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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

#111

Post by nl »

karmakaze wrote: post #67
dang wrote: post #47

Earlier 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...

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 open mind and now have opinions)

[1] https://x.com/Steve_Yegge/status/2043127887059210470

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

#112

Post by sowbug »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #73

Beads is cool, but I tried to use it, and the backend didn't really make sense. I have to run an sql database in the background? How does it sync with Git? (I didn't see any files/objects committed to the repo) Plus, Dolt ended up using a constant 3-30kB/s of i/o in the background, while nothing was actually going on. That and Beads has a lot of features I'm not gonna use. All of this was just too complicated for my…

Glad I'm not the only one using Gastown as a space heater. I filed an issue here and hope to find some time this week to research more: https://github.com/dolthub/dolt/issues/10849

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

#113

Post by nojito »

mmastrac wrote: post #5

Serious question - there's a lot of fluff talking about Gas Town, but has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting? At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.

>Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting?

I am very confident in saying that most individuals successfully using multiple agents have done so by building their own harness.

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

#114

Post by yieldcrv »

nl wrote: post #111
karmakaze wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the apparent rugpull on the $GAS meme coin[0] qualify? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge#Vibe_coding_and_cr...

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…

yeah its kind of sad, because people have to then re-evaluate others they heard about who they also didn't believe the apologies of at the time

like the Hawk Tuah girl, or the Enron relaunch long form comedy routine that wound up with a short lived crypto token, and pretty much anyone with 15 minutes of fame or celebrities that drop a contract address

for the most part, they themselves actually are the victims of a roving band of deployers running the crypto launch convincing them they're part of something, and of course, the consumers have the choice of never getting involved

but the deployers are the ones that should face some form of accountability, or at least the public eye

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

#115

Post by wolttam »

pron wrote: post #77

Does Yegge really think that building production software this way is a good idea? Let's assume that managing context well is a problem and that this kind of orchestration solves it. But I see another problem with agents: When designing a system or a component we have ideas that form invariants. Sometimes the invariant is big, like a certain grand architecture, and sometimes it's small, like the selection of a data s…

I think a lot of it comes down to the training objective, which is to fulfill the user’s request.

They have knowledge about how programs can be structured in ways that improve overall maintainability, but little room to exercise that knowledge over the course of fulfilling the user’s request to add X feature.

They can make changes which lead to an improvement to the code base itself (without adding features); they just need to be asked explicitly to do so.

I’d argue the training objective should be tweaked. Before implementing, stop to consider the absolutely best way to approach it - potentially making other refactors to accommodate the feature first.

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

#116

Post by wyre »

javawizard wrote: post #27
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…

Love this. How did you implement gates? Are they simply tasks Claude itself has to confirm it ran, or are they scripts that run to check that the thing in question actually happened, or do they spawn a separate AI agent to check that the thing happened, or what?

I built something similar with verifiable gates tasks. The agent has a command to mark the task as done and it will run the bash script, if it passes the task closes, if it doesn’t it appends the failure information into the task description for the agents next attempt at the task.

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

#117

Post by sroerick »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #73

Beads is cool, but I tried to use it, and the backend didn't really make sense. I have to run an sql database in the background? How does it sync with Git? (I didn't see any files/objects committed to the repo) Plus, Dolt ended up using a constant 3-30kB/s of i/o in the background, while nothing was actually going on. That and Beads has a lot of features I'm not gonna use. All of this was just too complicated for my…

I did the same thing, and had the same experience, but it also gave more of an appreciation for Beads' architecture. I think the weird redundancies actually made a lot of sense when I began to understand some of the edge cases where agents crap the bed.

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

#118

Post by BowBun »

nojito wrote: post #113
mmastrac wrote: post #5

Serious question - there's a lot of fluff talking about Gas Town, but has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting? At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.

>Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting? I am very confident in saying that most individuals successfully using multiple agents have done so by building their own harness.

This is my experience as well. At work, our team is 50/50 on 'mastery' of current AI tools. All of us using parallel agentic workflows have our own flavor of tooling. I'm not convinced there's an agreement yet on what the 'ideal' is here, so experimentation is where it's at. Over-indexing on a massively complex system like Gastown for professional work seems unwise. Lots of us have used it for fun at home though.

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

#119

Post by sailingparrot »

nl wrote: post #111
karmakaze wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the apparent rugpull on the $GAS meme coin[0] qualify? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge#Vibe_coding_and_cr...

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$.

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

#120

Post by antonvs »

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.
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