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Gas Town Decoded

alilleybrinker.com

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Re: Gas Town Decoded

#201

Post by [deleted] »

alexjurkiewicz wrote: post #89
fdr wrote: post #33

I use beads quite a bit, but not as steve intended. And definitely the opposite of "Gas Town," where I use the note-taking capability and integration with Git (that is, as something of a glorified Makefile and database) to debug contexts, to close the loop and increase accuracy over time. Nevertheless, it has been useful for large batch runs over my code base: the record has been processing for thirty hours straight…

His latest post is endorsing a crypto exchange because they paid him $50k. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-...

[deleted]

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#202

Post by colin_jack »

mjr00 wrote: post #195
krupan wrote: post #185

Gas town and the like all basically sound to me like, "AI is amazing! Ok, actually it isn't very good, but maybe we can just use more AI with our AI and then it'll be good!" And I'm not surprised at all to learn that this path took us to a "Maintenance Manager Checker Agent." I wonder what he'll call the inevitable Maintenance Manager Checker Agent Checker Agent? Maybe I've been in this game too long, but I've encoun…

It's the Jarvis Effect. For years we had people trying to make voice agents, like Iron Man's Jarvis, a thing . You had people super bought into the idea that if you could talk to your computer and say "Jarvis, book me a flight from New York to Hawaii" and it would just do it just like the movies, that was the future , that was sci-fi , it was awesome . But it turns out that voice sucks as a user interface. The only t…

"Agent 1, refactor that method to be more efficient. Agent 5, tighten up the graphics on level 3!"

I'm not sure its even that, his description of his role in this is:

"You are a Product Manager, and Gas Town is an Idea Compiler. You just make up features, design them, file the implementation plans, and then sling the work around to your polecats and crew. Opus 4.5 can handle any reasonably sized task, so your job is to make tasks for it. That’s it."

And he says he isn't reviewing the code, he lets agents review each others code from look of it. I am interested to see the specs/feature definitions he's giving them, that seems to be one interesting part of his flow.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#203

Post by coryrc »

bonesss wrote: post #128
alexjurkiewicz wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His latest post is endorsing a crypto exchange because they paid him $50k. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-...

I’m pro LLM and use them, but crikey: if they’re so good at code why aren’t these people with all the attention, branding, and connections in the world unable to capitalize them? I believe Google that uses their internal Gemini trained on their internal infrastructure to generate boiler plate and insights for older, less mature, code in one of the worlds biggest and most complicated anythings, ever. But I don’t see t…

> if they’re so good at code why aren’t these people with all the attention, branding, and connections in the world unable to capitalize them?

Exactly, this is what I'm wanting to see.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#204

Post by brunoborges »

mjr00 wrote: post #195
krupan wrote: post #185

Gas town and the like all basically sound to me like, "AI is amazing! Ok, actually it isn't very good, but maybe we can just use more AI with our AI and then it'll be good!" And I'm not surprised at all to learn that this path took us to a "Maintenance Manager Checker Agent." I wonder what he'll call the inevitable Maintenance Manager Checker Agent Checker Agent? Maybe I've been in this game too long, but I've encoun…

It's the Jarvis Effect. For years we had people trying to make voice agents, like Iron Man's Jarvis, a thing . You had people super bought into the idea that if you could talk to your computer and say "Jarvis, book me a flight from New York to Hawaii" and it would just do it just like the movies, that was the future , that was sci-fi , it was awesome . But it turns out that voice sucks as a user interface. The only t…

> Nobody is voluntarily booking a flight with their Alexa.

Rich people use voice because they have disposable income and they don't care if a flight is $800 or $4,000. They are likely buying business/first class anyways.

Tony Stark certainly doesn't care. Elon Musk certainly uses voice to talk to his management team to book his flights.

The average person doesn't have the privilege of using voice because it doesn't have enough fuck-you-money to not care for prices.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#205

Post by sonnig »

colin_jack wrote: post #202
mjr00 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the Jarvis Effect. For years we had people trying to make voice agents, like Iron Man's Jarvis, a thing . You had people super bought into the idea that if you could talk to your computer and say "Jarvis, book me a flight from New York to Hawaii" and it would just do it just like the movies, that was the future , that was sci-fi , it was awesome . But it turns out that voice sucks as a user interface. The only t…

"Agent 1, refactor that method to be more efficient. Agent 5, tighten up the graphics on level 3!" I'm not sure its even that, his description of his role in this is: "You are a Product Manager, and Gas Town is an Idea Compiler. You just make up features, design them, file the implementation plans, and then sling the work around to your polecats and crew. Opus 4.5 can handle any reasonably sized task, so your job is…

Assuming both agents are using the same model, what could the reviewer agent add of value to the agent writing the code? It feels like "thinking mode" but with extra steps, and more chance of getting them stuck in a loop trying to overcorrect some small inane detail.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#206

Post by colin_jack »

alecco wrote: post #197
colin_jack wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I’ve never seen the code, and I never care to, which might give you pause" https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16d...

