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Gas Town Decoded

alilleybrinker.com

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Re: Gas Town Decoded

#141

Post by dwaltrip »

bobjordan wrote: post #51
wenc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entitled to your time of course, but would you mind describing how? All I know is beads is supposed to help me retain memory from one session to the next. But I'm finding myself having to curate it like a git repo (and I already have a git repo). Also it's quite tied to github, which I cannot use at work. I want to use it but I feel I need to see how others use it to understand how to tailor it for my workflo…

To use it effectively, I spend a long time producing FSD (functional specification documents) to exhaustively plan out new features or architecture changes. I'll pass those docs back and forth between gemini, codex/chatgpt-pro, and claude. I'll ask each one something similar to following (credit to https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone for clearly laying out the utility of this workflow, these next few quoted prompts…

Thanks for these notes. Very interesting! Looking forward to experimenting.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#142

Post by soulofmischief »

jpfromlondon wrote: post #119
soulofmischief wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wright brothers are idiots, if it were me I'd have made a supersonic jet from the get go and not waste my time mucking around with prototypes.

the Wright brothers sold me a subscription to a supersonic jet and I've got a bundle of matchsticks and some canvas.

On the other hand, flight is ubiquitous and has changed everything.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#143

Post by soulofmischief »

ncruces wrote: post #111
soulofmischief wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Wright brothers are idiots, if it were me I'd have made a supersonic jet from the get go and not waste my time mucking around with prototypes.

The prototype phase meant data centers are now measured in MW instead of TFLOPS. At a time where we were desperate to reduce emissions, data centers now consume around 20% of the energy consumed by the entire aviation sector, with consumption is rising at 15% YoY. Never mind the water required to cool them, or the energy and resources required to build them, the capital allocation, and the opportunity cost of not all…

The computing power in a crappy cheap modern phone used to fill up a warehouse and cost a ton of energy, relatively. Moore's law might not remain steadfast, but if history is any indication, we'll find a way to make the technology more efficient.

So, yes, prototypes often use more energy than the final product. That doesn't mean we shouldn't sustainable build datacenters, but that's conflating issues.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#144

Post by Kostchei »

keyle wrote: post #66

I'd help build Gas City and Gas State, and Gas Country if that would mean we actually would solve the things AI promised to solve. All sickness, famine, wealth ... The problem is, we're just fidgeting yolo-fizzbuzz ad nauseam. The return on investment at the moment is probably one of the worst in the history of human investments. AI does improve over time, still today, but we're going to run out of planet before we g…

Are you saying that people can't work out what to code using these? Or that code is not a worthy subject to use AI for? 'cause I got news for you... 1. Improving coding improved reasoning in the models. Having a verifiable answer that is not a single thing is a good training test. 2. Software has been used for fairly serious things. We used to have skyscrapers of people doing manual math. Now we have campuses of people doing manual code. You might argue that nobody would trust AI to write code when it matters. History tells us that if that is ever true, it will pass. 3. We are not going to run out of planet. It just feels to folks that there is not enough planet for their dreams and we get population panic, energy panic etc. There is a huge fusion reactor conveniently holding us in it's gravity well and spewing out many orders of magnitude more energy than we can currently use. Chill.

I think at Gas Country levels we will need better networking systems. Maybe that backbone Nvidia just built....

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#145

Post by brushfoot »

Kostchei wrote: post #140
brushfoot wrote: post #136

Gas Town seems like a more confusing/expensive alternative to GitHub Copilot Agents. https://github.com/copilot/agents Go to the URL, type what you want done, and a cloud Claude agent creates a PR. $10/month.

try the tools. Really. If you are remotely interested in tech or AI, try the tools Copilot this is not. You may be trolling of course. There are huge steps between these various tools, if you try them, for a smidge of investment, it will become obvious what the trajectory is. It is like saying "I don't handwrite anything, I care too much about line spacing, I only use a dot matrix printer" when some one is trying to…

I'm not trolling. I'm just not aware of major differences between them.

When I make a change with a Copilot Agent, it checks for issues, builds my project, runs tests, and iterates until things work. Multiple agents can do that in parallel.

