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

maggieappleton.com

211–220 of 466 posts

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I used to go to a lot of industry events and I really enjoyed hearing about the diversity of different things people worked on both as a hobby and at work. I go to tech meetups regularly. The speed at which any conversation end up on the topic of AI is extremely grating to me. No more discussions about interesting problems and creative solutions that people come up with. It's all just AI, agentic, vibe code. At wha…

It's like the entire software industry is gambling on "LLMs will get better faster than human skills will decay, so they will be good enough to clean up their own slop before things really fall apart". I can't even say that's definitely a losing bet-- it could very well happen-- but boy does it seem risky to go all-in on it.

On one hand, it’s extremely tiring having to put up with that section of our industry.

On the other, if a large portion of the industry goes all in, and it _doesn’t_ pay off and craters them, maybe the overhyping will move onto something else and we can go back to having an interesting, actually-nice-to-be-in-industry!

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

#212
post #30
post #2

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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?

Is anybody surprised all the AI influencers are doing the same thing all the crypto influencers are doing?

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

#213
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen your issue, but git is actually one of the things I don't have the llm do. When I work on issues I create a new branch off of master, let the llm go to town on it, then I manually commit and push to remote for an MR/PR. If there are any errors on the commit hooks I just feed the errors back into the agent.

Interesting, ok, I might try that on my next attempt. I was trying to have it commit so that I could use pre-commit hooks to enforce things I want (test, lint, prettier, etc) but maybe instead I should handle that myself and make it more explicit in my prompts/CLAUDE.md to test/lint/etc. In reality I should just create a `/prep` command or similar that asks it to do all of that so that once it thinks it's done, I can…

You’ll likely have the same issue relying on CLAUDE.md instructions to test/lint/etc, mine get ignored constantly to the point of uselessness.

I’m trying to redesign my setup to use hooks now instead because poor adherence to rules files across all the agentic CLIs is exhausting to workaround.

(and no, Opus 4.5 didn’t magically solve this problem to preemptively respond to that reply)

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

#214
post #133

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…

Playing with new toys is part of doing my job. In my shop, we call them "ooh shiny"'s. Most devs are in the same boat, but I feel bad for those that aren't.

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

#215
post #40

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.

> The secret is that it doesn't work. I have 100% vibecoded software that I now use instead of commercial implementation that cost me almost 200 usd a month (tool for radiology dictation and report generation).

Using mystery vibe coded software in a tightly regulated, consequence-heavy environment, that’s so reassuring! /s

Is it _just_ speech-to-text, or god-forbid are you giving it scans and having it write reports for you too?

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

#217

>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…

Where is the "super upvote button" when you need it? YES! I have been playing with vibe coding tools since they came out. "Playing" because only on rare occasions have I created something that is good enough to commit/keep/use. I keep playing with them because, well I have a subscription, but also so I don't fall into the fuddy-duddy camp of "all AI is bad" and can legitimately speak on the value, or lack thereof, of…

I’ve definitely hit that same pattern in the early iterations, but for me it hasn’t really been a blocker. I’ve found the iteration loop itself isn’t that bad as long as you treat it like normal software work. I still test, review, and check what it actually did each time, but that’s expected anyway. What’s surprised me is how quickly things can scale once the overall architecture is thought through. I’ve built out working pieces in a couple of weeks using Claude Code, and a lot of that time was just deciding on the architecture up front and then letting it help fill in the details. It’s not hands-off, but used deliberately, it’s been quite effective https://robos.rnsu.net

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

#218

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…

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like gastown's moxie, it's fun, and seems kind of tongue in cheek. What I don't like is people me-tooing gastown as some breakthrough in orchestration. I also don't like how people are doing the same thing for ralph. In truth, what I hate is people dogpiling thoughtlessly on things, and only caring about what social media has told them to care about. This tendency makes me get warm tingles at the thought of the end…

I mean, isn’t the whole point of Ralph that it’s an allusion to “I’m in danger” because Claude in a for loop can do your job?

I believe the intent was that he's dumb but persistent.

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the "super upvote button" when you need it? YES! I have been playing with vibe coding tools since they came out. "Playing" because only on rare occasions have I created something that is good enough to commit/keep/use. I keep playing with them because, well I have a subscription, but also so I don't fall into the fuddy-duddy camp of "all AI is bad" and can legitimately speak on the value, or lack thereof, of…

I’ve definitely hit that same pattern in the early iterations, but for me it hasn’t really been a blocker. I’ve found the iteration loop itself isn’t that bad as long as you treat it like normal software work. I still test, review, and check what it actually did each time, but that’s expected anyway. What’s surprised me is how quickly things can scale once the overall architecture is thought through. I’ve built out w…

I agree that it can be very useful when used like that but I'm referring to fully vibe-coding, the "I've never looked at the code"-people. CC is a great tool when you use plan carefully, review its work, etc but people are building things they say they've never read the code for and that just hasn't been my experience, it always falls over on it's own if I'm not in the code reviewing/tweaking.
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