Gas Town Decoded
alilleybrinker.com
Gas Town Decoded
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Re: Gas Town Decoded
#2> Persistent Worker Agents, which you talk to directly (not through the Mayor),
I had a bit of a chuckle.
I think there is value in anything approximating a proposer-verifier loop, but I don't know that this is the most ideal approach.
Re: Gas Town Decoded
#3Very minor nit -- crew could be a person also - in fact that's how you're supposed to hack on a codebase in gas town directly - add yourself as crew.
Other than that, this is a helpful list especially for someone who hasn't been hacking around on this thing as it's in rapid development mode. I find gas town super interesting, and tantalizingly close to being amazingly useful. That said, I wouldn't mind a slightly less 'flavored' set of names for workers.
Re: Gas Town Decoded
#4At some point evolving software instead of designing it will work. Now the evolutionary pressure leads towards churning more tokens.
Re: Gas Town Decoded
#5I actually love the idea of totally new naming schemes for experimental software.
Certain name types are so normalized (agent, worker, etc) that while they serve their role well, they likely limit our imagination when thinking about software, and it's a worthwhile effort to explore alternatives.
Re: Gas Town Decoded
#6I actually love the idea of totally new naming schemes for experimental software. Certain name types are so normalized (agent, worker, etc) that while they serve their role well, they likely limit our imagination when thinking about software, and it's a worthwhile effort to explore alternatives.
I do too, but you can take things too far, which I'd argue has happened the moment "figuring out what the names mean" becomes enough of an intellectual challenge to provide a dopamine hit; at that point, you've (intentionally or otherwise) germinated a cult. It's human nature: people will support the design not on its merits but rather as loss aversion for the work they put into decoding it.
Re: Gas Town Decoded
#7The idea of gas town is simultaneously appealing and appalling to me. The waste and lack of control is wild, but at the same time there's at least a nugget of fascinating, useful work in there. In a world where compute is cheap and abundant and the models are a notch smarter, I think it's the start of a useful framework for what the future of augmented work might look like.
I have no interest in using gas town as it is (for a plethora of reasons, not the least of which being that I'm uninterested in spending the money), but I've been fascinated with the idea of slowing it down and having it run with a low concurrency. If you've got a couple A100s, what does it look like if you keep them busy with two agents working concurrently (with 20+ agents total)? What does it mean to have the town focus the scope of work to a series of non-overlapping changesets instead of a continuous stream of work?
If you don't plan to have it YOLO stuff in realtime and you can handle the models being dumber than Claude, I think you can have it do some really practical, useful things that are markedly better than the tools we have today.
Re: Gas Town Decoded
#8Maintenance Manager Checker Agent and the rest of the nouns Yegge employs are ironic given his Kingdom of Nouns essay.
Re: Gas Town Decoded
#9It's like Conway's Law. Both humans and agents arrive at roughly identical hierarchies for organizing labor. There is something inherent in the game of telephone required by limited working memory that requires this structure. Gas Town's only failure is not being familiar with prior art and coming up with very strange names for established patterns that already exist in large hierarchical organizations like governments, corporations and militaries.
Re: Gas Town Decoded
#10Maintenance Manager Checker Agent and the rest of the nouns Yegge employs are ironic given his Kingdom of Nouns essay.
“Maintenance Manager Checker Agent is not a noun Yegge employs”, it is Brinker’s term for Yegge’s “Boot the Dog”.