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

maggieappleton.com

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

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is fine to have criticisms of this, I have many, but saying that Yegge hasn't built real software is just not true.

Yegge obviously built real software in the past. He has not built real software wherein he never looked at the code, as he is now promoting.

Ok but this entire idea is very new. Its not an honest criticism to say no one has tried the new idea when they are actively doing it.

Honestly I don't get the hostility. Yegge is running an experiment. I don't think it will work, but it will be interesting and informative to watch.

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

#32
post #8

>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…

I'm sympathetic to this view, but I also wonder if this is the same thing that assembly language programmers said about compilers. What do you mean that you never look at the machine code? What if the compiler does something inefficient?

Not even remotely close.

Compilers are deterministic. People who write them test that they will produce correct results. You can expect the same code to compile to the same assembly.

With LLMs two people giving the exact same prompts can get wildly different results. That is not a tool you can use to blindly ship production code. Imagine if your compiler randomly threw in a syscall to delete your hard drive, or decide to pass credentials in plain text. LLMs can and will do those things.

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

#33
post #8

>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…

I'm sympathetic to this view, but I also wonder if this is the same thing that assembly language programmers said about compilers. What do you mean that you never look at the machine code? What if the compiler does something inefficient?

The big difference is that compilation is deterministic: compile the same program twice and it'll generate the same output twice. It also doesn't involve any "creativity": a compiler is mostly translating a high-level concept into its predefined lower-level components. I don't know exactly what my code compiles to, but I can be pretty certain what the general idea of the assembly is going to be.

With LLMs all bets are off. Is your code going to import leftpad, call leftpad-as-a-service, write its own leftpad implementation, decide that padding isn't needed after all, use a close-enough rightpad instead? Who knows! It's just rolling dice, so have fun finding out!

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

#34
post #12
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sympathetic to this view, but I also wonder if this is the same thing that assembly language programmers said about compilers. What do you mean that you never look at the machine code? What if the compiler does something inefficient?

I wonder if assembly programmers felt this way about the reliability of the electical components which their code relies upon...

I wonder if electrical engineers felt this way about the reliability of the silicon crystal lattice their circuits rely upon…

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

#35

>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…

There is an incentive for dishonesty about what AI can and cannot do.

People from OpenAI was saying that GPT2 had achieved AGI. There is a very clear incentive for that statement to be made by people who are not using AI for anything productive.

Even as increasingly bombastic claims are made, it is obvious that the best AI cannot one-shot everything if you are an actual user. And the worst ones: was using Gemini yesterday and it wouldn't stop outputting emojis, was using Grok and it refused to give me a code snippet because it claimed its system prompt forbade this...what can you say?

I don't understand why anyone would want to work on a codebase they didn't understand either. What happens when something goes wrong?

Again though, there is massive financial incentive to make these claims, and some other people will fall along with that because it is good for their career, etc. I have seen this in my own company where senior people are shoehorning this stuff in that they clearly do not actually use or understand (to be clear, this is engineering not management...these are people who definitely should understand but do not).

Great tool, but the 100% vibecoding without looking at the code, for something that you are actually expecting others to use, is a bad idea. Feels more like performance art than actual work. I like jokes, I like coding, room for both but don't confuse the two.

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

#36
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…

> Ralph loops are also stupid because they don't make use of kv cache properly.

This is a cost/resources thing. If it's more effective and the resources are available, it's completely fine.

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

#38

>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…

No one is promising anything. It's just a giant experiment and the author explicitly tells you not to use it. I appreciate those that try new things, even it it's possibly akin to throwing s** at a wall and seeing what sticks. Maybe it changes how we code or maybe it doesn't. Vibe coding has definitely helped me write throwaway tools that were useful.

After listening to Yegge's interview, I'm not sure this is accurate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw

For example, he makes a comment to the effect that anyone using an IDE to look at code in 2026 is a "bad engineer."

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

#39
Gas Town has a very clear "mad scientist/performance art" sort of thing going on, and I love that. It's taking a premise way past its logical conclusion, and I think that's fun to watch.

I haven't seen anything to suggest that Yegge is proposing it as a serious tool for serious work, so why all the hate?

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

#40

>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…

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).

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