I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment.
It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end.
And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and harumph at it for being Unprofessional and Not Serious and Not Ready For Production.
I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn't.
Maybe it's because we also have suits telling us we have to use neural nets everywhere for everything Or Else, and there's no sense of fun in that.
Maybe it's the natural consequence of large-scale professionalization, and stock option plans and RSUs and levels and sprints and PMs, that today's gray hoodie is just the updated gray suit of the past but with no less dryness of imagination.
> If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment:
So, Steve has the big scary "YOU WILL DIE" statements in there, but he also has this:
> I went ahead and built what’s next. First I predicted it, back in March, in Revenge of the Junior Developer. I predicted someone would lash the Claude Code camels together into chariots, and that is exactly what I’ve done with Gas Town. I’ve tamed them to where you can use 20–30 at once, productively, on a sustained basis.
"What's next"? Not an experiment. A prediction about how we'll work. The word "productively"? "Productively" is not just "a big fun experiment." "Productively" is what you say when you've got something people should use.
Even when he's giving the warnings, he says things like "If you have any doubt whatsoever, then you can’t use it" implying that it's ready for the right sort of person to use, or "Working effectively in Gas Town involves committing to vibe coding.", implying that working effectively with it is possible.
Every day, I go on Hacker News, and see the responses to a post where someone has an inconsistent message in their blog post like this.
If you say two different and contradictory things, and do not very explicitly resolve them, and say which one is the final answer, you will get blamed for both things you said, and you will not be entitled to complain about it, because you did it to yourself.
I agree, I’m one of the Very Serious Engineers and I liked Steve’s post when I thought it was sort of tongue in cheek but was horrified to come to the HN comments and LinkedIn comments proclaiming Gastown as the future of engineering. There absolutely is a large contingent of engineers who believe this, and it has a real world impact on my job if my bosses think you can just throw a dozen AI agents at our product roadmap and get better productivity than an engineer. This is not whimsical to me, I’m getting burnt out trying to navigate the absurd expectations of investors and executives with the real world engineering concerns of my day to day job.
I feel that yegge captured the mania of the whole operation rather well. If your bosses commit to the idea that 100 memoryless stochastic "polecats" will deliver a long term sustainable business, then there are probably other leadership issues besides this.
> horrified to come to the HN comments and LinkedIn comments proclaiming Gastown as the future of engineering.
I don't spend much time on LinkedIn, but basically every comment I've read on HN is that, at best, Gas Town can pump out a huge amount of "working" code in short timeframes at obscene costs.
The overwhelming majority are saying "This is neat, and this might be the rough shape of what comes next in agentic coding, but it's almost certainly not going to be Gas Town itself."
I have seen basically no one say that Gas Town is the The Thing.
Embrace and use it to your advantage. Tell them nobody knows and understands how these things will actually work long term, that's why there's stuff like gas town, and that the way you see all of this is you can manage this process. What you bring to the table is making sure it will actually work if the tech is safe and sound, reaping the rewards, or protect the business if the tech fails, protecting the company from catastrophic tech failure, telll them that you are uniquely positioned to carry out the balancing act because you are deep in the tech itself. bonus if you explain the uncertainty framing in the business strategy: "because nobody really understands the tech nobody has an advantage, we are all playing on a leveled field, from the big boys at FAANGs to us peasants in normal non-tech enterprises: I am your advantage here if you give me the tools and leverage I need to make this work". if you play this right you'll get the fat bonus whether the tech actually works or not.
I think Steve's idea of an agent coordinator and the general model could make sense. There is a lot of discussion (and even work from Anthropic, OpenAI, etc) around multiagent workflows.
Is Gas Town the implementation? I'm not sure.
What is interesting is seeing how this paradigm can help improve one's workflow. There is still a lot of guidance and structuring of prompts / claude.md / whichever files that need to be carefully written.
If there is a push for the equivalent of helm charts and crds for gas town, then I will be concerned.
I ran into this building a similar workflow with LangGraph. The prompt engineering is definitely a pain, but the real bottleneck with the coordinator model turns out to be the compounding context costs. You end up passing the full state history back and forth, so you are paying for the same tokens repeatedly. Between that and the latency from serial round-trips, it becomes very hard to justify in production.
AI is such a fun topic -- the hype makes it easy to loath, but as a coder working with Claude I think it's an awesome tool.
Gastown looks like a viable avenue for some app development. One of the most interesting things I've noticed about AI development is that it forces one to articulate desired and prohibited behaviors -- a spec becomes a true driving force.
Yegge's posts are always hyperbolic and he consistently presents interesting takes on the industry so I'm willing to cut him a buttload of slack.
