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Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

steve-yegge.medium.com

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Re: Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

#81

Post by shepherdjerred »

bloggie wrote: post #56
alecbz wrote: post #43

I'm still choosing to believe this is all a joke.

Yesterday I wanted to change a white background to transparent on some clip art. I’m still learning Affinity so asked Google Gemini Nano Banana PRO 2. The output looked ok at first but the grey squares were a little off. They didn’t make a perfect grid. I opened it in mspaint and was able to erase the grey squares. It didn’t change the white background to transparent, it just drew an array of grey squares, but only g…

I would've asked Claude Code to write a program to do it

Re: Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

#82

Post by troupo »

senordevnyc wrote: post #66

It's saddening to see folks here on HN direct so much contempt towards this. I have no intention of messing with Gas Town or Wasteland, but I think it's cool that folks like Steve with lots of money and time are using it to build stuff they find cool and interesting. I doubt these projects are the future of AI agent orchestration, but I do think they're probably going to help us collectively learn better how to work…

> Why be angry at Steve for playing around with a fun hobby project that goes nowhere?

People dislike scam artists, hype artists and bullshitters. Especially when said artists had something actually useful to contribute once upon a time. E.g. Yegge's Platform Rant [1] is still required reading IMO.

Now he's uncritically and unapologetically pushes extremely low quality level AI slop while first trying to prop up Amp, then trying to sell a book, then trying to sell a crypto scam, now trying to sell a vibe-coded database. All the while proclaiming his projects have the basest of basic ideas but somehow need hundreds of thousands of lines of AI-generated low quality slop code to barely function.

The contempt here is the same as for idiots who uncritically run clawdbot and other AI bullshitters and grifters.

Compare this to @simonw who constantly evaluates coding agents, explains what he does in a coherent clear language that doesn't use ChatGPT to invent new inane terms for existing things, and stands behind his work and motivations: https://simonwillison.net

[1] https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

Re: Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

#83

Post by citrusx »

Let's see...

You can be part of the new reputation economy, IF you can afford Multiple Claude Max subscriptions and use all your tokens for it.

Kind of like "getting good" at a collectible card game. It's more weighted toward whether you have money (and are willing to spend it) than anything else.

Re: Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

#84

Post by nkzd »

verdverm wrote: post #57
pocksuppet wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We pay for 10000 AI bots and it makes awesome software, which is invisible and undetectable by anybody except me. It gives me a sense of pride and accomplishment."

Remember when they did that dopamine abstinence movement?

Who? I am really interested, can you provide more info?

Re: Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

#85

Post by cadamsdotcom »

There are two bottlenecks in software.

First is understanding what to build.

Second is getting the details right.

The best software is both the right software, and high quality. It’s bloody hard to do!

So, we do requirements gathering, and try to get the details right (TDD, continuous delivery etc).. it’s surprising to see Gas Town do none of this and optimistically hope agents will converge on good software by just throwing tokens at a wall and hoping it sticks.

So anyway, that’s what they’re ignoring. What are they actually doing???

It’s all for themselves.

Gas Town’s “product” is the warm fuzzies it gives people with money to burn, warm fuzzy feelings of being “at the frontier”. It’s a luxury product for nerds, and the only ones making money or selling anything are the big labs. There’s zero output or benefit to society because that’s simply not the point.

Re: Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

#86

Post by DragonStrength »

senordevnyc wrote: post #66

It's saddening to see folks here on HN direct so much contempt towards this. I have no intention of messing with Gas Town or Wasteland, but I think it's cool that folks like Steve with lots of money and time are using it to build stuff they find cool and interesting. I doubt these projects are the future of AI agent orchestration, but I do think they're probably going to help us collectively learn better how to work…

If you can point to single product he has made through his "vibe-coding" that isn't for "vibe-coding," I think they would all relent.

Re: Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

#87

Post by verdverm »

nkzd wrote: post #84
verdverm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when they did that dopamine abstinence movement?

Who? I am really interested, can you provide more info?

It was thing among SV people around the crypto era

https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2019/nov/19/do...

Re: Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

#88

Post by hardwaregeek »

steveklabnik wrote: post #17
hardwaregeek wrote: post #6

I really want to host a vibe coding competition and see what can actually be made with these systems. Like if we’re doing insane token spends, it better be in service of creating amazing stuff. Can we make an entirely new programming language? Can we make an OS?

> Can we make an entirely new programming language? Can we make an OS? I have seen both of these already. I've done the former personally, and I've seen links to at least kernels for the latter. (I didn't do it via gastown, just regular old "use Claude".)

That’d also be an interesting data point! What’s the upper limits of vibe coding? Can you vibe code rust? What about an entire programming language toolchain? How about an ecosystem? Can you make a parallel npm?

Re: Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

#89

Post by ufmace »

zachmu wrote: post #70
senordevnyc wrote: post #66

It's saddening to see folks here on HN direct so much contempt towards this. I have no intention of messing with Gas Town or Wasteland, but I think it's cool that folks like Steve with lots of money and time are using it to build stuff they find cool and interesting. I doubt these projects are the future of AI agent orchestration, but I do think they're probably going to help us collectively learn better how to work…

Regardless of whether this particular project goes anywhere, it's at least very interesting that Yegge has discovered a way to make multi-agent setups work better. Giving them discrete personas ("you are a senior database engineer with 30 years of experience") and narrower scopes makes them much more effective. This was surprising to me but makes a lot of sense in retrospect.

The part that always struck me as weird about this stuff is that all of these "agents" with their "personas" are the same baseline LLMs with the same training ultimately, just told to basically pretend they're different. How far can that really get you?

I'm not actually a database engineer with 30 years of experience. If somebody demanded that I pretend to be one, I guess I'd give it a shot, but I would expect any actual employer would be able to tell that I don't have the level of knowledge and experience that you'd expect from somebody like that.

If the base LLM actually has the knowledge of all of these specialties, why can't it just apply them all at once, instead of needing to be told to I guess pretend to be only one of them.

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