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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

#141

Post by sandinmyjoints »

Lots of comments about Gas Town (which I get, it's hard not to talk about it!), but I thought this was a pretty good article -- nice job of summing up various questions and suggesting ways to think about them. I like this bit in particular:

> A more conservative, easier to consider, debate is: how close should the code be in agentic software development tools? How easy should it be to access? How often do we expect developers to edit it by hand?

> Framing this debate as an either/or – either you look at code or don’t, either you edit code by hand or you exclusively direct agents, either you’re the anti-AI-purist or the agentic-maxxer – is unhelpful.

> The right distance isn’t about what kind of person you are or what you believe about AI capabilities in the current moment. How far away you step from the syntax shifts based on what you’re building, who you’re building with, and what happens when things go wrong.

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

#142

Post by arrowleaf »

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 feeling has been that 'serious' software engineers aren't particularly suited to use these tools. Most don't have an interest in managing people or are attracted to the deterministic nature of computing. There's a whole psychology you have to learn when managing people, and a lot of those skills transfer to wrangling AI agents from my experience.

You can't be too prescriptive or verbose when interacting with them, you have to interact with them a bit to start understanding how they think and go from there to determine what information or context to provide. Same for understanding their programming styles, they will typically do what they're told but sometimes they go on a tangent.

You need to know how to communicate your expectations. Especially around testing and interaction with existing systems, performance standards, technology, the list goes on.

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

#143

Post by psadauskas »

> In the same way any poorly designed object or system gets abandoned

Hah, tell that to Docker, or React (the ecosystem, not the library), or any of the other terrible technologies that have better thought-out alternatives, but we're stuck with them being the de facto standard because they were first.

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

#144

Post by meowface »

an0malous wrote: post #124
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…

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 roa…

It's a half-joke. No need to take it that seriously or that jokingly. It's mostly only grifters and cryptocurrency scammers claiming it's amazing.

I think ideas from it will probably partially inspire future, simpler systems.

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

#145

Post by direwolf20 »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #108
alecbz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Depends where in the world they are. Here in Hungary, it’s not uncommon to email your-family-doctor@gmail.com

What does that have to do with vibe-coding?

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

#146

Post by direwolf20 »

causalmodels wrote: post #31
anonymous908213 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yegge obviously built real software in the past. He has not built real software wherein he never looked at the code, as he is now promoting.

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.

The experiment is fine if you treat it as an experiment. The problem is the state of the industry where it's treated as serious rather than silly — possibly even by Steve himself.

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

#147

Post by luckydata »

alecbz wrote: post #80
gtowey wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even remotely close. Compilers are deterministic. People who write them test that they will produce correct results. You can expect the same code to compile to the same assembly. With LLMs two people giving the exact same prompts can get wildly different results. That is not a tool you can use to blindly ship production code. Imagine if your compiler randomly threw in a syscall to delete your hard drive, or decid…

Even ignoring determinism, with traditional source code you have a durable, human-readable blueprint of what the software is meant to do that other humans can understand and tweak. There's no analogy in the case of "don't read the code" LLM usage. No artifacts exist that humans can read or verify to understand what the software is supposed to be doing.

yeah there is. it's called "documentation" and "requirements". And it's not like you can't go read the code if you want to understand how it works, it's just not necessary to do so while in the process of getting to working software. I truly do not understand why so many people are hung up on this "I need to understand every single line of code in my program" bs I keep reading here, do you also disassemble every library you use and understand it? no, you just use it because it's faster that way.

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

#148

Post by FeteCommuniste »

Analemma_ wrote: post #125
Ronsenshi wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Some of the heads like Altman seem to be putting all their chips in the "AGI in [single-digit number] years" pile.
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