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

Post by kapimalos » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:10 PM UTC

kaydub wrote: post #61

jrmg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, it sounds like "you're holding it wrong" Like, why are you manually tidying and fixing things? The first pass is never perfect. Maybe the functionality is there but the code is spaghetti or untestable. Have another agent review and feed that review back into the original agent that built out the code. Keep iterating like that. My usual workflow: Agent 1 - Build feature Agent 2 - Review these parts of the code,…

Post by thorum » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:11 PM UTC

Ethee wrote: post #174

thorum wrote: post #171

Am I wrong that this entire approach to agent design patterns is based on the assumption that agents are slow? Which yeah, is very true in January 2026, but we’ve seen that inference gets faster over time. When an agent can complete most tasks in 1 minute, or 1 second, parallel agents seem like the wrong direction. It’s not clear how this would be any better than a single Claude Code session (as “orchestrator”) runni…

It's likely then that you are thinking too small. Sure for one off tasks and small implementations, a single prompt might save you 20-30 mins. But when you're building an entire library/service/software in 3 days that normally would have taken you by hand 30 days. Then the real limitation comes down to how fast you can get your design into a structured format. As this article describes.

Post by square_usual » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:13 PM UTC

wrs wrote: post #81

mediaman wrote: post #46

I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment. It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end. And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and h…

Perhaps it was his followup post about how people are lining up to throw millions of VC dollars at his bizarre whimsical fever dream that disturbs people? I’m all for arts funding, but…

Post by square_usual » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:16 PM UTC

mrkeen wrote: post #133

bdcravens wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. Fear over what it means if it works.

I work in a typical web app company which does accounting/banking etc. A couple of days ago I was sitting in a meeting of 10-15 devs, discussing our AI agents. People were raising issues and brainstorming ways around the problems with AI. How to make the AI better. Our devs were occupied doing AI things, not accounting/banking things. If the time savings were as promised, we should have been 3 devs (with the remainin…

Post by freedomben » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:19 PM UTC

mediaman wrote: post #46

I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment. It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end. And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and h…