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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

#21

Post by causalmodels »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #10
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…

The secret is that it doesn't work. None of these people have built real software that anyone outside their bubble uses. They are not replacing anyone, they are just off in their own corner building sand castles.

It is fine to have criticisms of this, I have many, but saying that Yegge hasn't built real software is just not true.

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

#22

Post by fragmede »

7777332215 wrote: post #15
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?

The compiler is deterministic and the translation does not lose semantics. The meaning of your code is an exact reflection of what is produced.

We can tell you weren't around for the advent of compilers. To be fair, neither was I since the UNIX c compiler came out in '68 and was by far not the first compiler. Modern comilers you can make that claim about, but early compilers weren't.

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

#23

Post by anonymous908213 »

causalmodels wrote: post #21
anonymous908213 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The secret is that it doesn't work. None of these people have built real software that anyone outside their bubble uses. They are not replacing anyone, they are just off in their own corner building sand castles.

It is fine to have criticisms of this, I have many, but saying that Yegge hasn't built real software is just not true.

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.

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

#24

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

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…

Do you understand at a molecular level how cooking works? Or do you just do some rote actions according to instructions? How do you know if your cooking worked properly without understanding chemistry? Without looking at its components under a microscope?

Simple: you follow the directions, eat the food, and if it tastes good, it worked.

If cooks don't understand physics, chemistry, biology, etc, how do all the cooks in the world ensure they don't get people sick? They follow a set of practices and guidelines developed to ensure the food comes out okay. At scale, businesses develop even more practices (pasteurization, sanitization, refrigeration, etc) to ensure more food safety. None of the people involved understand it at a base level. There are no scientists directly involved in building the machines or day-to-day operations. Yet the entire world's food supply works just fine.

It's all just abstractions. You don't need to see the code for the code to work.

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

#25

Post by asadm »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #10
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…

The secret is that it doesn't work. None of these people have built real software that anyone outside their bubble uses. They are not replacing anyone, they are just off in their own corner building sand castles.

no that's not true. I rarely now write a SINGLE line of code both at work or at home. Even simple config switches, I ask codex/gemini to do it.

You always have to review overall diff though and go back to agent with broader corrections to do.

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

#26

Post by slfnflctd »

> Yegge deserves praise for exercising agency and taking a swing at a system like this [...] then running a public tour of his shitty, quarter-built plane while it’s mid-flight

This quote sums it all up for me. It's a crazy project that moves the conversation forward, which is the main value I see in it.

It very well could be a logjam breaker for those who are fortunate enough to get out more than they put into it... but it's very much a gamble, and the odds are against you.

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

#27

Post by jrmg »

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…

This is also my experience. Everything I’ve ever tried to vibe code has ended up with off-by-one errors, logic errors, repeated instances of incorrect assumptions etc. Sometimes they appear to work at first, but, still, they have errors like this in them that are often immediately obvious on code review and would definitely show up in anything more than very light real world use.

They _can_ usually be manually tidied and fixed, with varying amounts of effort (small project = easy fixes, on a par with regular code review, large project = “this would’ve been easier to write myself...”)

I guess Gas Town’s multiple layers of supervisory entities are meant to replace this manual tidying and fixing, but, well, really?

I don’t understand how people are supposedly having so much success with things like this. Am I just holding it wrong?

If they are having real success, why are there no open source projects that are AI developed and maintained that are _not_ just systems for managing AI? (Or are there and I just haven’t seen them?...)

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

#28

Post by [deleted] »

bbayles wrote: post #8
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'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?

[deleted]

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

#29

Post by conartist6 »

bbayles wrote: post #8
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'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 unimpressive size before it collapses under its own weight. Even if someone tried to prop it up with stable infra, Steve would surely vibe the stable infra out of existence since he does not care about that

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

#30

Post by jsheard »

acedTrex wrote: post #2

[flagged]

Did you catch the part where it crossed over into a crypto pump-and-dump scam, with Yegge's approval? And then the guy behind the "Ralph" vibe coding thing endorsed the same scam, despite being a former crypto critic who should absolutely know better?
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