM obsession.
zbentley 2mo ago
Congratulations, you have reinvented RFCs, architecture reviews, linters, and integration tests. From first principles. With cutesy names.
vishalrad 2mo ago
100% This is EXACTLY my experience and I didn't even spend 1% of what Steve has. Fable loves to create rules around the evaluations and decisions that I make. This is good, but this is also scary because 1/ I am fallible 2/ I don't have time to digest every detail and make a careful decision. And if I do spend that time, the system will return in 10 mins and give me another massive set of decisions to make .. thus creating an unending loop, resulting in decision fatigue... which leads to #2 again. So AI is optimizing in some ways for an AI as the judge, not human as a judge. It needs this input, this steer, but humans aren't built to support this.
- ImHereToVote 2mo ago
  The trick is to use a cheap Chinese model as the human-to-machine interface. No bullshit. Just honest mistakes.
SwellJoe 2mo ago
It kinda feels like Yegge is trying to start a cult. And, I just don't find that very interesting.
- svieira 2mo ago
  I don't think he's trying to start one, so much as he is being brainwashed by one.
  - SwellJoe 2mo ago
    Many cults are started by true believers. The founder can be the first victim.
pianopatrick 2mo ago
If the agents are really doing politics now, we can test and see which method of organizing agents politically works best.
danpalmer 2mo ago
Lots of talk about engineering his game, lots of talk about how this game is exactly what he wants, no talk of play testing. Is there any world in which this is going to be a good game?
- kleiba2 2mo ago
  Read this review on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198009905262/recommended/1541710 https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198009905262/recomm...
maherbeg 2mo ago
I'll say that Gastown sounded absolutely crazy, but the idea of having orchestrator threads to manage your work and keep tabs on it, having validators to validate the other work etc. were generally the right shape. I think GasTown probably could have been really successful if there was a pared down version with more obvious names rather than the fun names. I'm going to be thinking about this blog post for a while though because if you squint and tear it apart, there are probably really good generalizable pieces in here to take home for future models.
- tomveber 2mo ago
  [dead]
nvader 2mo ago
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1541710/Wyvern/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1541710/Wyvern/ Wyvern on Steam. Looks like Runescape
Animats 2mo ago
This scrolled off HN too fast. The concept is like Gas Town - AI as a organization, not an emulated human. Yes, it's inefficient. But it scales. (A very long time ago, I got a tour of Xerox PARC, even before Steve Jobs did. Alan Kay explained that they were building the future of computing, accepting that it cost far too much to be cost-effective. They assumed the hardware would catch up. It did. Took about ten years.)
- grebc 2mo ago
  Where’s the benefit in that? It’s not like Xerox is at the forefront these days. Maybe investors made a tonne on their equity back in the day? (What the real game is).
  - rmaxdev 2mo ago
    The purpose of any game is to get better at playing the game
stillpointlab 2mo ago
What Yegge describes in this post is something I have seen to a lesser extent in my own agent use. But one specific thing I noticed, which his inline comic lampoons, is Fable (especially) explicitly stating "[User] has ruled", or "The rulings are in". I was confused by this until I saw a post on X about how someone came to his agents in the morning after they ran all night, and the sub-agents had refused the requests from the orchestrating agents because they thought the decisions being made were not inline with the user. They thought the decisions were from the ochestrating agent. This, as well as the governance things that Fable and Codex both often request, made me thing of provenance, especially related to decisions and authority. As we get deeper and deeper hierarchies of agents (as we likely will) this idea of authority, who has it and where does it come from, feels like it will be a key component to agental systems.
skybrian 2mo ago
I'd like to read more about the game. Maybe after the new release?
uptownhr 2mo ago
It's interesting that I've also gone down a similar journey and the same keywords, fences, gates .. also showed up in my ai government platform.
appplication 2mo ago
> When you add it all up, Fable is trying to turn Wheelhouse into an engine that can prove, mechanically, that every change to Wyvern is legal. The agents capture every single intention, decision, policy, rule of thumb, and legacy behavior in the system, and they use that to govern every future decision and action. They live by the Rule of Law. It’s interesting to think of this as the chaotic result of essentially unbounded compute on fable in a positive feedback loop. I would suspect this essentially represents the formalization of the underlying system prompt as a process.
- Terr_ 2mo ago
  > They live by the Rule of Law. I feel that description is a bit too strident for the underlying stochastically-creative writing exercise going on. > "Is this a chain of command, or a chain of credulity?" > "There's a difference?" -- The Vor Game by Lois McClure Bujold
1282715 2mo ago
There is method in the madness: https://yegge.ai/services https://yegge.ai/services The C-suite wants to hear this Gavin Belson level stuff that would traditionally get people institutionalized. They think he is a inspirational speaker.
esafak 2mo ago
The code fable generated is interesting from the perspective of understanding how llms behave but it's not an immutable behavior -- it could have been designed not to do that. I think it's quite interesting how it conflated details of the game with the code's architecture. I don't think that's a good thing, and he could have caught it had he read the code.
adammarples 2mo ago
Never seen a sloppier hero image
WorseIsBetter 2mo ago
Yegge is either a visionary or completely delusional. Probably both. But I'm glad someone is running this experiment. We'll know in a year whether it was genius or madness
Oblouk 2mo ago
As someone who has worked on games with progression systems that run for years, engineering throughput is almost never the limiting factor. You can add content & systems much faster than players can understand them. Good design is deciding what NOT to add.

