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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

#151

Post by luckydata »

conartist6 wrote: post #29
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?

I write JS, and I have never directly observed the IRs or assembly code that my code becomes. Yet I certainly assume that the compiler author has looked at the compiled output in the process of writing a compiler! For me the difference is prognosis. Gas Town has no ratchet of quality: its fate was written on the wall since the day Steve decided he didn't want to know what the code says: it will grow to a moderate but…

or he will find a way to get the AI to create harnesses so it becomes stable. The lack of imagination and willingness to experiment in the HN crowd is AMAZING me and worrying me at the same time. Never thought a group of engineers would be the most conservative and close minded people I could discuss with.

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

#152

Post by hyperpape »

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…

My background is in philosophy, though I am a programmer, for what it is worth. I think what I'm saying is subtly different from "black and white thinking".

The final answer can be "each of these positions has merit, and I don't know which is right." It can be "I don't understand what's going on here." It can be "I've raised some questions."

The final answer is not "the final answer that ends the discussion." Rather, it is the final statement about your current position. It can be revised in the future. It does not have to be definitive.

The problem comes when the same article says two contradictory things and does not even try to reconcile them, or try to give a careful reader an accurate picture.

And I think that the sustained argument over how to read that article shows that Yegge did a bad job of writing to make a clear point, albeit a good job of creatring hype.

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

#153

Post by joshstrange »

GoatInGrey wrote: post #127
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…

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.

> Keep in mind that Steve has LLMs write his posts on that blog.

Ok, I can accept that, it's a choice.

> Things said there may not reflect his actual thoughts on the subject(s) at hand.

Nope, you don't get to have it both ways. LLMs are just tools, there is always a human behind them and that human is responsible for what they let the LLM do/say/post/etc.

We have seen the hell that comes from playing the "They said that but they don't mean it" or "It's just a joke" (re: Trump), I'm not a fan of whitewashing with LLMs.

This is not an anti or pro Gas Town comment, just a comment on giving people a pass because they used an LLM.

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

#154

Post by kaydub »

arrowleaf wrote: post #142
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 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,…

All our best performing devs/engineers are using the tools the most.

I think this is something a lot of people are telling themselves though, sure.

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#157

Post by kaydub »

habinero wrote: post #134
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…

It lets 0.05X developers be 0.2X developers and 1X developers be 0.9-1.1X developers. The problem is some 0.05X developers thought they were 0.5X and now they think they're 2X.

Nah, our best devs/engineers use the tools the most.

In my real life experience it's been the middling devs that always talk about "ai slop" and how the tools can't do their jobs.

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

#158

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #137
GoatInGrey wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is this confirmed true? Yegge has a very very long history of writing absurdly long posts / rants.

Back in the day they used to be coherent.

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

#159

Post by joshstrange »

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…

Where is the "super upvote button" when you need it?

YES! I have been playing with vibe coding tools since they came out. "Playing" because only on rare occasions have I created something that is good enough to commit/keep/use. I keep playing with them because, well I have a subscription, but also so I don't fall into the fuddy-duddy camp of "all AI is bad" and can legitimately speak on the value, or lack thereof, of these tools.

Claude Code is super cool, no doubt, and with _highly targeted_ and _well planned_ tasks it can produce valuable output. Period. But, every attempt at full-vibe-coding I've done has gotten hung up at some point and I have to step in an manually fix this. My experience is often:

1. First Prompt: Oh wow, this is amazing, this is the future

2. Second Prompt: Ok, let me just add/tweak a few things

10. 10th prompt: Ugh, everytime I fix one thing, something else breaks

I'm not sure at all what I'm doing "wrong". Flogging the agents along doesn't not work well for me or maybe I am just having trouble letting go of the control and I'm not flogging enough?

But the bottom line is I am generally shocked that something like Gas Town was able to be vibe-coded. Maybe it's a case of the LLM overstating what it's accomplished (typical) and if you look under the hood it's doing 1% of what it says it is but I really don't know. Clearly it's doing something, but then I sit over here trying to build a simple agent with some MCPs hooked up to it using a LLM agent framework and it's falling over after a few iterations.

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

#160

Post by itsafarqueue »

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…

It’s not the whimsy. It’s that the whimsy is laced with casual disdain, a touch too much “let me buy you a stick of gum and show you how to chew it”, a frustrated tenor never stated but dog whistled “you dumb fucks”. A soft sharp stink of someone very smart shoving that fact in your face as they evangelise “the obvious truth” you’re too stupid to see.

And maybe he’s even right. But the reaction is to the flavour of chip on the shoulder delivery mixed into an otherwise fun piece.

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