Oof, he changed that. I stand corrected.

Yeah and its not a big focus of the posts which is interesting. I'd have thought he'd spend a lot more time talking about the workflow he's using, the specs/feature definitions he's writing, and so on.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#207

Post by mjr00 »

brunoborges wrote: post #204
mjr00 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the Jarvis Effect. For years we had people trying to make voice agents, like Iron Man's Jarvis, a thing . You had people super bought into the idea that if you could talk to your computer and say "Jarvis, book me a flight from New York to Hawaii" and it would just do it just like the movies, that was the future , that was sci-fi , it was awesome . But it turns out that voice sucks as a user interface. The only t…

> Nobody is voluntarily booking a flight with their Alexa. Rich people use voice because they have disposable income and they don't care if a flight is $800 or $4,000. They are likely buying business/first class anyways. Tony Stark certainly doesn't care. Elon Musk certainly uses voice to talk to his management team to book his flights. The average person doesn't have the privilege of using voice because it doesn't h…

As someone who's friends with executive assistants: rich people use executive assistants (humans) because they are busy and/or value their time more than money and don't want to bother with the details. None of them are using voice assistants.

> Tony Stark certainly doesn't care. Elon Musk certainly uses voice to talk to his management team to book his flights.

Delegating to a human isn't the same as using a voice assistant, this should be obvious, unless you believe that managers are doing all the real work and every IC is a brainless minion. Maybe far in the future when there's AGI, but certainly not today.

> The average person doesn't have the privilege of using voice because it doesn't have enough fuck-you-money to not care for prices.

You can order crap off Amazon for the same price as you would through the website with your Alexa right now, but Amazon themselves have admitted approximately 0% of people actually do this which is why the entire division ended up a minor disaster. It's just a shitty interface in the same way that booking a flight through voice is a shitty interface.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#208

Post by mjr00 »

colin_jack wrote: post #202
mjr00 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the Jarvis Effect. For years we had people trying to make voice agents, like Iron Man's Jarvis, a thing . You had people super bought into the idea that if you could talk to your computer and say "Jarvis, book me a flight from New York to Hawaii" and it would just do it just like the movies, that was the future , that was sci-fi , it was awesome . But it turns out that voice sucks as a user interface. The only t…

"Agent 1, refactor that method to be more efficient. Agent 5, tighten up the graphics on level 3!" I'm not sure its even that, his description of his role in this is: "You are a Product Manager, and Gas Town is an Idea Compiler. You just make up features, design them, file the implementation plans, and then sling the work around to your polecats and crew. Opus 4.5 can handle any reasonably sized task, so your job is…

Yeah maybe the refactoring was a bad example because it implies looking at the code. It's more like "Agent 1, change the color of this widget. Agent 9, add a red dot whenever there's a new message. Agent 67, send out a marketing email blast advertising our new feature."

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#209

Post by e12e »

oofbey wrote: post #93
bfrog wrote: post #67

Claude is ok. Gas town seems like a Claude multiplier. I’m not sure more Claude is what I’d even want! Not sure I love what it does all the time, it tends to fit whatever box you setup and will easily break out if you aren’t veeeery specific. Is it better than writing a few thousand lines of code myself that I deeply understand that can debug and explain? I don’t know yet. I think it’d be good for writing functions o…

I’d like gastown more if it could run cursor-CLI instead of claude, and thus be able to choose models. Claude is okay. But these things certainly have personalities. I’m not sure which would be best for each role. But gastown’s different actors seem like a great place to take advantage of the different quirks of each. And I certainly don’t choose Claude consistently when given a choice.

Well, according to Yegge, the next step is an SDK/framework for building your own ai orchestrator - so I expect we'll see support for more than Claude soon.

Re: Gas Town Decoded

#210

Post by aaronblohowiak »

spmurrayzzz wrote: post #198
dchuk wrote: post #98

I’m very bought in to the idea that raw coding is now a solved problem with the current models and agentic harnesses. Let alone what’s coming in the near term. That being said, I think we’re in a weird phase right now where people’s obvious mental health issues are appearing as “hyper productivity” due to the use of these tools to absolutely spam out code that isn’t necessarily broadly coherent but is locally impress…

This has also been an interesting social experiment in that we get to see what work people think is actually impressive vs trivial. Folks who have spent years effectively snapping together other people’s APIs like LEGOs (and being well-compensated for it) are understandably blown away by the current state of AI. Compare that to someone writing embedded firmware for device microcontrollers, who would understandably be…

>Compare that to someone writing embedded firmware for device microcontrollers, who would understandably be underwhelmed by the same.

One datum for you: I recently asked Claude to make a jerk-limited and jerk-derivative-limited motion planner and to use the existing trapezoidal planner as reference for fuzzy-testing various moves (to ensure total pulses sent was correct) and it totally worked. Only a few rounds of guidance to get it to where I wanted to commit it.

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