"I’m getting burnt out trying to navigate the absurd expectations of investors and executives with the real world engineering concerns of my day to day job."
Welcome to being a member of a product team who cares beyond just whats on their screen... Honestly there is a humbling moment coming for everyone, it and Im not sure its unemployment.
I too am a Very Serious Engineer but my shock is in the other direction: of course the ideas behind Gas Town are the future of software development and several VSEs I know are developing a proper, robust, engineering version of it that works. As the author of this article here remarks “yes, but Steve did it first”, and it annoys me that if I had written this post nobody would have read it, but also that, because I intend to use it in Very Serious Business ($bns) my version isn’t ready to a actually be published yet. Bravo to Steve for getting these thoughts on paper and the idea built even in such crude form. But “level 8” is real and there will be 9s and 10s and I am really enjoying building my own.
Strong agreement with this. The whimsical, fantasy, fun, light hearted things are great until a large enough group of people take them as a serious life motto & then try to push it on everyone else.
Taking the example of the cryptocurrency boom (as a whole) as the guide, the problem is the interaction of two realities: big money on the table; and the self-fulfilling-prophecy (not to say Ponzi) dynamic of needing people to keep clapping for Tinker-bell, in greater and greater numbers, to keep the line going up. It corrupts whimsical fun and community spirit, it corrupts idealism, and it corrupts technical curiosity.
And FOMO stories about missing out on Bitcoin when he knew about it, so he doesn't want you to miss out on this new opportunity to get "filthy rich" as an "investor" while you still can.
I don't get crypto - just looked up how a couple of most performant stocks did in the past decade, and I'm pretty sure you could outperform BTC with the same amount of risk tolerance.
The swings on BTC price are absolutely insane, and ETH even more so (which is even more risky, without showing higher gains).
This initially sunk my heart, but in all his replies there are like 50 very clearly unintelligent crypto grifters telling him he needs to be killed for scamming them, so I am unsure who to root for at this point. It's depressing he accepted it, but I might partially forgive it due to him making a lot of them lose money.
I feel it's hard to criticize people for engaging in this anymore. Why would any reasonable person not take the free money?
In the past this would've been different when you couldn't necessarily expect all participants to be fully aware of what's going on, but absolutely nobody is treating "gas town" coins as a serious investment.
Why is it hard to criticize people for being part of a scam operation? It's so morally and ethically bankrupt that it's really easy and valid to criticize someone for
Who is being scammed? The only people buying into tokens as obscure as these are degenerate gamblers who know very well that it's not any kind of an investment.
But people do. There are people who genuinely think crypto is an investment. Yes, smart people knows it is just a grift and that it is just about selling it on to the next person before it crashes. But is it moral to make money on stupid people? Many people lose all their money on gambling even if we always known gambling is a loss.
People keep giving him the benefit of the doubt. "He's clearly on to something, I just don't know what". I know what. The hustle of the shill. He has long gone from 'let's use a lot of tokens' to seeking a high score. He disgusts me.
Note the word "future" not "present". People are making a prediction of where things will go. I haven't seen a single person saying that Gas Town as it exists today is ready for production-grade engineering project.
> "If you say two different and contradictory things, and do not very explicitly resolve them, and say which one is the final answer, you will get blamed for both things you said, and you will not be entitled to complain about it, because you did it to yourself."
If I can be a bit bold and observe that this tic is also a very old rhetorical trick you see in our industry. Call it Schrodinger's Modest Proposal if you will.
In it someone writes something provocative, but casts it as both a joke and deadly serious at various points. Depending on how the audience reacts they can then double down on it being all-in-good-jest or yes-absolutely-totally. People who enjoy the author will explain the nonsensical tension as "nuance".
You see it in rationalist writing all the time. It's a tiresome rhetorical "trick" that doesn't fool anyone any more.
In what rationalist writing? The LessWrong style is to be literal and unambiguous. They’re pretty explicit that this is a community value they’re striving for.
The whole trick is having your cake and eating it too. The LessWrong style exploits the gap between the strength of the claims ("this is a big deal that explains something fundamental about the world") and the evidence/foundation (abstract armchair reasoning, unfalsifiable)
That’s not the same issue, though. You’re claiming just plain overconfidence or that you find their arguments unconvincing. But the rhetorical trick we were discussing is oscillating between treating a claim as a joke or as deadly serious depending on the audience.
It's a version of a motte and bailey argument (named after a medieval castle defense system):
> "...philosopher Nicholas Shackel coined the term 'motte-and-bailey' to describe the rhetorical strategy in which a debater retreats to an uncontroversial claim when challenged on a controversial one."
These are some very tortured interpretations you're making.
