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

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

#121

Post by tucnak »

msp26 wrote: post #3

Originally I thought that Gas Town was some form of high level satire like GOODY-2 but it seems that some of you people have actually lost the plot. Ralph loops are also stupid because they don't make use of kv cache properly. --- https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown/issues/503 Problem: Every gt command runs bd version to verify the minimum beads version requirement. Under high concurrency (17+ agent sessions), this…

I think it is satire, and pretty obvious one at that; is anybody taking it for real?

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

#122

Post by tjr »

fragmede wrote: post #111
crote wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

I’ve done builds for aerospace products where the only binary difference between two builds of the same source code is the embedded timestamp. And per FAA review guidelines, this deterministic attribute is required, or else something is wrong in the source code or build process.

I certainly don’t use all compilers everywhere, but I don’t think determinism in compilation is especially rare.

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

#123

Post by amenhotep »

lovich wrote: post #78
turtlebits wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's just a giant experiment and the author explicitly tells you not to use it. No, he threw up a hyperbolic warning and then dove deep into how this is the future of all coding in the rest of his talks/writing. It’s as good a warning as someone saying “I’m not {X} but {something blatantly showing I am X}”

Reminds me of Matt Levine on https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WACraar4p3o6oF2wD/sam-altman...

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

#124

Post by an0malous »

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…

I agree, I’m one of the Very Serious Engineers and I liked Steve’s post when I thought it was sort of tongue in cheek but was horrified to come to the HN comments and LinkedIn comments proclaiming Gastown as the future of engineering. There absolutely is a large contingent of engineers who believe this, and it has a real world impact on my job if my bosses think you can just throw a dozen AI agents at our product roadmap and get better productivity than an engineer. This is not whimsical to me, I’m getting burnt out trying to navigate the absurd expectations of investors and executives with the real world engineering concerns of my day to day job.

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

#125

Post by Analemma_ »

Ronsenshi wrote: post #107
pydry wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn't. Remember the days when people experimented with and talked about things that werent LLMs? I used to go to a lot of industry events and I really enjoyed hearing about the diversity of different things people worked on both as a hobby and at work.…

> I used to go to a lot of industry events and I really enjoyed hearing about the diversity of different things people worked on both as a hobby and at work. I go to tech meetups regularly. The speed at which any conversation end up on the topic of AI is extremely grating to me. No more discussions about interesting problems and creative solutions that people come up with. It's all just AI, agentic, vibe code. At wha…

It's like the entire software industry is gambling on "LLMs will get better faster than human skills will decay, so they will be good enough to clean up their own slop before things really fall apart".

I can't even say that's definitely a losing bet-- it could very well happen-- but boy does it seem risky to go all-in on it.

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

#126

Post by magicalist »

Ronsenshi wrote: post #107
pydry wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn't. Remember the days when people experimented with and talked about things that werent LLMs? I used to go to a lot of industry events and I really enjoyed hearing about the diversity of different things people worked on both as a hobby and at work.…

> I used to go to a lot of industry events and I really enjoyed hearing about the diversity of different things people worked on both as a hobby and at work. I go to tech meetups regularly. The speed at which any conversation end up on the topic of AI is extremely grating to me. No more discussions about interesting problems and creative solutions that people come up with. It's all just AI, agentic, vibe code. At wha…

> No more discussions about interesting problems and creative solutions that people come up with. It's all just AI, agentic, vibe code.

And then you give in and ask what they're building with AI, that activation energy finally available to build the side project they wouldn't have built otherwise.

"Oh, I'm building a custom agentic harness!"

...

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

#127

Post by GoatInGrey »

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…

Keep in mind that Steve has LLMs write his posts on that blog. Things said there may not reflect his actual thoughts on the subject(s) at hand.

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

#128

Post by habinero »

drewbug01 wrote: post #118
hyperpape wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Or -- and hear me out -- unserious people are saying nonsense things for attention and pointing this out is the appropriate response.

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

#129

Post by kaydub »

sjajshha wrote: post #120
kaydub wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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

#130

Post by causalmodels »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #92
causalmodels wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok but this entire idea is very new. Its not an honest criticism to say no one has tried the new idea when they are actively doing it. Honestly I don't get the hostility. Yegge is running an experiment. I don't think it will work, but it will be interesting and informative to watch.

> Ok but this entire idea is very new. Its not an honest criticism to say no one has tried the new idea when they are actively doing it. Not really new. Back in the day companies used to outsource their stuff to the lowest bidder agencies in proverbial Elbonia, never looked at the code, and then panickedly hired another agency when the things visibly were not what was ordered. Case studies are abound on TheDailyWTF f…

Fair point on the Elbonia comparison. But we can't sue the SQLite maintainers either, and yet we trust them with basically everything. The reason is that open source developed its own trust mechanisms over decades. We don't have anything close to that with LLMs today. What those mechanisms might look like is an open question that is getting more important as AI generated code becomes more common.
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