My impression was that this does more or less the same thing.

That said, I'm definitely open to learning more about them both.

What are the advantages of this in your experience?

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#146

Post by Kostchei »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #62

I don't understand why people are making this so complicated. We have a battle tested SDLC. We don't need to reinvent this shit. We just need to make some affordances in the tools and processes we set up for the majority of the actors in the system to be agents (such as rationing human attention). Spec your software like an architect/po, decompose it into a task dag, then orchestrate for each lane and assemble all ch…

These operate in parallel. Maybe you SDLC does that, the effort of each human developer sitting in a planning meeting, getting jira tickets, doing individual code (or pair or whatever), reporting back in standup, coordinating the next step, getting it QA'ed...

Yes, if your shop is well developed these work (10% of the time every time), but this is a structure to kick that all in to gear, as a repo, where all you need to add is unlimited machine cognitive power/tokens.

Maybe you need to add these gas town personalities to various parts of the existing SDLC, .....but..... you still need to track what they do and how- and you need them to intermediate between each other at 2am when they hit an impasse. Something very rare in most human cognition shops.

And word from the experimenters is.. it sort of works. Which is on par with most human shops. IMO. I don't have the money to burn to test at the scale Yegge is, but the small scale stuff I have done in this direction, this seems plausible.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#147

Post by skywhopper »

bkolobara wrote: post #104
dchuk wrote: post #98

I’m very bought in to the idea that raw coding is now a solved problem with the current models and agentic harnesses. Let alone what’s coming in the near term. That being said, I think we’re in a weird phase right now where people’s obvious mental health issues are appearing as “hyper productivity” due to the use of these tools to absolutely spam out code that isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impress…

There is a lot of research on how words/language influences what we think, and even what we can observe, like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. If in a langauge there is one word for 2 different colors, speakers of it are unable to see the difference between the colors. I have a suspicion that extensive use of LLMs can result in damage to your brain. That's why we are seeing so many mental health issues surfacing up, and w…

But the color thing is self-evidently untrue. It’s not even hard to talk about. Unless you yourself are colorblind I think that would be obvious?

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#148

Post by Kostchei »

PKop wrote: post #94
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a real open source tool Yegge has built and been using for a while now. And no, it's not insane, he's literally written a book with Gene Kim about the fundamental lessons that go into it, and he's been on lots of podcasts where he explains more. I expect major companies will soon be NIH-ing their own version of it. Even bleeding tokens as it does, the cost is less than an engineer, and produces working software…

Where is the working software it produces? Do you have a repo you've made with it as an example?

yeh the repo is Gas Town

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#149

Post by bonzini »

skywhopper wrote: post #147
bkolobara wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of research on how words/language influences what we think, and even what we can observe, like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. If in a langauge there is one word for 2 different colors, speakers of it are unable to see the difference between the colors. I have a suspicion that extensive use of LLMs can result in damage to your brain. That's why we are seeing so many mental health issues surfacing up, and w…

But the color thing is self-evidently untrue. It’s not even hard to talk about. Unless you yourself are colorblind I think that would be obvious?

Sort of, at least some degree of relativism exists though how much is debated. Would you ever talk about sea having the same color as wine? But that's exactly what Homer called it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine-dark_sea

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#150

Post by meowface »

yetihehe wrote: post #125
dchuk wrote: post #98

I’m very bought in to the idea that raw coding is now a solved problem with the current models and agentic harnesses. Let alone what’s coming in the near term. That being said, I think we’re in a weird phase right now where people’s obvious mental health issues are appearing as “hyper productivity” due to the use of these tools to absolutely spam out code that isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impress…

If you give every idiot a worldwide heard voice, you will hear every idiot from the whole world. If you give every idiot a tool to make programs, you will see a lot of programs made by idiots.

Steve Yegge is not an idiot or a bad programmer. Possibly just hypomanic at most. And a good, entertaining writer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge

Gas Town is ridiculous and I had to uninstall Beads after seeing it only confuse my agents, but he's not completely insane or a moron. There may be some kernels of good ideas inside of Gas Town which could be extracted out into a better system.

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