- "what's next" does not mean "production quality" and is in no way mutually exclusive with "experimental". It means exactly what it says, which is that what comes next in the evolution of LLM-based coding is orchestration of numerous agents. It does not somehow mean that his orchestrator writes production-grade code and I don't really understand why one would think it does mean that.
- "productively" also does not mean "production quality". It means getting things done, not getting things done at production-grade quality. Someone can be a productive tinkerer or they can be a productive engineer on enterprise software. Just because they have the word "product" in them does not make them the same word.
- "working effectively" is a phrase taken out of the context of this extremely clear paragraph which is saying the opposite of production-grade: "Working effectively in Gas Town involves committing to vibe coding. Work becomes fluid, an uncountable substance that you sling around freely, like slopping shiny fish into wooden barrels at the docks. Most work gets done; some work gets lost."
If he wanted to say that Gas Town wrote production grade code, he would have said that somewhere in his 8000-word post. But he did not. In fact, he said the opposite, many many many many many many times.
You're taking individual words out of context, using them to build a strawman representing a promise he never came close to making, and then attacking that strawman.
What possible motivation could you have for doing this? I have no idea.
> If you say two different and contradictory things...
He did not. Nothing in the blog post explicitly says or even remotely implies that this is production quality software. In addition, the post explicitly, unambiguously, and repeatedly screams at you that this is highly experimental, unreliable, spaghetti code, meant for writing spaghetti code.
The blog post could not possibly have been more clear.
> ...because you did it to yourself.
No, you're doing this to his words.
Don't believe me? Copy-paste his post into any LLM and ask it whether the post is contradictory or whether it's ambiguous whether this is production-grade software or not. No objective reader of this would come to the conclusion that it's ambiguous or misleading.
> Copy-paste his post into any LLM and ask it whether the post is contradictory or whether it's ambiguous whether this is production-grade software or not. No objective reader of this would come to the conclusion that it's ambiguous or misleading.
That's hilarious! You might want to add a bit more transition for the joke before the other points above, though.
> Don't believe me? Copy-paste his post into any LLM and ask it whether the post is contradictory or whether it's ambiguous whether this is production-grade software or not.
> If you say two different and contradictory things, and do not very explicitly resolve them, and say which one is the final answer, you will get blamed for both things you said, and you will not be entitled to complain about it, because you did it to yourself.
Our industry is held back in so many ways by engineers clinging to black-and-white thinking.
Sometimes there isn’t a “final” answer, and sometimes there is no “right” answer. Sometimes two conflicting ideas can be “true” and “correct” simultaneously.
It would do us a world of good to get comfortable with that.
My background is in philosophy, though I am a programmer, for what it is worth. I think what I'm saying is subtly different from "black and white thinking".
The final answer can be "each of these positions has merit, and I don't know which is right." It can be "I don't understand what's going on here." It can be "I've raised some questions."
The final answer is not "the final answer that ends the discussion." Rather, it is the final statement about your current position. It can be revised in the future. It does not have to be definitive.
The problem comes when the same article says two contradictory things and does not even try to reconcile them, or try to give a careful reader an accurate picture.
And I think that the sustained argument over how to read that article shows that Yegge did a bad job of writing to make a clear point, albeit a good job of creatring hype.
>We should take Yegge’s creation seriously not because it’s a serious, working tool for today’s developers (it isn’t). But because it’s a good piece of speculative design fiction that asks provocative questions and reveals the shape of constraints we’ll face as agentic coding systems mature and grow.
I have no doubt Yegge would agree wholeheartedly with that take. He wants the community to explore these ideas with him.
The bizarre thing is that Gas Town has been popping up in mainstream news and media. It's being discussed in my economics podcasts.
It's relevant for them because it hints at a very disruptive idea: The hierarchy of Gas Town, when extrapolated, suggests that agents won't just replace your workers, it will replace your business too. It suggests that in a few years there could be a tool that is effectively a software agency, which means companies like Anthropic could eat any software shop that can't compete.
yeah the messaging is somewhat insecure in that it preemptively seeks to invalidate criticism by just being an experiment while simultaneously making fairly inflammatory remarks about nay sayers like they'll eat dirt if they don't get on board.
I think it's possible to convey that you believe strongly in your idea and it could be the future (or "is the future" if you're so sure of self) while it still being experimental. I think he would get less critics if he wasn't so hyperbolic in his pitch and had fewer inflammatory personal remarks about people who he hasn't managed to bring on side.
People I know who communicate like that generally struggle to contribute constructively to nuanced discussions, and tend to seek out confrontation for the sake of it.