97 points by tosh 2mo ago

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

What is the overhead to have agents play model UN? Why is the coordination so elaborate? It sounds like a deeply complex and expensive emergent behavior that maybe looks comprehensible but could be nonsensical. Also like any complex system, can you actually predict the outcomes? Waste is a failure case. How do we know the code factory is actually productive or just agents filling up the computation resource cap because they can?

kodoman 2mo ago
Yeah I have noticed lots of agent stuff recently seems to be spin as many agents up as possible have a whole office of agents. Just keep spinning more AI bastards up, give names to your AI bastards not descriptive names human names, set up email messages for your AI bastards and wonder why your stressed out that you have messages from Dave, Linda and Michael and the other Dave. I think a lot of this sort of thinking is probably going to cause mental exhausting and so wasteful. Steve is a intelligent guy but I find my self thinking the whole build an AI office or company thing is not going to be the way things work in the future and better harnesses and agents that are particularized with highly particularized tools and loop are where things are going to work better rather then lots of AI employees.
skywhopper 2mo ago
The companies selling these ideas (and tuning their products to work well in this mode) make money based on how much they are used. They’ve committed to ludicrous levels of demand growth that can’t possibly be sustained by direct human use. But if they make their own product drive multiple instances of their own product, you get exponential effects.

coder-pm 2mo ago

How do you find the bad decisions with so many subscriptions active? isn't that looking for needle in a haystack:)?

elenaviter 2mo ago
[dead]
tclancy 2mo ago
I think A Bad Decision is the genesis of this.

mccoyb 2mo ago

> I am running an organization of around 50-60 agents, five of whom are interfacing with around 10 humans in the outside world: myself, my 5-person core game design team, my accountant, my chief of staff, and a few others. Only Fable is allowed to talk to humans, via Slack and email. RIP to those poor humans. I can't imagine having your brain melted by Fablespeak as your FTJ.

nepthar 2mo ago

(Asking sincerely in good faith - I read this note along with skimming a few of the linked ones, and I'm familiar with gastown) Can someone explain the value calculation to me? This seems like someone has truly let AI VASTLY expand the codebase of what seems to be a medium sized hobby game to ~10-100x the amount of engineering required. Especially with statements about how wheelhouse, his software factory, has grown to nearly the size of the actual software he's writing. He also mentions several times that wheelhouse is specific to developing the game. Then, he discusses "pulling in beads" which itself seems on my read to be enormously engineered. (note that he also says that you burn a lot of tokens with agents "keeping your beads in sync" and I didn't have the time to figure out what that meant, but it looks like as complicated as it is, beads can't reconcile itself without burning $$$). It seems like if you answer "yes" at every time you have the question of "can I make AI do this", you end up burning $120k/month in tokens on your side project. Again, I am not disparaging this- but I feel like I am genuinely missing something and would welcome help understanding it.

