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Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

steve-yegge.medium.com

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Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#131

Post by sailingparrot »

antonvs wrote: post #120
phpnode wrote: post #87

I'm pretty excited about agentic coding myself, but this does appear to be an extended ai-psychosis (i'm not super comfortable with this phrase, but it is becoming pretty recognisable). I think he's boxed himself in by continually layering more complexity on his approach, rather than stepping back and questioning the fundamentals or the overall direction. All of the steps Gas Town or Gas City etc are taking are towar…

I’ve wondered whether this is all supposed to be a satire on the industry. But unintentional self-parody is also a possibility.

[deleted]

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#132

Post by Uhhrrr »

underarm5717 wrote: post #126
Quarrelsome wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we can do better than "that man is crazy". Why not pull up a line in his OPENLY AVAILABLE CODE BASE and mock that instead?

[dead]

If you actually follow the links you posted, you will see that he didn't create a meme coin and didn't rug pull it. Someone else made the coin and set it up so he got transfer fees.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#133

Post by zactato »

bayarearefugee wrote: post #10

> But no need to wait. At a high level, Gas City is the answer to all your problems. Ha! At least, for certain classes of problem, such as, “How can I bring AI into my company and pass an audit trail,” The important audit at my company is conducted by the FDA. I have a feeling when they ask what processes we followed to mitigate any user harm that could be caused by software changes that "I told an AI-mayor in the fo…

Ehhh in my experience compliance auditors are 10 behind the cutting edge. I still see auditors that don't understand Kubernetes and so ask the same questions they would about on prem machines. They don't know the questions to ask to get to the real meat of the risks. This leads them to allow things through that probably deserve more scrutiny. I bet the same thing will happen with LLM tools like this. They'll just ask if you use PRs and wave you on through.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#134

Post by nl »

sailingparrot wrote: post #119
nl wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting sucked into a crypto scam and then deciding to get out, despite the death threats(!)[1] is not a rug pull. To be clear, the BAGS scam coin he got sucked into is a extractive zero-sum game where someone else creates a coin named after him, offers him trading commission to talk about it and then makes money off the hype. He did the correct thing by leaving. (I worked for a bit at a Web3 place. Went in with an o…

> someone else creates a coin named after him, offers him trading commission to talk about it and then makes money off the hype And we are supposed to believe that someone deep in tech, in 2026, did not know this was going to be the end goal? Was $GAS supposed to be a crypto to help fund poor farmers in Burundi or something ? How else is the meme coin #16352813 supposed to end? That’s the entire point of meme coins.…

> Would love to also « get sucked » into making 300k$.

Exactly.

It seems harmless - "look, we have this token, it is being traded anyway, do you want to get some of the emissions?"

Who wouldn't say "yes" to that free money.

But it's not clear at all how corrupting the crypto scam is, and how subtly the corruption seeps into what you do. It starts by "oh can you just tweet out about this" and you are "sure - it's just a tweet" and slowly grows.

Steve Yegg deserves credit for walking away from it.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#135

Post by pitched »

throwup238 wrote: post #92
Quarrelsome wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're supposed to be engineers. Criticising a concept based on conjecture and insult is unbecoming of our culture.

> We're supposed to be engineers. Criticising a concept based on conjecture and insult is unbecoming of our culture. The entire thing is nothing but conjecture. No real software has been produced by the concept to date, except more garbage software that takes hundreds of thousands of lines where a few thousand would do. And to be clear, Beads and Gastown are unbecoming of our “culture” and any self respecting enginee…

There are some good ideas in the tools. I hope our culture has room left for curiosity and exploration in that way. I also highly doubt these will catch on over one-shotting and Jira though. Here’s one quick thought from each:

Beads keeps the issue tracker state in git. This can only work if you don’t have a PR/Review-Gate to submitting patches (to file bugs/issues/etc) but I’ve found it unexpectedly helpful for personal projects. Helpful enough to entertain the idea in other contexts.

Gastown uses an AI Agent _as the orchestrator_, and to kick stalled agents, and, that’s such an obvious thing in hindsight I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it. I have adopted this in a few other contexts now.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#136

Post by pitched »

slopinthebag wrote: post #103
_pdp_ wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the post does not have any use-cases proving value then perhaps this is something yet to be validated, i.e. the burden on the users, not the creators.

Wym? I can slop out 100 libraries/frameworks/packages/cli's a day, the onus is not on other people to prove that they are useful.

You’re very good at this! I have trouble slopping out more than a day or two!

Treat this like art. There are some neat ideas, maybe not executed particularly well. Somewhere around 7/10 IMDB score. The working implementation makes the blog post more impactful more than the other way around.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#137

Post by ok_dad »

selimthegrim wrote: post #100
coldtea wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You can build anything with Gas Town! The only limit is yourself!" edit: was "is your imagination". Changed to fully match https://genius.com/Zombo-zombocom-lyrics

Oh man, we can't even say yourself anymore.

“Yourself” still has to pay for tokens!

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#138

Post by giancarlostoro »

mflanaman wrote: post #90
giancarlostoro wrote: post #4

I loved Beads, but kept running into issues because it is so git heavy. One: not every system and project I work on uses git. Two: Sometimes I'd switch branches, and that would screw up Beads state entirely. Three: And this is at least last I used it, there's no safety net, Claude would close a Bead, without validating anything. I wound up building my own with Claude, I made it SQLite first, syncs to GitHub, can pull…

Did you try using `git worktree`? https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree

I have not, and at this point its too late for me to do so, I've already invested in my project that does what Beads did for me with some features I really wanted.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#139

Post by giancarlostoro »

maleldil wrote: post #49
giancarlostoro wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude or whatever agent will get a message when it tries to close a task, which tells them which gates are not resolved yet, at which point, the agent will instinctively want to read the task. I did run into an issue where I forgot to add gates to a new project, so Claude did smoosh over by making a blanket gate, I have otherwise never had an issue when I defined what the gate is, Claude usually honors it. I havent…

Who closes the gate? Is it Claude itself after it runs the verification? Who makes sure the verification did in fact run?

I usually have Claude confirm with me but I've seen it close it if its a unit test that passed for example.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#140

Post by giancarlostoro »

skybrian wrote: post #70
giancarlostoro wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude or whatever agent will get a message when it tries to close a task, which tells them which gates are not resolved yet, at which point, the agent will instinctively want to read the task. I did run into an issue where I forgot to add gates to a new project, so Claude did smoosh over by making a blanket gate, I have otherwise never had an issue when I defined what the gate is, Claude usually honors it. I havent…

It sounds like a gate is a prompt that shows up at the appropriate time, which works because LLM’s pay more attention to the last thing they read. It seems like a lot of coding agent features work that way?

I suppose, I mean the LLM is still reading it, the issue is, Beads gives the model a task, and then the model finishes, and never checks anything. I kept running into this repeatedly, and sometimes I'd go to compile the project after it said "hey I finished" it wouldn't compile at all, where if it would have just tried to build the project, it would have just worked.
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