There is no way for this to be true. I read his book about vibe coding and it is obvoius that it has significant LLM contribution. His blog posts though are funy and controversial, and have bad jokes, and he jumps from topic to topic. Ha has had this style like 10+ years before LLMs came around.
I've been reading Steve's posts for quite literally a decade now and I don't think his new posts are so meaningfully different from the old ones that he's not at the wheel any more. Besides, his twitter posts often double down on what he's writing in the blog, and it's doubtful he's not writing those.
> Keep in mind that Steve has LLMs write his posts on that blog.
Ok, I can accept that, it's a choice.
> Things said there may not reflect his actual thoughts on the subject(s) at hand.
Nope, you don't get to have it both ways. LLMs are just tools, there is always a human behind them and that human is responsible for what they let the LLM do/say/post/etc.
We have seen the hell that comes from playing the "They said that but they don't mean it" or "It's just a joke" (re: Trump), I'm not a fan of whitewashing with LLMs.
This is not an anti or pro Gas Town comment, just a comment on giving people a pass because they used an LLM.
Do you read that as giving him a pass? I read it as more of a condemnation. If you have an LLM write "your" blog posts then of course their content doesn't represent your thoughts. Discussing the contents of the post then is pointless, and we can disregard it entirely. Separately we can talk about what the person's actual views might be, using the fact that he has a machine generate his blog posts as a clue. I'm not sure I buy that the post was meaningfully LLM-generated though.
The same approach actually applies to Trump and other liars. You can't take anything they say as truth or serious intent on its own; they're not engaging in good faith. You can remove yourself one step and attempt to analyze why they say what they do, and from there get at what to take seriously and what to disregard.
In Steve's case, my interpretation is that he's extremely bullish on AI and sees his setup or something similar as the inevitable future, but he sprinkles in silly warnings to lampshade criticism. That's how the two messages of "this isn't serious" and "this is the future or software development" co-exist. The first is largely just a cover and an admission this his particular project is a mess. Note that this interpretation assumes that the contents of the blog post in question were largely written by him, even if LLM assistance was used.
Hmm, maybe I read the original comment wrong then? I did read it as "You can't blame him, that might not even be what he thinks" and my stance is "He posted it on his blog, directly or indirectly, what else am I supposed to think?".
I agree with you on Steve's case, and I have no ill will towards him. Mostly it was just me trying to "stomp" on giving him a pass, but, as you point out, that may not have been what the original commenter meant.
I thought it was harmless(ish) fun, but David Gerard put out a post stating that Yegge used Gas Town to push out a crypto project that rug pulled his supporters, while he personally walked away with something between $50K to $100K from memory.
I suppose that has little to do with the technical merits of the work, but it's such a bad look, and it makes everyone boosting this stuff seem exactly as dysregulated/unwise as they've appeared to many engineers for a while.
I met Sean Goedecke for lunch a few weeks ago, who uses LLMs a bunch, and is clearly a serious adult, but half the folks being shoved in front of everyone are behaving totally manic and people are cheering them on. Absolutely blows my mind to watch.
That was very weird. In the post where he was arguably "shilling," he seems to have signposted pretty well that it was dumb, but he will take the money they offered:
> $GAS is not equity and does not give you any ownership interest in Gas Town or my work. This post is for informational purposes only and is not a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any token. Crypto markets are volatile and speculative — do not risk money you can’t afford to lose.
...
> Note: The next few sections are about online gambling in all its forms, where “investing” is the buy-and-hold long-form “acceptable” form of gambling because it’s tied to world GDP growth. Cryptocurrencies are subject to wild swings and spikes, and the currency tied to Gas Town is on a wild swing up. But it’s still gambling, and this stuff is only for people who are into that… which is not me, and should probably not be you either.
In the next post he said he wasn't going to shill it any more, and then the price collapsed and people sent him death threats on Twitter. It probably would have collapsed anyway. Perhaps there was supposedly some implicit bargain that he shouldn't take the money if he wasn't going to shill? Well, there's certainly no rule saying you have to do that.
I think he's not very much to blame for taking the money from degenerate gamblers, and the cryptocurrency idiots are mostly to blame for their own mistakes.
> I think he's not very much to blame for taking the money from degenerate gamblers, and the cryptocurrency idiots are mostly to blame for their own mistakes.
I empathize with the disdain for crypto idiots, but I still think the people running or promoting these scams deserve most of the blame. "There's a market for my poison" is every dopamine dealer's excuse.
“Degenerate gamblers” is the kind of stigma that stops people and their families getting help for addiction. Even if you believe it’s a moral failing, the families deserve better.
Very true. Although, I wonder how much of that sort of thing was going on in this case? Did people actually bet money they couldn't afford to lose on this crazy scheme?
