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Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

maggieappleton.com

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Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#11

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

> I also think Yegge deserves praise for exercising agency and taking a swing at a system like this, despite the inefficiencies and chaos of this iteration. And then running a public tour of his shitty, quarter-built plane while it’s mid-flight.

Can we please stop with the backhanded compliments and judgement? This is cutting edge technology in a brand new field of computing using experimental methods. Please give the guy a break. At least he's trying to advance the state of the art, unlike all the people that copy everyone else.

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#12

Post by gegtik »

bbayles wrote: post #8
suriya-ganesh wrote: post #7

>Yegge is leaning into the true definition of vibecoding with this project: “It is 100% vibecoded. I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to.” I don't get it. Even with a very good understanding of what type of work I am doing and a prebuilt knowledge of the code, even for very well specced problem. Claude code etc. just plain fail or use sloppy code. How do these industry figures claim they see no part of a 225K…

I'm sympathetic to this view, but I also wonder if this is the same thing that assembly language programmers said about compilers. What do you mean that you never look at the machine code? What if the compiler does something inefficient?

I wonder if assembly programmers felt this way about the reliability of the electical components which their code relies upon...

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#14

Post by [deleted] »

suriya-ganesh wrote: post #7

>Yegge is leaning into the true definition of vibecoding with this project: “It is 100% vibecoded. I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to.” I don't get it. Even with a very good understanding of what type of work I am doing and a prebuilt knowledge of the code, even for very well specced problem. Claude code etc. just plain fail or use sloppy code. How do these industry figures claim they see no part of a 225K…

[deleted]

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#15

Post by 7777332215 »

bbayles wrote: post #8
suriya-ganesh wrote: post #7

>Yegge is leaning into the true definition of vibecoding with this project: “It is 100% vibecoded. I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to.” I don't get it. Even with a very good understanding of what type of work I am doing and a prebuilt knowledge of the code, even for very well specced problem. Claude code etc. just plain fail or use sloppy code. How do these industry figures claim they see no part of a 225K…

I'm sympathetic to this view, but I also wonder if this is the same thing that assembly language programmers said about compilers. What do you mean that you never look at the machine code? What if the compiler does something inefficient?

The compiler is deterministic and the translation does not lose semantics. The meaning of your code is an exact reflection of what is produced.

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#16

Post by anonymous908213 »

bbayles wrote: post #8
suriya-ganesh wrote: post #7

>Yegge is leaning into the true definition of vibecoding with this project: “It is 100% vibecoded. I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to.” I don't get it. Even with a very good understanding of what type of work I am doing and a prebuilt knowledge of the code, even for very well specced problem. Claude code etc. just plain fail or use sloppy code. How do these industry figures claim they see no part of a 225K…

I'm sympathetic to this view, but I also wonder if this is the same thing that assembly language programmers said about compilers. What do you mean that you never look at the machine code? What if the compiler does something inefficient?

No, it is not what assembly programmers said about compilers, because you can still look at the compiled assembly, and if the compiler makes a mistake, you can observe it and work around it with inline assembly or, if the source is available, improve the compiler. That is not the same as saying "never look at the code".

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#17

Post by hilbertseries »

bbayles wrote: post #8
suriya-ganesh wrote: post #7

>Yegge is leaning into the true definition of vibecoding with this project: “It is 100% vibecoded. I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to.” I don't get it. Even with a very good understanding of what type of work I am doing and a prebuilt knowledge of the code, even for very well specced problem. Claude code etc. just plain fail or use sloppy code. How do these industry figures claim they see no part of a 225K…

I'm sympathetic to this view, but I also wonder if this is the same thing that assembly language programmers said about compilers. What do you mean that you never look at the machine code? What if the compiler does something inefficient?

I feel like this argument would make a lot more sense if LLMs had anywhere near the same level of determinism as a compiler.

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#18

Post by turtlebits »

suriya-ganesh wrote: post #7

>Yegge is leaning into the true definition of vibecoding with this project: “It is 100% vibecoded. I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to.” I don't get it. Even with a very good understanding of what type of work I am doing and a prebuilt knowledge of the code, even for very well specced problem. Claude code etc. just plain fail or use sloppy code. How do these industry figures claim they see no part of a 225K…

No one is promising anything. It's just a giant experiment and the author explicitly tells you not to use it. I appreciate those that try new things, even it it's possibly akin to throwing s** at a wall and seeing what sticks.

Maybe it changes how we code or maybe it doesn't. Vibe coding has definitely helped me write throwaway tools that were useful.

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#20

Post by durch »

Design indeed becomes the bottleneck, I think that this points to a step that is implied but still worth naming explicitly -> design isn't just planning upfront. It is a loop where you see output, see if it is directionally right, and refine.

While the agents can generate, they can't exercise that judgement, they can't see nuances and they can't really walk their actions back in a "that's not quite what I meant" sense.

Exercising judgement is where design actually happens, it is iterative, in response to something concrete. The bottleneck isn't just thinking ahead, it's the judgment call when you see the result, its the walking back, as well as thinking forward.

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