FinnLobsien 2mo ago
I guess this is a question of what you believe code and software engineering writ large is for. If you believe that good engineering practice matters (in the sense that your software is maintainable, efficient, etc.), then this is horrific because the human has no idea what’s going on and any attempt to fix something by hand would probably uncover enough complications to make you consider rewriting from scratch. But if your only qualifier is “does it do what I want it to do?” then this is perfectly fine. If you throw out the assumption that a human will ever maintain the code or need to understand it, then who cares if your main branch is full of unused code and it’s outrageously complex. In a way, I guess this is a similar moment to abstract painting in the early 20th century. If your assumption was that the point of a painting is to accurately capture a landscape or person, then abstract paintings are an abomination. If you believe paintings should evoke a feeling and depicting people or landscapes are only one way to get there, you can throw out all the sketching and composing and painting technique.
- watwut 2mo ago
  Meh, the actual complaint is that it does not really do what it should and keeps burning those $$$ as you ask it to fix this or that.

grebc 2mo ago

Yegge’s writing has declined proportionately to his AI usage.

BeetleB 2mo ago
I used to read his stuff ~20 years ago. He has cool things to say, but his writing always sucked. I often write lengthy pieces. Then I look at it and say "Oh no, I don't want to become Steve Yegge!"
AloysB 2mo ago
I genuinely wonder if he has completely lost touch with reality. He seems to slowly become the Terry A. Davis of LLMs.
owebmaster 2mo ago
It looks like AI psychosis
ramses0 2mo ago
Agree/disagree! He's genuinely writing words for humans (load bearing! honestly!), and he's definitely on the forefront of _something_, whether you agree with his findings or not. I'm particularly struck by the Superman metaphor: "Even if you put a giant shield around your house, Superman could destroy it with his super-strength and laser eyes... but he won't dare cross the white picket fence you've put up because it goes against his core beliefs!" Maybe think of "The Truman Show" ... 90% of the time you should be relying on guardrails and making the easier path obvious. ALSO have the hardened sandbox-proof escape container, but against a determined adversary, it's all 1's and 0's at the end and there's probably a way for them to get out?
- grebc 2mo ago
  NFT’s were the forefront according to HN 3 years ago, just before the AI hype cycle kicked off.

BeetleB 2mo ago

> I didn't want this to be a long post, and I think I've succeeded. Classic Steve Yegge!

xnx 2mo ago

> First, my secret: I see the future by living in it. I am spending the equivalent of $122k/month of API token spend, or about $4,000 per day, using 21 Claude Max accounts, a number that has been growing steadily at 2 per week. Good to know that together, Yegge and Zitron bring balance to the force.

fractorial 2mo ago
This is ludicrous; also, why publicly admit that blatant violation of ToS?
- mplewis 2mo ago
  Anthropic doesn't actually mind if you use multiple subscriptions
cedws 2mo ago
This is beyond AI psychosis; this is full AI schizophrenia.
- ngruhn 2mo ago
  AI megalomania

sneilan1 2mo ago

I'm glad someone is trying this and exploring what's possible. It's easy to deride his work by saying what's the value but are you running 50 fable agents and letting them run wild to see what the future looks like?

tediousgraffit1 2mo ago
I would if I had that kind of money!
- jkubicek 2mo ago
  If I had $122k/month to spend on tokens I would simply.... not. $1.5mm/year buys more of everything I want out of life than I could possibly consume.
  - baruz 2mo ago
    He’s using a $5k/month account to access the “equivalent” of $122k worth of tokens.
    - cowboylowrez 2mo ago
      Yeah same tho, that 5k looks to be pissing in the wind. He even knows for a fact he's not paying the actual costs yet never mentions how he's going to maintain that stack of code if costs per token ever get tightened up. I've used AI chat for coding, but with the caveat that I need to be able to "manually" edit the results. I like the process and am ready to maybe spend a little money on tokens but am still pretty far from using agents, although I'm starting to peruse peoples claude.mds and spending some hugging face tutorials plus I guess that means python bah He's really focused on the software factory aspect, and talks about the future and how he's living it but lets see how the code base he's accumulating is maintained, because thats the one question about the future that I rarely see answered.
      - unified101 2mo ago

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

jshaqaw 2mo ago

The proof is (or isn't) in the game. If the game is something genuinely great then this all worked and is important. If the game is a bloviated, boring, and derivative mess then it didn't. Without any proof point on the output it is hard to say if the article has any value.