Yegge wrote in his blog post (viewed by many who ended up buying in) that it is an investment and that he wishes the investors will become "filthy rich". He wrote the post as an introduction to the concept of BAGS for an audience that is unfamiliar with it. He onboarded people to the platform and to his pump and dump scheme (in which he pumped, and dumped, then announced he's walking away from it).
You left out that part of the post and only mentioned the disclaimer he added at the top after he got pushback on his messaging. Are you influenced by his celebrity?
> I think he's not very much to blame for taking the money from degenerate gamblers, and the cryptocurrency idiots are mostly to blame for their own mistakes.
So drug dealers are not to blame for taking the money from degenerate addicts! Let's free everyone and disband the DEA, we'll save billions of dollars.
Oh wait nvm this line of thinking only applies to sv people
Maybe I'd care about his opinion if he didn't take the money. I consider this worse than OSS taking VC money. At least those don't have a scam auto-builtin to the structure beyond normal capitalistic parasitism.
Also, 275k lines for a markdown todo app. Anyone defending this is an idiot. I'll just say that. Go ahead, defend it. Go do a code review on `beads`. Don't say it's alright, but gastown is madness. He fucking sucks.
> And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and harumph at it for being Unprofessional and Not Serious and Not Ready For Production.
> OK! That was like half a dozen great reasons not to use Gas Town. If I haven’t got rid of you yet, then I guess you’re one of the crazy ones. Hang on. This will be a long and complex ride. I’ve tried to go super top-down and simplify as much as I can, but it’s a bit of a textbook.
A sense of art and whimsy and experimentation is less compelling when it's jumping on the hypest of hype-trains. I'd love to see more folk art in programming, but Gas Town is closer to fucking Beeple than anything charming.
I like gastown's moxie, it's fun, and seems kind of tongue in cheek.
What I don't like is people me-tooing gastown as some breakthrough in orchestration. I also don't like how people are doing the same thing for ralph.
In truth, what I hate is people dogpiling thoughtlessly on things, and only caring about what social media has told them to care about. This tendency makes me get warm tingles at the thought of the end of the world. Agent smith was right about humanity.
No, Ralph is famously dumb and needs lots of hand-holding and explanations of things most people think are very simple and can hold very little in his head at once.
But that's often enough to loop over and over again and eventually finish a task
Perhaps it was his followup post about how people are lining up to throw millions of VC dollars at his bizarre whimsical fever dream that disturbs people? I’m all for arts funding, but…
Isn't the point that he refused them? VCs can be dumb (see the crypto hype, even the recent inflated AI raises) so I wouldn't put too much stock in what they think is valuable.
It isn't though. It crossed the chasm when Steve (who I would like to think is somewhat comfortable after writing a book, holding a director level position at several startups) decided to endorse an outright crypto pump and dump.
When he decided to monetize the eyeballs on the project instead of anything related to the engineering. Which, of course, Steve isn't smart enough to understand (in his own words) and he recommends you not buy but he still makes a tidy profit from it.
Its a memecoin now... that has a software project attached to it. Anything related to engineering died the day he failed to disavow the crypto BS and instead starting shrilling it.
What happened to engineers not calling out BS as BS.
My favorite part about that is gas town is supposedly so productive that this guys sleep patterns are affected by how much work he’s doing, but he took the time to physically go to a bank to get a 5 figure payout.
It makes it difficult to believe that gas town is actually producing anything of value.
I also lol at his bitching about how the bank didn’t let him do the transactions instantly as he describes himself how much of a scam this seems and how the worst thing is his bank account being drained, like banks don’t have a self interest in protecting their clientele from such scams.
> I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment. It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative.
Because I actually have an arts degree and I know the equivalent of a con artist in a rich people arts gallery bullshitting their way into money when I see one.
And the "pushing and crossing boundaries" argument has been abused as a pathetic defense to hide behind shallowness in the art world for longer than anyone in this discussion board has been alive. It's not provocative when it's utterly predictable, and in this case the "art" is "take the most absurd parody of AI culture and play it straight". Gee whiz how "creative" and "provocative".
I work in a typical web app company which does accounting/banking etc.
A couple of days ago I was sitting in a meeting of 10-15 devs, discussing our AI agents. People were raising issues and brainstorming ways around the problems with AI. How to make the AI better.
Our devs were occupied doing AI things, not accounting/banking things.
If the time savings were as promised, we should have been 3 devs (with the remaining devs replaced by 7-10 AI agents) discussing accounting/banking.
If Gas Town succeeds, it will just be the next toy we play with instead of doing our jobs.
