4 ms·

(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 c

by nepthar 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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.
- mplewis 1mo ago
  ok, but when steve made gas town, it didn't actually do anything but build more gas town.
- SchemaLoad 1mo ago
  [dead]
- like_any_other 1mo ago
  > If your assumption was that the point of a painting is to accurately capture a landscape or person I know this is way off-topic, but this oft-repeated disinformation should be quashed wherever it appears. "Accuracy" was never the goal. Look at Hokusai [1], at John Bauer [2], at Jeffrey Catherine Jones [3]. Even at so "realistic" painters as Beksiński [4], or Caspar David Friedrich [5] - even if you were at the site of such a ruined abbey, and it was late evening, and you had the camera of your choice, the resulting photo would look nothing like that - painted in 1810. Look at The Swing by Fragonard [6], from 1768. Trees don't actually grow like that. Light doesn't work like that! You could visit every tree in the world with a camera, and you couldn't even approximate the feeling of that painting. These were not accidents, it was not that they tried to be photorealistic, and came up short. They were deliberate stylizations. And modern artists, and abstract artists, well educated in the history of art, know this well, but they deliberately spread the lie that accuracy was the goal, that photography made beautiful art redundant, to justify their abominations. Because the sketching and composing and painting techniques were only half about capturing life, while the other half, the more important half (or in the case of composing, the whole), was about evoking a feeling. Something at which they were infinitely better than their modern art successors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokusai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokusai [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bauer_(illustrator) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bauer_(illustrator) [3] https://darklongbox.com/2024/08/17/jeffrey-catherine-jones-an-appreciation/ https://darklongbox.com/2024/08/17/jeffrey-catherine-jones-a... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zdzis%C5%82aw_Beksi%C5%84ski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zdzis%C5%82aw_Beksi%C5%84ski [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abbey_in_the_Oakwood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abbey_in_the_Oakwood [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swing_(Fragonard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swing_(Fragonard)
jay_kyburz 1mo ago
Steve is not making a game, he is _playing_ the game of making games. It's like playing Factorio but instead building a rocket to escape, you are building a game. Instead of messing around with mining drills and train tracks, he is deploying agents and thinking about how to interface with them. I think it sounds like a super fun game. update: with the added benefit that he might see a return on his investment as well!
- nzoschke 1mo ago
  You nailed it, this is a meta game. AI lets you LARP. Want to be the head of a game studio? "Hire" a bunch of game dev agents, put them to work in the software factory, get pretty progress updates and an actual game of sorts along the way. Want to be the CEO of a startup? Hire a bunch of biz ops agents, and fire them when they make mistakes. Ship an actual website and MVP and make some numbers go up along the way. If you know you're playing a game its fun and weird. But I worry for the people that don't know they're LARPing...
- grebc 1mo ago
  Pushing pixels around the screen is what I bluntly described the grand sum capabilities of AI to my brother, who is quite infatuated with it. It wasn't appreciated.
  - reverius42 1mo ago
    Pushing pixels around the screen is how I used to describe my day job. These days I describe it as "I talk to Claude about every 15 minutes".
zellyn 1mo ago
Disclaimer: I work at an AI lab [edit: but speak for myself :-)] The value proposition is an average of 270 commits a day, for $4000/month, and the dramatic improvements to the game Yegge described. Even supposing 2/3 of them are burned on the scaffolding, 90 commits/day (assuming they’re of mostly good quality) would cost multiple engineers, one of which would cost much more than $48k/year. As another comment said, the ultimate proof will be in the pudding. But I don’t think the value proposition claimed is complicated.
- cowpig 1mo ago
  > I am spending the equivalent of $122k/month of API token spend, or about $4,000 per day, using 21 Claude Max accounts That's ~$1.4 million/year
  - codethief 1mo ago
    Emphasis on "the equivalent". Further down he writes: > I am of course using sanctioned cheating: I get all those tokens because I'm an individual, with the Claude Max discount. So it "only" costs me about $5k/month out of pocket, for a 50-agent cluster running on a 512GB M3 Ultra Mac Studio I bought off eBay for $25k. > So it's not $120k/month of real money, but it's still crazy spend.
- owebmaster 1mo ago
  > would cost multiple engineers, one of which would cost much more than $48k/year. Have you played the game? There's no way all this wasted money is comparable to the work of multiple engineers. This is using AI for entertainment, the result isn't an engaging game.
- nepthar 1mo ago
  I wouldn't say complicated, and I agree with you that the proof is in the pudding. I looked at the gameplay and if it was something akin to.. let's say "minecraft before minecraft existed", I'd be amazed and see the value right away. Looking at the game, it doesn't seem like a game that would require as much money to build as he's claiming he uses in credits (although via a loophole that allows him cheaper access). It doesn't look BAD, it just doesn't seem to warrant that much spend.
JimDabell 1mo ago
I haven’t kept up to date on Gastown, but I’m familiar with the mindset. A lot of people who want to go all-in on AI start with how they currently produce software and they try to add AI everywhere they can until things start going wrong. At this point they’ve found the threshold for “we can automate as much as possible without compromising on quality” and they can expand their AI use when models improve. A minority of people like Yegge start by automating absolutely everything possible but still trying to get everything to work, even if it’s low quality. At this point they’ve found the threshold for “as automated as possible while still basically working” and they can improve their quality when models improve. Both sets of people are trying to do the same thing – automate software development as much as possible – but they are approaching it from starting points on the opposite ends of the spectrum. One starts with quality and increases automation; the other starts with automation and increases quality. The latter approach is insane if you have to ship and maintain production quality software, but it’s also where some of the ideas that will be eventually used by the people taking the former approach come from.
Zylokloto 1mo ago
We are in the hot phase of research, development and exploration. I think its good that someone is trying it out. If the output is shit, its not my money. If the output is great, I know we crossed some magic line and we will rethink our world a lot sooner. And I do a lot more experiments with claude the last 2 weeks and have to admit, that claude got a lot better and a lot more intuitive. Just reading it and not doing it, doesn't give you the same xperience on were we at.

