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

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

#241

Post by aprilthird2021 »

FuckButtons wrote: post #193
CuriouslyC wrote: post #116

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?

No, Ralph is famously dumb and needs lots of hand-holding and explanations of things most people think are very simple and can hold very little in his head at once.

But that's often enough to loop over and over again and eventually finish a task

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

#242

Post by skybrian »

ludicity wrote: post #226
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 a…

That was very weird. In the post where he was arguably "shilling," he seems to have signposted pretty well that it was dumb, but he will take the money they offered:

> $GAS is not equity and does not give you any ownership interest in Gas Town or my work. This post is for informational purposes only and is not a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any token. Crypto markets are volatile and speculative — do not risk money you can’t afford to lose.

...

> Note: The next few sections are about online gambling in all its forms, where “investing” is the buy-and-hold long-form “acceptable” form of gambling because it’s tied to world GDP growth. Cryptocurrencies are subject to wild swings and spikes, and the currency tied to Gas Town is on a wild swing up. But it’s still gambling, and this stuff is only for people who are into that… which is not me, and should probably not be you either.

In the next post he said he wasn't going to shill it any more, and then the price collapsed and people sent him death threats on Twitter. It probably would have collapsed anyway. Perhaps there was supposedly some implicit bargain that he shouldn't take the money if he wasn't going to shill? Well, there's certainly no rule saying you have to do that.

I think he's not very much to blame for taking the money from degenerate gamblers, and the cryptocurrency idiots are mostly to blame for their own mistakes.

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

#243

Post by ryandrake »

nicoburns wrote: post #196
ryandrake wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because they're one-off tools that only one person uses doesn't mean it's not "real software". I'm actually pretty excited about the fact that it's now feasible for me to replace all my BloatedShittyCommercialApps that I only use 5% of with vibe-coded bespoke tools that only do the important 5%, just for me to use. If that makes it a "sand castle" to you, fine, but this is real software and I'm seeing real benef…

> I'm actually pretty excited about the fact that it's now feasible for me to replace all my BloatedShittyCommercialApps that I only use 5% of with vibe-coded bespoke tools that only do the important 5%, just for me to use. Aren't you worried that they'll work fine for 3 weeks then delete all your data when you hold them slightly different? Vibe coded software seems to have a similar problem to "Undefined Behaviour",…

> Aren't you worried that they'll work fine for 3 weeks then delete all your data when you hold them slightly different?

It might. It probably won't though. I don't see any code in it that deletes files. And, unlike BloatedShittyCommercialApp (and its cousin, BloatedDoEverythingOpenSourceApp), the code is going to be relatively small and if I do have doubts I can easily check to see what it's doing. I can build it quickly. I can patch it quickly. I don't have to file a bug to someone and beg him to look at it. I don't have to worry that the next release is going to break stuff I want and add stuff I don't want.

I recently moved my home theater PC from Kodi to a tiny bespoke vibed video player app, that basically just wraps libVLC with a minimal Android GUI. It's like 3000 lines of code total. I can practically keep the entire app in my head. If I need to fix something, it's 5 minutes in my dev terminal and then adb install. Ever tried to find and fix a bug in Kodi? The goddamn thing takes forever to even build, let alone debug. And that's even open source. I don't even have a remote chance of getting a bug fixed in professionally-built proprietary software.

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

#244

Post by skybrian »

tucnak wrote: post #121
msp26 wrote: post #3

Originally I thought that Gas Town was some form of high level satire like GOODY-2 but it seems that some of you people have actually lost the plot. Ralph loops are also stupid because they don't make use of kv cache properly. --- https://github.com/steveyegge/gastown/issues/503 Problem: Every gt command runs bd version to verify the minimum beads version requirement. Under high concurrency (17+ agent sessions), this…

I think it is satire, and pretty obvious one at that; is anybody taking it for real?

Why not both? I think it's pretty clearly both for fun and serious.

He's thrown out his experiments before. Maybe he'll start over one more time.

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

#245

Post by mactavish88 »

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…

In my experience, it really depends on what you're building _and_ how you prompt the LLM.

For some things, LLMs are great. For others, they're absolute dog shit.

It's still early days. Anyone who claims to know what they're talking about either doesn't or what they're saying will be out of date in a month's time (including me).

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

#246

Post by wahnfrieden »

lupire wrote: post #230
meowface wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Complete with a "Let’s goooooooo!"

And FOMO stories about missing out on Bitcoin when he knew about it, so he doesn't want you to miss out on this new opportunity to get "filthy rich" as an "investor" while you still can.

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

#247

Post by walthamstow »

toraway wrote: post #208
walthamstow wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's paying $600 a month for 3x Claude Max subs. It's in his article.

…and now funded by a $GAS crypto coin on the BAGS platform so it even pays for itself! https://steve-yegge.medium.com/bags-and-the-creator-economy-...

What a tasty disclosure section that is

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

#248

Post by lknuth »

kaydub wrote: post #154
arrowleaf wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My feeling has been that 'serious' software engineers aren't particularly suited to use these tools. Most don't have an interest in managing people or are attracted to the deterministic nature of computing. There's a whole psychology you have to learn when managing people, and a lot of those skills transfer to wrangling AI agents from my experience. You can't be too prescriptive or verbose when interacting with them,…

All our best performing devs/engineers are using the tools the most. I think this is something a lot of people are telling themselves though, sure.

Best performing by what metric? There aren't meaningful ways to measure engineer "performance" that makes them comparable as far as I know.

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

#249

Post by shermantanktop »

kibwen wrote: post #96
1970-01-01 wrote: post #64

If it's stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid. Gas town transcends stupid. It is an abstract garbage generator. Call it art, call it an experiment, but you cannot call it a solution to a problem by any definition of the word.

"If it's stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid" is a maxim that only applies to luxury use cases where the results fundamentally don't matter. As soon as the results actually matter, the maxim becomes "if it works, but it's stupid, it doesn't work".

I just got some medication yesterday where the leaflet included the following phrase: "the exact mechanism of efficacy is unknown."

So apparently the medical field is not above this logic.

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

#250

Post by shermantanktop »

siliconc0w wrote: post #224

GasTown is better enjoyed as more of Fear And Loathing-style ACID-fueled fevered dream than as a productivity tool.

I guess that's the way I "enjoyed" it as well. He could not be clearer with all the caveats and sarcastic asides.
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