Gas Town Decoded

I think Yegge and Huntley are smart guys.

I don't think they're doing a good job incubating their ideas into being precise and clearly useful -- there is something to be said about being careful and methodical before showing your cards.

The message they are spreading feels inevitable, but the things they are showing now are ... for lack of better words, not clear or sharp. In a recent video at AI Engineer, Yegge comments on "the Luddites" - but even for advocates of the technology, it is nigh impossible to buy the story he's telling from his blog posts.

Show, don't tell -- my major complaint about this group is that they are proselytizing about vibe coding tools ... without serious software to show for it.

Let's see some serious fucking software. I'm looking for new compilers, browsers, OSes -- and they better work. Otherwise, what are we talking about? We're counting foxes before the hunt.

In any case, wouldn't trying to develop a serious piece of software like that _at the same time you're developing Gas Town or Loom_ make (what critics might call) the ~Emacs config tweaking for orchestration~ result driven?

> If it's not a joke... I have no words. You've all gone insane.

How is it insane to jump to the logical conclusion of all of this? The article was full of warnings, its not a sensible thing to do but its a cool thing to do. We might ask whether or not it works, but does that actually matter? It read as an experiment using experimental software doing experimental things.

Consider a deterministic life form looking at how we program software today, that might look insane to it and gastown might look considerably more sane.

Everything that ever happens in human creation begins as a thought, then as a prototype before it becomes adopted and maybe (if it works/scales) something we eventually take for granted. I mean I hate it but maybe I've misunderstood my profession when I thought this job was being able to prove the correctness of the system that we release. Maybe the business side of the org was never actually interested in that in the first place. Dev and business have been misaligned with competing interests for decades. Maybe this is actually the fit. Give greater control of software engineering to people higher up the org chart.

Maybe this is how we actually sink c-suite and let their ideas crash against the rocks forcing c-suite to eventually become extremely technical to be able to harness this. Instead of today's reality where c-suite gorge on the majority of the profit with an extremely loosely coupled feedback loop where its incredibly difficult to square cause and effect. Stock went up on Tuesday afternoon did it? I deserve eleventy million dollars for that. I just find it odd to crap on gastown when I think our status quo is kinda insane too.

The overuse of metaphors makes me feel like this person is trying to reinvent Chef, but for AI.

It's a science project. I think the "I am so crazy" messaging is deliberate to scare most people away while attracting a few like-minded beta testers. He's telling you not to use it, which some people will take as a dare...

Here's a separate, optimistic comment about Yegge and Huntley: they are obviously on the right track.

In a recent video about Loom (Huntley's orchestration tool), Huntley comments:

"I've got a single goal and that is autonomous evolutionary software and figuring out what's needed to be there."

which is extremely interesting and sounds like great fun.

When you take these ideas seriously, if the agents get better (by hook and crook or RLVR) -- you can see the implications: "grad student descent" on whatever piece of software you want. RAG over ideas, A/B testing of anything, endless looping, moving software.

It's a nightmare for the model of software development and human organization which is "productive" today, but an extremely compelling vision for those dabbling in the alternative.