SwellJoe 2mo ago
The player community seems to hold the opinion it's the latter. Steam reviews are pretty dire. Worse, there really aren't a lot of players. Certainly not enough to cover Yegge's absurd number of Claude Max accounts.
- scorpioxy 2mo ago
  This whole article is very strange to me. Consider the following quotes "I have been launching new game features so fast that the players asked me to slow down." and "using magic tricks that are a year ahead of their time. It's a system that we can ride so hard that it scares the players and they tell us to slow down. " That tells me a lot about the operation. Maybe I'm out of touch but none of what was described seems like a sustainable operation or business. Fun experiment perhaps but that's it. In another section there's also boasting of how the problem was that more code was needed to be produced and faster. I don't know. Was that really the problem all along before LLMs and agents showed up?
  - SwellJoe 2mo ago
    Am I so out of touch? No, it's the players who are wrong.
  - dwroberts 2mo ago
    This also stands out as strange to me: > interfacing with around 10 humans in the outside world: myself, my 5-person core game design team Like, really, there are 5 human designers on this game? What are they doing, exactly? (Or is this just a fancy way of saying, they approve/reject design proposals of the stack of agents, and they have zero agency of their own?)

Avshalom 2mo ago

>This tier, or the one just after it, will power hundreds to thousands of new AI employees at every company. >And companies are in no way, shape, or form prepared for this transition. so, uh, what's the business model here?

AgentOrange1234 2mo ago

"Wheelhouse is about 600k lines of code and tests (mostly bash)" This article is a joke right? Please tell me you are joking. Jesus christ.

mplewis 2mo ago
Every time Steve goes deeper into the AI whirlpool his engineering practices slip further from good.
- threecheese 2mo ago
  I’m glad somebody is doing it though; we need an honest assessment of what’s possible, and we’re getting one.
  - Terr_ 2mo ago
    So at least somebody is figuring out how much torment the human mind can handle in the Torment Nexus...

groby_b 2mo ago

"I would guess I'm one of a handful of top individuals on Earth outside the frontier labs, in terms of my experience with top-end models." I'd argue that number of tokens burned does not translate into "experience". And if you needed to spend $300k or so to find out that process helps manage larger efforts (process is what "fences" are outside Yegge-land), you sure spent a lot. I mean, I'm glad the guy's got a a hobby he enjoys, but there's less insight than you'd hope for.

kibwen 2mo ago

In the glorious future where I can conjure a game with a snap of my fingers for the cost of a pack of gum, why would I ever choose to play Wyvern, the game tailored to Steve Yegge's tastes, when I could just make a game tailored to my tastes? Perhaps Steve will be content to play his MUD with agents pretending to be human players?

zbentley 2mo ago
You joke, but even very simple/cheap AIs already make it a way bigger pain in the ass than it used to be to identify growth hacking fake user/signup/activity bullshit in all sorts of situations. It was already bad out there. But now it’s worse.

nzoschke 2mo ago

Seems like this is the year of the sandbox and governance layers. I recently wrote how we set all this up for our agent computers that help people with their email: https://housecat.com/blog/agent-computer-101 https://housecat.com/blog/agent-computer-101 I do agree even more rules help keep things on track, but I do these as linters, specifically as Golang `go vet` and `go fix` commands. That works 100x better than any SKILL.md or team of agents in my experience.

Theory5 2mo ago

I don't even like the idea of humans operating without guardrails where I work, much less AI.

unified101 2mo ago
Why not? What kind of work is this for?

fwlr 2mo ago

> the subject matter is too complicated to explain … All I can do is walk you around like an excited tour guide, one who has unearthed an ancient alien civilization. Now this is AI psychosis.

perrygeo 2mo ago

> So it's not $120k/month of real money, but it's still crazy spend. I would guess I'm one of a handful of top individuals on Earth outside the frontier labs, in terms of my experience with top-end models. We get it bro, you buy lots of tokens. My son buys lots of pokemon cards. Still haven't seen shit for return on that investment either, but as long as its all in good fun, "you do you". > That's how I'm able to tell the future. I'm living in a world that will not become cost-effective for most people for another year. That's pretty easy to verify. #remindme August 24, 2027 - are $120k worth of tokens in 2026 generally "affordable" by 2027? By what mechanism have the economics shifted?