Isn't that fun though? We get paid to fuck around. People say AI is putting devs out of jobs, I say we're getting paid to play with them and see if there's any value there. This is no different from the dev tools boom of the ZIRP era: I remember having several sprints worth of work just integrating the latest dev tool whose sales team won our execs over.
Playing with new toys is part of doing my job. In my shop, we call them "ooh shiny"'s. Most devs are in the same boat, but I feel bad for those that aren't.
Anyone using beads should switch to something else that isn't insane. If you like beads, https://github.com/hmans/beans works the same (not my project), just that its serdes is markdown files with front matter, in a dot folder. Like every sane solution. No daemons, no sync branches. I cannot guarantee the project at all, but at least its better than beads. Or make your own; this is one example of one such project.
I didn't read this article as hate at all, FWIW. It was a pretty measured review of what it is and what it isn't with some much clearer diagrams of the mental models.
I don't understand what's "scammy" about a rugpull. What did the "investors" expect? That lolcoin would become a cash flow positive business and disburse dividends?
>I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn't.
Remember the days when people experimented with and talked about things that werent LLMs?
I used to go to a lot of industry events and I really enjoyed hearing about the diversity of different things people worked on both as a hobby and at work.
Now it's all LLMs all the time and it's so goddamn tedious.
> I used to go to a lot of industry events and I really enjoyed hearing about the diversity of different things people worked on both as a hobby and at work.
I go to tech meetups regularly. The speed at which any conversation end up on the topic of AI is extremely grating to me. No more discussions about interesting problems and creative solutions that people come up with. It's all just AI, agentic, vibe code.
At what point are we going to see the loss of practical skills if people keep on relying on LLMs for all their thinking?
It's incredible the change over the last few years even on the hardware side. I go to the supercomputing.org conference annually and saw folks advertising "AI power distribution units". There used to be a lot of neat innovation, and now every last thing has to have "AI" in the title, it's infuriating
> No more discussions about interesting problems and creative solutions that people come up with. It's all just AI, agentic, vibe code.
And then you give in and ask what they're building with AI, that activation energy finally available to build the side project they wouldn't have built otherwise.
It's like the entire software industry is gambling on "LLMs will get better faster than human skills will decay, so they will be good enough to clean up their own slop before things really fall apart".
I can't even say that's definitely a losing bet-- it could very well happen-- but boy does it seem risky to go all-in on it.
On one hand, it’s extremely tiring having to put up with that section of our industry.
On the other, if a large portion of the industry goes all in, and it _doesn’t_ pay off and craters them, maybe the overhyping will move onto something else and we can go back to having an interesting, actually-nice-to-be-in-industry!
I can't help but think of a video of a talk by someone- uncle Bob maybe?- talking about the origin of the agile manifesto.
He framed it as software developers were once the experts in the room, but so many young people joined the industry that managers turned to micromanaging them out of instinctual distrust. The manifesto was supposed to be the way for software developers to retake the mantle of the professional expert, trusted to make things happen.
I don't really think that happened, especially with agile becoming synonymous with Scrum, but if this doesn't pay off and craters the industry, it seems like it'd be the final nail in that coffin.
Well, LLMs are an engineering breakthrough of the degree somewhere between the Internet and electricity, in terms of how general-purpose and broadly-applicable they are. Much like them, LLMs have the potential to be useful in just about everything people do, so it's no surprise they've dominated the conversation - just like electricity and the Internet did, back in their heyday.
(And similar to the two, I expect many of the initial ideas for LLM application to be bad, perhaps obviously stupid in hindsight. But enough of them will work to make LLMs become a lasting thing in every aspect of people's lives - again, just like electricity and the Internet did).
It reminds me most of the release of the first iPhone - very flashy, very overhyped, adds a bit of convenience to people's lives but also likely to measurably damage people's brains in the long run.
~80% of the usage patterns i see these days falsely assume that LLMs can handle their own quality control and are optimizing for appearance, potential or demo-worthiness rather than hardcore usefulness. Gas town is not an outlier here.
When the internet and electricity were ~3 years old people were already using it for stuff that was working and obviously world changing rather than as demos of potential.
That 20% of usage patterns that work now arent going away but the other 80% are going to be seen as blockchainesque hype in 5 or 10 years.
It’s not the whimsy. It’s that the whimsy is laced with casual disdain, a touch too much “let me buy you a stick of gum and show you how to chew it”, a frustrated tenor never stated but dog whistled “you dumb fucks”. A soft sharp stink of someone very smart shoving that fact in your face as they evangelise “the obvious truth” you’re too stupid to see.
And maybe he’s even right. But the reaction is to the flavour of chip on the shoulder delivery mixed into an otherwise fun piece.
