161–170 of 183 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What it means is that it is easy to shit on other people's work. Much harder to give constructive criticism - especially on what looks like a throwaway account.
It’s not “other people’s work” because Steve didn’t do any work. He vibe coded hundreds of thousands of lines that don’t do what they’re supposed to with many thousands of lines of documentation that are inaccurate at best and aspirational at worst. He wrote some blog posts and got them picked up by vapid outlets that had nothing else to add to boost his exposure. Case in point: no one talks about beads or gastown on…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using regular Claude code I can generate 4k lines an hour. Using some bash I can generate 4k lines of code per second. Lines of code per hour is a bad metric. Can it solve a problem using production quality code that doesn’t take four times as long to review? That sounds like something I would pay $100 for.
I think the point is that we are given no real idea at all, not even some ballpark figures, about how much actual money actually needs to be spent in order to run Gas Town. The original article had some handwavy stuff about how it cost An Awful Lot, but no actual numbers. Cost per line of code is not an amazing metric, but at least it's an attempt to come up with a figure. (I would also be interested to find out how…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the op meant Gas Town itself (if they did, my bad), but what has Yegge done with Gas Town? By now it should have released some amazing thing if Gas Town increases productivity so much.
What has Yegge done with Gas Town? Well for one, he has posted a bunch of blog content about it which has generated chatter like this and increased his geek mindshare. Just because he's operating in the realm of smart nerds doesn't mean he is immune to the value-inverting effects of social media.
(btw I've been wondering the same thing as you and am not sure if there's another answer besides that he and people following his projects keep building projects on their projects: Beads, to Gas Town, to Wasteland, etc.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I usually have Claude confirm with me but I've seen it close it if its a unit test that passed for example.
You can't trust it 100%. Sometimes it will just refuse to fix a compiler or lint warning (often saying "This was a pre-existing issue...") or write a trivial test that does nothing and always passes.
For "hacker" news, this group is reacting like its "labor" news. I get it - this will have an impact on the current ways of building software getting deprecated. But this is genuinely cutting-edge, new paradigm of building software. Something that will iron it's kinks out, and potentially be the way of developing software in the new Era. That's worth some curious and exploratory discussion, rather than more comments…
Reading about Gas Town has been fun, it's definitely an experiment and may not be practical and doesn't have to be; it does seem to be a possible correct vision of the future of coordinating agents to code with (it's just not fully there yet as it is on the cutting edge of seeing what's possible)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been using Beads for 5 different projects, and Beads and/or Dolt failures have been a regular thing. It's own "doctor" feature is sort of disturbing, in that it (1) tells me that my Beads setups are always at least a little bit broken, but (2) can never fix all of the issues. Hopefully the 1.0 designation means that Steve is out of "throw shit at the wall" mode. Beads is fine as a replacement for Markdown files,…
Agreed. I kinda concluded that the expected `doctor` usage is to have an agent run it for you and then they can try to figure it out when `doctor` can’t fix the issues.
YMMV but this seems like a simpler port: https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/beads_rust
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the op meant Gas Town itself (if they did, my bad), but what has Yegge done with Gas Town? By now it should have released some amazing thing if Gas Town increases productivity so much.
What has Yegge done with Gas Town? Well for one, he has posted a bunch of blog content about it which has generated chatter like this and increased his geek mindshare. Just because he's operating in the realm of smart nerds doesn't mean he is immune to the value-inverting effects of social media.
How anybody takes him (or the Ralph Wiggum guy who did the same) seriously after this is beyond me. These people should be exiled
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Read some of his earlier stuff. He’s a very informal writer, but he’s a damn good one with good ideas.
No. He used to be good with ideas. Now he's drinking too much of his own poison. His blog posts are bloviated monstrosities incapable of coherently describing the very trivial ideas contained in them.
That's not true. He coherently and clearly described this crypto pump and dump nonsense he was pushing for a while https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-...