danpalmer 2mo ago
I don't disagree with you, but I would clarify that it's not $120k of tokens, it's $5k of Claude subscriptions. And also I suspect he would consider "affordable" to be "as a well paid software engineer". So I guess his benchmark is really more like: does $5k of subscriptions reduce to ~$500 next year. I don't think it will. I also don't think this is really that affordable, but I'd imagine he'd call it accurate.
- perrygeo 2mo ago
  That $5k subscription is already deeply discounted by debt funding. Anthropic is losing money on that account. So the bet is this free lunch will continue indefinitely and prices are gonna drop 10x on top of that? We'll see! Put another way, someone else is paying that 115k difference, and it's not out of the goodness of their hearts. Once they capture market share, capitalists gonna capitalize. For now, investors seem happy to pump money into the bubble without seeing returns, but that will not last forever.
  - danpalmer 2mo ago
    Well that $120k is also likely at a huge profit margin, at least accounting for COGS. That's already most of the $115k difference gone. Again, I don't really disagree with your general point here, but I think it's just a bit more complicated than you're making out.

throwaw12 2mo ago

I think Steve somewhat predicted the future well. He might be slightly off, because he is overly optimistic and operates at the edge, but look at Gas Town, when it was released it felt like dystopian, today it looks not too far away, I am sure most of your orgs are already running some kind of agent to triage the tickets and in some cases automatically open the PR in your git repo. I think he is onto something this time as well

threecheese 2mo ago
This weekend I stumbled across a codebase unlike anything I’d ever seen: Swamp Club[]. Came out of nowhere, lots of useful features, but with a coherent philosophy and architecture and a large body of working code. Change volume is high - notably so, but it looks nothing like the vibe slop I’d expected. A “swamp” contains tools that you build - with the help of agents - intended for use not just by apps and scripts, but agents (to add deterministic behavior, like code mode). Tools are ops things, product things, whatever. *And so it’s a tool plus a factory to update the tool.* The factory though isn’t only used for building your tool - that’s just a set of skill.md files. It can build your whole app, which itself can _use_ your tools - either for product features or ops tasks. *And so it’s a factory that can build any app, including a tool which can operate any app. * Right now, looking at the commit volume of the swamp stuff, it’s not stupid to suppose that the swamp is being used to create the swamp. *And so it’s a factory which makes, among other things, factories.* We’re cooked. - https://swamp-club.com/use-cases https://swamp-club.com/use-cases

AWebOfBrown 2mo ago

I honestly think Yegge has reached a point where he knows he isn't interested in doing the leg work of today's software engineering, but wants his career to ride the wave. The lowest effort, maximum value to extract in his position is abusing the crap out LLMs to an extent that is genuinely novel to secure thought leadership, but on close inspection it's just pointless token spend driving blog posts and publicity. To me it is absolutely farcical that he was being being paid by a harness company (Amp) as a staff software engineer, slop-coded a solution to keeping LLMs on track (Beads), and having paid for all of this Amp and Steve...parted ways. Beads never went into Amp. Someone cottoned on to the value Steve was providing, for my money.

grebc 2mo ago
You just described 99% of AI usage.
ytoawwhra92 2mo ago
> being paid by a [...] company > parted ways > Someone cottoned on to the value Steve was providing This pattern predates the LLM obsession.

zbentley 2mo ago

Congratulations, you have reinvented RFCs, architecture reviews, linters, and integration tests. From first principles. With cutesy names.

vishalrad 2mo ago

100% This is EXACTLY my experience and I didn't even spend 1% of what Steve has. Fable loves to create rules around the evaluations and decisions that I make. This is good, but this is also scary because 1/ I am fallible 2/ I don't have time to digest every detail and make a careful decision. And if I do spend that time, the system will return in 10 mins and give me another massive set of decisions to make .. thus creating an unending loop, resulting in decision fatigue... which leads to #2 again. So AI is optimizing in some ways for an AI as the judge, not human as a judge. It needs this input, this steer, but humans aren't built to support this.

ImHereToVote 2mo ago
The trick is to use a cheap Chinese model as the human-to-machine interface. No bullshit. Just honest mistakes.