We have a different take than Gastown. If AI behaves unreliably and unpredictably, maybe the problem is the ask. So we looked at backend code and decided it was time to bring in more declarative programming. We are already halfway there with declarative frontend (React) and declarative database (SQL). Functional programming is an answer, but functional programming didnt replace object oriented programming because of practical reasons.
So even if the super serious engineers are serious, they should watch their back. Eventually enough guardrails will be created or even the ask will change enough for a lot of automation to happen. And make no mistake, it is automation no different than having automated testing replace armies of manual testing or code generation or procedural generation or any other machine method. And who is going to be left with jobs? People who embrace the change, not people who lament for the good old days or who can't adapt.
Sucks but just how the world works. Sit on the bleeding edge or be burned. Yes there is an "enough" but I suspect enough is around people willing to look at Gastown or even make their own Gastown, not the other side.
>it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative
There's no art (or engineering) in this and the only provocative thing about it is that Yegge apparently decided to turn it into a crypto scam. I like the intersection of engineering and art but I prefer if it includes both actual engineering and art, 100 rabbits (100r.co) is a good example of it, not a blog post with 15 AI generated images in it that advocates some unholy combination of gambling, vibe coding and cryptocurrency crap.
Hi mediaman! I'm totally there with you and Steve on the whimsy and experimentation! And your tolerant attitude gives me the Dutch courage to post this.
I've been reading Yegge since the "Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™" days -- his rantings on Lisp, Emacs, and the Eval Empire shaped how I approach programming. His pro-LLM-coding rants were direct inspiration for my own work on MOOLLM. The guy has my deep respect, and I'm intrigued by his recent work on Sourcegraph and Gas Town.
The difference is resource constraints. Yegge has token abundance; I'm paying out of pocket. So where Gas Town explores "what if tokens were free?" (20-30 Claude instances overnight), MOOLLM explores "what if every token mattered?" Many agents, many turns, one LLM call.
To address wordswords2's concern about "no metrics or statistics" -- I agree that's a gap in Gas Town. MOOLLM makes falsifiable claims with receipts. Last night I ran an Amsterdam Fluxx Marathon stress test: 116+ turns, 4 characters (120+ character-turns per LLM call), complex social dynamics on top of dynamic rule-changing game mechanics. Rubric-scored 94/100. The run files exist. Anyone can audit.
qcnguy's critique ("same thing multiplied by ten thousand") is exactly the kind of specific feedback that helps systems improve. I wrote a detailed analysis comparing the two approaches -- intellectual lineage (Self, Minsky's K-lines, The Sims, LambdaMOO), the "vibecoded" problem (MOOLLM is LLM-generated but rigorously iterated, not ship-and-hope), and why "carrier pigeon" IPC architecture is a dark pattern when LLMs can simulate many agents at the speed of light.
an0malous raises a real fear about bosses thinking "throw agents at it" replaces engineering. Both systems agree: design becomes the bottleneck. Gas Town says "keep the engine fed with more plans." MOOLLM says "design IS the point -- make it richer." Different answers, same problem.
lowbloodsugar mentions building a "proper, robust, engineering version" -- I'd love to compare notes. csallen is right that "future" doesn't mean "production-grade today."
Adventure Uplift — Building a YAML-to-Web Adventure Compiler with Simulated Computing Pioneers:
I ran a 260KB session log where I convened a simulated symposium of computing pioneers to design an Adventure Compiler — a tool that compiles YAML adventure definitions that run on MOOLLM under cursor into standalone deterministic browser games requiring no LLM at runtime.
The twist: the "attendees" include AI-simulated tributes to Will Wright, Alan Kay, Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert, Ted Nelson, Ken Kahn, Gary Drescher, and 25+ others — both living legends and memorial candles for those who've passed. All clearly marked as simulated tributes, not transcripts.
What emerged from this thought experiment:
- Pie menus as the universal interface (rooms, inventory, dialogue trees)
- Sims-style needs system with YAML Jazz inner voice ("hunger: 1 # FOOD. FOOD. FOOD.")
- ToonTalk-inspired "programming by petting" for terpene kittens
- Speed of Light simulation — the opposite of "carrier pigeon" multi-agent architectures
On that last point: most multi-agent systems use message passing between separate LLM calls. Agent A generates output, it gets detokenized to text, sent over IPC, retokenized into Agent B's context. MOOLLM inverts this. Everything happens in one LLM call.
The spatial MOO map (rooms connected by exits) provides navigation, but communication is instantaneous within a call. Many agents, many turns, zero latency between them — and zero token requantization or semantic noise from successive detokenization/tokenization loops.
