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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

#111

Post by fragmede »

crote wrote: post #33
bbayles wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 big difference is that compilation is deterministic: compile the same program twice and it'll generate the same output twice. It also doesn't involve any "creativity": a compiler is mostly translating a high-level concept into its predefined lower-level components. I don't know exactly what my code compiles to, but I can be pretty certain what the general idea of the assembly is going to be. With LLMs all bets ar…

> The big difference is that compilation is deterministic: compile the same program twice and it'll generate the same output twice.

That's barely true now. Nix comes close, but builds are only bit-for-bit identical if you set a bunch of extra flags that aren't set by default. The most obvious instability is CPU dispatch order (aka modern single computer systems are themselves distributed, racy systems) changes the generated code ever so slightly.

We don't actually care, because if one compiled version of the code uses r8 for a variable but a different compilation uses r9 for that variable, it doesn't matter because we just assume the resulting binary works the same either way. R8 vs r9 are implementation details that don't matter to humans. See where I'm going with this? If the LLM non-deterministically calls the variable fileName one day, and file_name the next time it's given the same prompt, yeah language syntax purists are going to suffer an aneurysm because one of those is clearly "wrong" for the language in use, but it's really more of an implementation detail at this point. Obviously you can't mix them, the generated code has to be consistent in which one it's using, but if compilers get to chose r8 one day and r9 the next, and we're fine with it, why is having the exact variable name that important, as long as it's being used correctly?

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

#113

Post by fragmede »

roberttod wrote: post #62
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…

It's unintuitive, but having an llm verification loop like a code reviewer works impeccably well, you can even create dedicated agents to check for specific problem areas like poor error handling. This isn't about anthropomorphism, it's context engineering. By breaking things into more agents, you get more focused context windows. I believe gas town has some review process built in, but my comment is more to address…

> it's mostly higher level and architectural things they need guidance on

Any examples you can share?

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

#114

Post by mbesto »

alecbz wrote: post #71
azan_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The secret is that it doesn't work. I have 100% vibecoded software that I now use instead of commercial implementation that cost me almost 200 usd a month (tool for radiology dictation and report generation).

Wait, so you're a radiologist and you're using software you vibecoded to generate radiology reports for real patients? Is that, like, allowed?

Not saying it's right, but boy do I have stories about the code used in healthcare applications. Not sure how "vibecoded" programming lines of code is any worse.

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

#115

Post by anonymous908213 »

saidarembrace wrote: post #101
anonymous908213 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet I notice you haven't mentioned publishing it and undercutting the market. You could make a lot of money out-competing the existing option if what you produced was production-grade software. I'm guessing the actual case is that you only needed a small subset of the functionality of the paid software, and the LLM stitched together a rough unpolished proof-of-concept that handled your exact specific use case. Wh…

Not everything has to be monetized, buddy. It's okay to relax.

> If you're altruistic, you could even release it as FOSS and save a lot of people $200/mo. Unless, of course, your vibe-coded app isn't actually remotely capable of replacing the software in question.

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

#116

Post by CuriouslyC »

mediaman wrote: post #46

I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment. It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end. And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and h…

I like gastown's moxie, it's fun, and seems kind of tongue in cheek.

What I don't like is people me-tooing gastown as some breakthrough in orchestration. I also don't like how people are doing the same thing for ralph.

In truth, what I hate is people dogpiling thoughtlessly on things, and only caring about what social media has told them to care about. This tendency makes me get warm tingles at the thought of the end of the world. Agent smith was right about humanity.

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

#117

Post by JamesTRexx »

mediaman wrote: post #46

I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment. It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end. And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and h…

"our industry has lost its sense of whimsy"

The first thing I thought as I read his post and saw the images of the weasels was that he should make a game of it. Maybe name it Bitborn.

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

#118

Post by drewbug01 »

hyperpape wrote: post #97
mediaman wrote: post #46

I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment. It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end. And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and h…

> If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment: So, Steve has the big scary "YOU WILL DIE" statements in there, but he also has this: > I went ahead and built what’s next. First I predicted it, back in March, in Revenge of the Junior Developer. I predicted someone would lash the Claude Code camels together into chariots, and that is exactly what I’ve done with Gas Town. I’ve tamed them to…

> If you say two different and contradictory things, and do not very explicitly resolve them, and say which one is the final answer, you will get blamed for both things you said, and you will not be entitled to complain about it, because you did it to yourself.

Our industry is held back in so many ways by engineers clinging to black-and-white thinking.

Sometimes there isn’t a “final” answer, and sometimes there is no “right” answer. Sometimes two conflicting ideas can be “true” and “correct” simultaneously.

It would do us a world of good to get comfortable with that.

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

#120

Post by sjajshha »

kaydub wrote: post #54
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 don't get you guys that are getting such bad results. Are you guys just trying to one shot stuff? Are you not using agents to iterate on things? Are you not putting agents against each other (have one code, one critique/test the code, and put them in a loop)? I still look at the code that's produced, I'm not THAT far down the "vibe coding" path that I'm trusting everything being produced, but I get phenomenal resul…

My (former) coworker who’s heavy into this stuff produced a lot of unmaintainable slop on his way out while singing agents praises to hire-ups. He also felt he was getting a lot of value and had no issues.
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