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Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

steve-yegge.medium.com

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Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#21

Post by dist-epoch »

Zafira wrote: post #19
dist-epoch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having spent six weeks or so using Gas Town across multiple simultaneous projects, I believe I can describe the shift concretely. The bottleneck migrates from coding speed to the rate at which you can generate ideas, write specifications, and validate outputs. You are no longer limited by how fast you can build. You are limited by how fast you can think. Interesting: > Kubernetes asks “Is it running?” Gas Town asks…

I’m not sure I find the testimony of a Bain & Company AI consultant ( https://www.bain.com/our-team/eric-koziol/ ) to be compelling for anything outside of generating fees.

Does this mean you would avoid an article on PostgreSQL if it's from a company selling Postgres products or consultation?

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#22

Post by [deleted] »

siva7 wrote: post #14
bayarearefugee wrote: post #10

> But no need to wait. At a high level, Gas City is the answer to all your problems. Ha! At least, for certain classes of problem, such as, “How can I bring AI into my company and pass an audit trail,” The important audit at my company is conducted by the FDA. I have a feeling when they ask what processes we followed to mitigate any user harm that could be caused by software changes that "I told an AI-mayor in the fo…

Not yet... but me in 2020 telling you what the HN frontpage 2026 would look like you would have sent me to a mental institution, wouldn't you?

[deleted]

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#23

Post by pianopatrick »

I searched on google about the cost of running Gas Town. The Gemini AI response claimed Gas town costs $100 / hour and can spit out 4000 lines of code per hour, so Gas Town costs 2.5 cents per line of code.

I tried tracking down where those numbers came from and the sources were a bit sketchy. Can anybody who has used Gas Town confirm those numbers, or report their personal numbers?

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#24

Post by bayarearefugee »

dist-epoch wrote: post #15
mmastrac wrote: post #5

Serious question - there's a lot of fluff talking about Gas Town, but has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting? At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.

> Having spent six weeks or so using Gas Town across multiple simultaneous projects, I believe I can describe the shift concretely. The bottleneck migrates from coding speed to the rate at which you can generate ideas, write specifications, and validate outputs. You are no longer limited by how fast you can build. You are limited by how fast you can think. Interesting: > Kubernetes asks “Is it running?” Gas Town asks…

This doesn't really answer the question...?

You provided a quote from someone who seems to be an AI-boosting influencer who claimed to use it, but where's the output in the form of code we can look at, or in the form of an app someone can use today?

I'm not an AI-denier. I use LLMs and agentic coding. They increase my productivity.

...but there is still a very real problem with people claiming that some new way of using AI is earth shattering, and changes everything based on vague anecdotes that don't involve a tangible released output that they can point to.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#26

Post by vessenes »

Nice timing. I was just noting that beads in an old repo, just ... worked. Updates worked, I didn't have super weird errors to track down... I was like "nice!" Beads bumping to 1.0 is great. I haven't used gas town in a month or so, but a stable gas town sounds very valuable.

I think Yegge's instincts that making a programmable / editable coordination layer (he calls this gas city) is a great idea. Gas town early days was definitely a wild experience in terms of needing to watch carefully lest your system be destroyed, and then I put that energy into OpenClaw - I'll probably spin up Gas City and see what it can do soon though. Very cool.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#27

Post by javawizard »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #4

I loved Beads, but kept running into issues because it is so git heavy. One: not every system and project I work on uses git. Two: Sometimes I'd switch branches, and that would screw up Beads state entirely. Three: And this is at least last I used it, there's no safety net, Claude would close a Bead, without validating anything. I wound up building my own with Claude, I made it SQLite first, syncs to GitHub, can pull…

Love this.

How did you implement gates? Are they simply tasks Claude itself has to confirm it ran, or are they scripts that run to check that the thing in question actually happened, or do they spawn a separate AI agent to check that the thing happened, or what?

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#29

Post by Leszek »

dist-epoch wrote: post #21
Zafira wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure I find the testimony of a Bain & Company AI consultant ( https://www.bain.com/our-team/eric-koziol/ ) to be compelling for anything outside of generating fees.

Does this mean you would avoid an article on PostgreSQL if it's from a company selling Postgres products or consultation?

It means they'd avoid an article on the benefits of smoking if it's posted by a company selling cigarettes.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#30

Post by giancarlostoro »

javawizard wrote: post #27
giancarlostoro wrote: post #4

I loved Beads, but kept running into issues because it is so git heavy. One: not every system and project I work on uses git. Two: Sometimes I'd switch branches, and that would screw up Beads state entirely. Three: And this is at least last I used it, there's no safety net, Claude would close a Bead, without validating anything. I wound up building my own with Claude, I made it SQLite first, syncs to GitHub, can pull…

Love this. How did you implement gates? Are they simply tasks Claude itself has to confirm it ran, or are they scripts that run to check that the thing in question actually happened, or do they spawn a separate AI agent to check that the thing happened, or what?

Claude or whatever agent will get a message when it tries to close a task, which tells them which gates are not resolved yet, at which point, the agent will instinctively want to read the task. I did run into an issue where I forgot to add gates to a new project, so Claude did smoosh over by making a blanket gate, I have otherwise never had an issue when I defined what the gate is, Claude usually honors it. I havent worked on big updates recently, but I noticed other tools like rtk (Rust Token Killer) will add their own instructions to your claude's instructions.md file, so I think I need to craft one to tack on with sane instructions, including never closing tasks without having the user create gates for them first.

In a nutshell, a gate is a entry in the DB with arbitrary text, Claude is good about following whatever it is. Claude trying to close a task will force it to read it.

Life's gotten slightly busy, but you can see more on the repo. I've been debating giving it a better name, I feel like GuardRails implies security, when the goal is just to validate work slightly.

https://github.com/Giancarlos/GuardRails

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