by nepthar 1mo ago

FinnLobsien 1mo 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 1mo 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.
mplewis 1mo ago
ok, but when steve made gas town, it didn't actually do anything but build more gas town.
SchemaLoad 1mo ago
[dead]
like_any_other 1mo ago
> If your assumption was that the point of a painting is to accurately capture a landscape or person I know this is way off-topic, but this oft-repeated disinformation should be quashed wherever it appears. "Accuracy" was never the goal. Look at Hokusai [1], at John Bauer [2], at Jeffrey Catherine Jones [3]. Even at so "realistic" painters as Beksiński [4], or Caspar David Friedrich [5] - even if you were at the site of such a ruined abbey, and it was late evening, and you had the camera of your choice, the resulting photo would look nothing like that - painted in 1810. Look at The Swing by Fragonard [6], from 1768. Trees don't actually grow like that. Light doesn't work like that! You could visit every tree in the world with a camera, and you couldn't even approximate the feeling of that painting. These were not accidents, it was not that they tried to be photorealistic, and came up short. They were deliberate stylizations. And modern artists, and abstract artists, well educated in the history of art, know this well, but they deliberately spread the lie that accuracy was the goal, that photography made beautiful art redundant, to justify their abominations. Because the sketching and composing and painting techniques were only half about capturing life, while the other half, the more important half (or in the case of composing, the whole), was about evoking a feeling. Something at which they were infinitely better than their modern art successors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokusai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokusai [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bauer_(illustrator) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bauer_(illustrator) [3] https://darklongbox.com/2024/08/17/jeffrey-catherine-jones-an-appreciation/ https://darklongbox.com/2024/08/17/jeffrey-catherine-jones-a... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zdzis%C5%82aw_Beksi%C5%84ski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zdzis%C5%82aw_Beksi%C5%84ski [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abbey_in_the_Oakwood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abbey_in_the_Oakwood [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swing_(Fragonard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swing_(Fragonard)

jay_kyburz 1mo ago

Steve is not making a game, he is _playing_ the game of making games. It's like playing Factorio but instead building a rocket to escape, you are building a game. Instead of messing around with mining drills and train tracks, he is deploying agents and thinking about how to interface with them. I think it sounds like a super fun game. update: with the added benefit that he might see a return on his investment as well!

