How does this compare to G-Stack?
Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0
171–180 of 183 posts
Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0
#172I'm a long-time Steve Yegge fan but a major Gas Town hater (now Gas City too, I guess). It's doubling down on all the wrong metaphors. I also simply detest how Gas Town is modeled fundamentally on an extractive and destructive metaphor, the 19th century factory. I want to live in a verdant software garden, not a dystopian industrialist hellscape. In my view the StrongDM guys are on the right long-term path.
Ha! https://github.com/gastownhall/gastown/issues/3649
downvoters get rekt
Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't post personal attacks to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. Thoughtful critique is of course fine but there's no need to be personal, and it should be something we can learn from. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Does the apparent rugpull on the $GAS meme coin[0] qualify? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge#Vibe_coding_and_cr...
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Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
From my understanding the way Gas Town uses beads is that it's not only "what to do" but also contains a workflow.
Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I usually have Claude confirm with me but I've seen it close it if its a unit test that passed for example.
You can't trust it 100%. Sometimes it will just refuse to fix a compiler or lint warning (often saying "This was a pre-existing issue...") or write a trivial test that does nothing and always passes.
> writes code with a lot of warnings
> compacts
> "This was a pre-existing issue..."
I still take this over writing code myself though.
Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0
#176Gas Town really feels not just vibe coded but also vibe designed. I looked into it, to see whether multi agent setups really made a difference, the entire design philosophy feels like it was « let’s add one more layer of agent and surely this time it will work » about 10 times in a row. So now you have agents of type mayor, polecats, witnesses, deacons, dogs etc plus a slew of Unneeded constructs with incomprehensibl…
Except you don't have agents of "type" you have the same claude running everywhere with the same system prompt and no guardrails.
First time I tried gas town (after finding the exact combination of dolt and beads that work; flake.nix was out of date and didn't work), "mayor" started implementing things.
Sure, author can build a whole gas city using gas town, but I don't get how anyone other than the author can use it.
Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0
#177I'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…
Building harnesses does seem like a task that's particularly conductive to psychosis. I've wondered if it's because there is no push-back; almost anything you try will be "right" in that your changes appear to make things happen. "Oh look I added a carpenter and now it's walking around and making notes about the scaffolding" So you get to stay in your flow state without reassessing if the concepts you are forming are…
I think at this point it’s all but confirmed that LLMs sycophantic tendencies coupled with yes-man attitudes produce AI psychosis and AI fanaticism. Especially if you’re already of high opinion of yourself (be it deserved or not).
Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 pers…
> Beads keeps the issue tracker state in git.
Wow that's so innovative. I'm amazed Linus didn't think of that twenty years ago when he invented git.
Oh wait... It's been tried and discarded half a dozen times since then. Git is literally just a bunch of text files with a tree pointer. You can fit any data into it you want, but as it turns out, most people who report bugs don't want to use git to do so.
> 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.
I too can't believe you didn't think of it. Literally can't believe it.
Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
How is it conjecture when you just admitted you're aware of a repo with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Your argument belies a lazyness or skill issue. You abandon the possibility of proof to sling mud. People have made a shit ton of economic value with shit code over the course of history of software and now that's accelerating with this sort of shite. I appreciate its ugly but i will not follow you by fashi…
> You abandon the possibility of proof to sling mud.
> i will not follow you by fashioning a duvet out of arrogance and throwing rocks people investigating the ugly.
Seriously?
Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
[dead]
cos it proves that he's wrong for not looking at it, thus undermining the very principle of what he's trying to do.
I don't need to touch and taste a pile of shit, to identify a pile of shit.
If that is a foreign concept, I hope to god that you have excellent health insurance.