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Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

steve-yegge.medium.com

21–30 of 102 posts

Re: Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

#21

Reads like a scam. Obfuscatory language, outsized claims on future impact, excited opportunity advertisement, first-mover advantage, "no time for the rulebook, it's an inch thick!". I'm good, thanks.

Hilarious too that he uses the word "wasteland" for something that's supposedly good. Perhaps it is a double coding where all of us normies mock it but the FOMO-blinded have their own private reading and say the rest of us are totally wrong.

Reminds me of those 419 emails where the grammar is bad, the story makes no sense, but hey there really are people who expect $10 million to fall out of the sky because they already had $10 million fall out of the sky on them.

Re: Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

#23
What's the incentive for anyone to participate in this? It seems wildly expensive (in tokens), high mental overhead to understand, high hardware cost. So what's the upside?

Is it for people with too much money and time on their hands to flex on Github?

I could at least understand the pitch if there was a crypto scam attached, or if folks were getting paid somehow (which might be an interesting social/AI experiment). But that doesn't seem to be the case.

Re: Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

#25
post #22

AI got to Yegge,too. What the hell is "Gas Town" and why should I watch AI generated furry stuff? All I can take from this is that you must spend more tokens.

AI got to him awhile ago, I'm afraid. Been telling stories about these gastowns, zero code review and thousands of lines of code and thousands of dollars in burned tokens since last year.

Re: Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

#26
This is a classic example of a 'Solution in Search of a Metaphor.' Strip away the 5,000 words of Fury Road fan fiction and you’re left with a multi-agent wrapper for Claude Code that effectively automates the generation of technical debt. It feels like Yegge is trying to brand 'shoveling tokens into a furnace' as a new paradigm, but the cognitive overhead of learning his proprietary 'lore' just to manage a tmux session of LLMs is a massive net loss in productivity. We don't need a Wasteland; we need tools that actually improve the signal-to-noise ratio, not industrial-scale noise generators.

Re: Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns

#28

I really want to host a vibe coding competition and see what can actually be made with these systems. Like if we’re doing insane token spends, it better be in service of creating amazing stuff. Can we make an entirely new programming language? Can we make an OS?

A lot of it seems to be porting open source projects to rust for other open source projects to consume.
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