Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

maggieappleton.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 466 posts

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

#221

Post by potatolicious »

hyperpape wrote: post #97
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…

> If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment: So, Steve has the big scary "YOU WILL DIE" statements in there, but he also has this: > I went ahead and built what’s next. First I predicted it, back in March, in Revenge of the Junior Developer. I predicted someone would lash the Claude Code camels together into chariots, and that is exactly what I’ve done with Gas Town. I’ve tamed them to…

> "If you say two different and contradictory things, and do not very explicitly resolve them, and say which one is the final answer, you will get blamed for both things you said, and you will not be entitled to complain about it, because you did it to yourself."

If I can be a bit bold and observe that this tic is also a very old rhetorical trick you see in our industry. Call it Schrodinger's Modest Proposal if you will.

In it someone writes something provocative, but casts it as both a joke and deadly serious at various points. Depending on how the audience reacts they can then double down on it being all-in-good-jest or yes-absolutely-totally. People who enjoy the author will explain the nonsensical tension as "nuance".

You see it in rationalist writing all the time. It's a tiresome rhetorical "trick" that doesn't fool anyone any more.

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

#222

Post by turtlebits »

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…

Who wants to do grunt work when you can play architect to a bunch of robots?

Its like the ultimate RTS, plus you get paid.

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

#223

Post by dunk010 »

> When I was taken to the Tate Modern as a child I’d point at Mark Rothko pieces and say to my mother “I could do that”, and she would say “yes, but you didn’t.”

Yes, but you didn't https://www.signedoriginalprints.com/cdn/shop/products/wegot...

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

#225

Post by directevolve »

potatolicious wrote: post #221
hyperpape wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment: So, Steve has the big scary "YOU WILL DIE" statements in there, but he also has this: > I went ahead and built what’s next. First I predicted it, back in March, in Revenge of the Junior Developer. I predicted someone would lash the Claude Code camels together into chariots, and that is exactly what I’ve done with Gas Town. I’ve tamed them to…

> "If you say two different and contradictory things, and do not very explicitly resolve them, and say which one is the final answer, you will get blamed for both things you said, and you will not be entitled to complain about it, because you did it to yourself." If I can be a bit bold and observe that this tic is also a very old rhetorical trick you see in our industry. Call it Schrodinger's Modest Proposal if you w…

In what rationalist writing? The LessWrong style is to be literal and unambiguous. They’re pretty explicit that this is a community value they’re striving for.

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

#226

Post by ludicity »

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…

I thought it was harmless(ish) fun, but David Gerard put out a post stating that Yegge used Gas Town to push out a crypto project that rug pulled his supporters, while he personally walked away with something between $50K to $100K from memory.

I suppose that has little to do with the technical merits of the work, but it's such a bad look, and it makes everyone boosting this stuff seem exactly as dysregulated/unwise as they've appeared to many engineers for a while.

I met Sean Goedecke for lunch a few weeks ago, who uses LLMs a bunch, and is clearly a serious adult, but half the folks being shoved in front of everyone are behaving totally manic and people are cheering them on. Absolutely blows my mind to watch.

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vib...

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

#227

Post by mbesto »

dullcrisp wrote: post #180
mbesto wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not saying it's right, but boy do I have stories about the code used in healthcare applications. Not sure how "vibecoded" programming lines of code is any worse.

Because that code is presumably working and the vibe code is probably not?

do you have evidence that all vibe coded solutions dont work? Because thats what you're implying.

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

#228

Post by EFreethought »

joshstrange wrote: post #159
suriya-ganesh wrote: post #7

>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…

> 10. 10th prompt: Ugh, everytime I fix one thing, something else breaks

Maybe that is the time to start making changes by hand. I think this dream of humans never ever writing any more code might be too far and unnecessary.

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

#229

Post by kaydub »

kapimalos wrote: post #201
kaydub wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I haven’t used multi-agent set up yet but it’s intriguing. Are you using Claude Code? How do you run the agents and make them speak?

Let me clarify actually, I run separate terminals and the agents are separated. I think claude code cli is the best. But at home I pay per token. I have a google account and I pay for chatgpt. So I often use codex and gemini cli in tandem. I'll copy + paste stuff between them sometimes or I'll have one review the changes or just the code in general and then feed the other with the outputs. I'll break out claude code for specific tasks or when I feel like gemini/chatgpt aren't quite doing the job right (which has gotten rarer the past few months).

I messed around with separate "agents" in the same context window for a while. I even went as far as playing with strands agents. Having multiple agents was a crapshoot.

Sometimes they'd work great, but sometimes they start working on the same files at the same time, argue with each other, etc. I'd always get multiple agents working, at least how I assumed they should work, by telling the llm explicitly what agents to create and what work to pass off to what agents. And it did a pretty poor job of that. I tried having orchestration agents, but at a certain point the orchestration agent would just takeover and do everything. So I'm not big on having multiple agents (in theory it sounds great, especially since they are supposed to each have their own context window). When I attempted doing this kind of stuff with strands agents it honestly felt like I was trying to recreate claude, so I just stick with plain cli llm tools for now.

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

#230

Post by lupire »

meowface wrote: post #144
an0malous wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I’m one of the Very Serious Engineers and I liked Steve’s post when I thought it was sort of tongue in cheek but was horrified to come to the HN comments and LinkedIn comments proclaiming Gastown as the future of engineering. There absolutely is a large contingent of engineers who believe this, and it has a real world impact on my job if my bosses think you can just throw a dozen AI agents at our product roa…

It's a half-joke. No need to take it that seriously or that jokingly. It's mostly only grifters and cryptocurrency scammers claiming it's amazing. I think ideas from it will probably partially inspire future, simpler systems.

stevey already made $300K from cryptocurrency grift on Gas Town. Read his blog post about it.
Post reply on HN