nzoschke 1mo ago
You nailed it, this is a meta game. AI lets you LARP. Want to be the head of a game studio? "Hire" a bunch of game dev agents, put them to work in the software factory, get pretty progress updates and an actual game of sorts along the way. Want to be the CEO of a startup? Hire a bunch of biz ops agents, and fire them when they make mistakes. Ship an actual website and MVP and make some numbers go up along the way. If you know you're playing a game its fun and weird. But I worry for the people that don't know they're LARPing...
grebc 1mo ago
Pushing pixels around the screen is what I bluntly described the grand sum capabilities of AI to my brother, who is quite infatuated with it. It wasn't appreciated.
- reverius42 1mo ago
  Pushing pixels around the screen is how I used to describe my day job. These days I describe it as "I talk to Claude about every 15 minutes".

zellyn 1mo ago

Disclaimer: I work at an AI lab [edit: but speak for myself :-)] The value proposition is an average of 270 commits a day, for $4000/month, and the dramatic improvements to the game Yegge described. Even supposing 2/3 of them are burned on the scaffolding, 90 commits/day (assuming they’re of mostly good quality) would cost multiple engineers, one of which would cost much more than $48k/year. As another comment said, the ultimate proof will be in the pudding. But I don’t think the value proposition claimed is complicated.

cowpig 1mo ago
> I am spending the equivalent of $122k/month of API token spend, or about $4,000 per day, using 21 Claude Max accounts That's ~$1.4 million/year
- codethief 1mo ago
  Emphasis on "the equivalent". Further down he writes: > I am of course using sanctioned cheating: I get all those tokens because I'm an individual, with the Claude Max discount. So it "only" costs me about $5k/month out of pocket, for a 50-agent cluster running on a 512GB M3 Ultra Mac Studio I bought off eBay for $25k. > So it's not $120k/month of real money, but it's still crazy spend.
owebmaster 1mo ago
> would cost multiple engineers, one of which would cost much more than $48k/year. Have you played the game? There's no way all this wasted money is comparable to the work of multiple engineers. This is using AI for entertainment, the result isn't an engaging game.
nepthar 1mo ago
I wouldn't say complicated, and I agree with you that the proof is in the pudding. I looked at the gameplay and if it was something akin to.. let's say "minecraft before minecraft existed", I'd be amazed and see the value right away. Looking at the game, it doesn't seem like a game that would require as much money to build as he's claiming he uses in credits (although via a loophole that allows him cheaper access). It doesn't look BAD, it just doesn't seem to warrant that much spend.

JimDabell 1mo ago

I haven’t kept up to date on Gastown, but I’m familiar with the mindset. A lot of people who want to go all-in on AI start with how they currently produce software and they try to add AI everywhere they can until things start going wrong. At this point they’ve found the threshold for “we can automate as much as possible without compromising on quality” and they can expand their AI use when models improve. A minority of people like Yegge start by automating absolutely everything possible but still trying to get everything to work, even if it’s low quality. At this point they’ve found the threshold for “as automated as possible while still basically working” and they can improve their quality when models improve. Both sets of people are trying to do the same thing – automate software development as much as possible – but they are approaching it from starting points on the opposite ends of the spectrum. One starts with quality and increases automation; the other starts with automation and increases quality. The latter approach is insane if you have to ship and maintain production quality software, but it’s also where some of the ideas that will be eventually used by the people taking the former approach come from.

Zylokloto 1mo ago

We are in the hot phase of research, development and exploration. I think its good that someone is trying it out. If the output is shit, its not my money. If the output is great, I know we crossed some magic line and we will rethink our world a lot sooner. And I do a lot more experiments with claude the last 2 weeks and have to admit, that claude got a lot better and a lot more intuitive. Just reading it and not doing it, doesn't give you the same xperience on were we at.