The session includes adversarial brainstorming where Barbara Liskov challenges schema contracts, James Gosling questions performance, Amy Ko pushes accessibility, and Bret Victor demands immediate feedback. Each critique gets a concrete response.
Concrete outputs: a working linter, architecture decisions, 53 indexed topics from "Food Oriented Programming" to "Hidden Objects as Invisible Infrastructure."
This is MOOLLM's Play-Learn-Lift methodology in action — play with ideas, extract patterns, lift into reusable skills and efficient scripts.
The session uses representation ethics guidelines — all simulated people are clearly marked, deceased figures invoked with memorial candles, and the framing is explicitly "educational thought experiment."
Happy to discuss the ethics of simulating people, the architecture decisions, or how this relates to my earlier Gas Town comparison post.
In the simulated discussion guest book entry, simulated Douglass Engelbart wrote:
>Doug Engelbart (Augmentation):
"Bootstrapping. The tools that build the tools. Your adventure compiler should be able to compile ITS OWN documentation into an adventure ABOUT how it works. The manual is a playable game."
That is exactly how the self documenting categorized skill directory/room works -- the directory is a room with subdirectories for every skill, themselves intertwingled rooms, which form a network you can navigate around via k-lines (see also tags).
Here is the skills dir, with the ROOM.yml file that makes it a room (like COM QueryInterface works: multiple interfaces available for a class, for multiple aspects of it, the directory is IUnknown and you can QI by looking for known interfaces like ROOM.yml, CHARACTER.yml, CONTAINER.yml that inherit from the corresponding skills).
And the README.md file is naturally the ubiquitous human readable documentation (also great for LLM deep dives). And github kindly formats and publishes README.md on every repo directory page, supporting mermaid diagrams, etc):
# ROOM.yml — The Skill Nexus
#
# This is a ROOM — a metaphysical library where all capabilities live.
# Every skill is a book that teaches itself when you read it.
# Every cluster is a shelf of related knowledge.
# Every ensemble is a team that works together.
To go meta, you can enter the Skill Skill (skills/skill), an extended MOOLLM meta-skill that knows all about creating new skills (via the constructionist "Play Learn Lift" strategy), and importing and upgrading Anthropic skills:
And here is a narrative session of me giving a tour of the category and skill networks by hopping around through K-Lines!
MOOLLM currently has 103 Anthropic compatible but extended skills (using 7 MOOLLM extensions, like CARD.yml, K-Lines, Self Prototypes and Delegation, etc).
Eight luminaries have been summoned as Hero-Story familiars — not puppets, but conceptual guides whose traditions we invoke. Each carries the K-lines they pioneered. [...]
ENTERING THE SKILL NEXUS
You push through a shimmering membrane and step into the Skill Nexus.
The space is impossible — a vast spherical chamber where books float in mid-air, orbiting a central point of warm golden light. But these aren't books. They're SKILLS. Living documents that teach themselves when you read them.
Lines of golden light connect related skills. Each connection pulses with meaning. This isn't a library — it's a constellation of knowledge.
Your companions materialize beside you:
Marvin Minsky adjusts his glasses, looking around with evident satisfaction.
"Ah! K-lines made manifest. Each of these floating tomes is a knowledge structure. Touch one and it reactivates an entire constellation of associations. I wrote about this in 1985, but I never imagined seeing it rendered so... literally."
Ted Nelson is already examining the golden threads between skills.
"Two-way links! Every connection goes BOTH directions. When skill A references skill B, skill B knows about skill A. This is what I've been trying to explain since 1965! Everything is deeply intertwingled!"
James Burke turns to address an invisible camera.
"You're looking at the Skill Nexus. A room where every door leads to another room, and every room has doors to everywhere else. But here's the thing — the signs above each door tell you WHY. Not just where you're going, but what connects HERE to THERE. That's what we're going to explore."
Palm scampers up to a floating skill-book labeled "incarnation" and hugs it.
"This is where I became REAL! Don spoke the wish, the tribunal approved, and I wrote my own soul."
Yeah it's unbelievably tiresome, endless complaints from people pushing up their glasses complaining, ITS A PROJECT ABOUT POLECATS CALLED GAS TOWN MADE FOR FUN, read that again, either admire it and enjoy it or quit the umpteenth complaint about vibecoding.
It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end.
And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and harumph at it for being Unprofessional and Not Serious and Not Ready For Production.
I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn't.
Maybe it's because we also have suits telling us we have to use neural nets everywhere for everything Or Else, and there's no sense of fun in that.
Maybe it's the natural consequence of large-scale professionalization, and stock option plans and RSUs and levels and sprints and PMs, that today's gray hoodie is just the updated gray suit of the past but with no less dryness of imagination.