SwellJoe 2mo ago

It kinda feels like Yegge is trying to start a cult. And, I just don't find that very interesting.

svieira 2mo ago
I don't think he's trying to start one, so much as he is being brainwashed by one.
- SwellJoe 2mo ago
  Many cults are started by true believers. The founder can be the first victim.

pianopatrick 2mo ago

If the agents are really doing politics now, we can test and see which method of organizing agents politically works best.

danpalmer 2mo ago

Lots of talk about engineering his game, lots of talk about how this game is exactly what he wants, no talk of play testing. Is there any world in which this is going to be a good game?

kleiba2 2mo ago
Read this review on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198009905262/recommended/1541710 https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198009905262/recomm...

maherbeg 2mo ago

I'll say that Gastown sounded absolutely crazy, but the idea of having orchestrator threads to manage your work and keep tabs on it, having validators to validate the other work etc. were generally the right shape. I think GasTown probably could have been really successful if there was a pared down version with more obvious names rather than the fun names. I'm going to be thinking about this blog post for a while though because if you squint and tear it apart, there are probably really good generalizable pieces in here to take home for future models.

tomveber 2mo ago
[dead]

nvader 2mo ago

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1541710/Wyvern/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1541710/Wyvern/ Wyvern on Steam. Looks like Runescape

Animats 2mo ago

This scrolled off HN too fast. The concept is like Gas Town - AI as a organization, not an emulated human. Yes, it's inefficient. But it scales. (A very long time ago, I got a tour of Xerox PARC, even before Steve Jobs did. Alan Kay explained that they were building the future of computing, accepting that it cost far too much to be cost-effective. They assumed the hardware would catch up. It did. Took about ten years.)

grebc 2mo ago
Where’s the benefit in that? It’s not like Xerox is at the forefront these days. Maybe investors made a tonne on their equity back in the day? (What the real game is).
- rmaxdev 2mo ago
  The purpose of any game is to get better at playing the game

stillpointlab 2mo ago

What Yegge describes in this post is something I have seen to a lesser extent in my own agent use. But one specific thing I noticed, which his inline comic lampoons, is Fable (especially) explicitly stating "[User] has ruled", or "The rulings are in". I was confused by this until I saw a post on X about how someone came to his agents in the morning after they ran all night, and the sub-agents had refused the requests from the orchestrating agents because they thought the decisions being made were not inline with the user. They thought the decisions were from the ochestrating agent. This, as well as the governance things that Fable and Codex both often request, made me thing of provenance, especially related to decisions and authority. As we get deeper and deeper hierarchies of agents (as we likely will) this idea of authority, who has it and where does it come from, feels like it will be a key component to agental systems.

skybrian 2mo ago

I'd like to read more about the game. Maybe after the new release?

uptownhr 2mo ago

It's interesting that I've also gone down a similar journey and the same keywords, fences, gates .. also showed up in my ai government platform.

appplication 2mo ago

> When you add it all up, Fable is trying to turn Wheelhouse into an engine that can prove, mechanically, that every change to Wyvern is legal. The agents capture every single intention, decision, policy, rule of thumb, and legacy behavior in the system, and they use that to govern every future decision and action. They live by the Rule of Law. It’s interesting to think of this as the chaotic result of essentially unbounded compute on fable in a positive feedback loop. I would suspect this essentially represents the formalization of the underlying system prompt as a process.

Terr_ 2mo ago
> They live by the Rule of Law. I feel that description is a bit too strident for the underlying stochastically-creative writing exercise going on. > "Is this a chain of command, or a chain of credulity?" > "There's a difference?" -- The Vor Game by Lois McClure Bujold

1282715 2mo ago

There is method in the madness: https://yegge.ai/services https://yegge.ai/services The C-suite wants to hear this Gavin Belson level stuff that would traditionally get people institutionalized. They think he is a inspirational speaker.

esafak 2mo ago

The code fable generated is interesting from the perspective of understanding how llms behave but it's not an immutable behavior -- it could have been designed not to do that. I think it's quite interesting how it conflated details of the game with the code's architecture. I don't think that's a good thing, and he could have caught it had he read the code.

adammarples 2mo ago

Never seen a sloppier hero image

WorseIsBetter 2mo ago

Yegge is either a visionary or completely delusional. Probably both. But I'm glad someone is running this experiment. We'll know in a year whether it was genius or madness

Oblouk 2mo ago

As someone who has worked on games with progression systems that run for years, engineering throughput is almost never the limiting factor. You can add content & systems much faster than players can understand them. Good design is deciding what NOT to add.