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Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

steve-yegge.medium.com

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Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#31

Post by torginus »

dist-epoch wrote: post #15
mmastrac wrote: post #5

Serious question - there's a lot of fluff talking about Gas Town, but has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting? At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.

> Having spent six weeks or so using Gas Town across multiple simultaneous projects, I believe I can describe the shift concretely. The bottleneck migrates from coding speed to the rate at which you can generate ideas, write specifications, and validate outputs. You are no longer limited by how fast you can build. You are limited by how fast you can think. Interesting: > Kubernetes asks “Is it running?” Gas Town asks…

This sounds like every LLM workflow, which is 'you tell the LLM what you want'.

The real distinction is of scale - whether you want a REST endpoint or a fully functional word processor.

But real, actual, complex software is at least half spec (either explicit, or implicitly captured by its code), the question is, can LLMs specify software to the same degree with Gas Town, that you get something functioning?

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#32

Post by joezydeco »

mtlynch wrote: post #20
dist-epoch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having spent six weeks or so using Gas Town across multiple simultaneous projects, I believe I can describe the shift concretely. The bottleneck migrates from coding speed to the rate at which you can generate ideas, write specifications, and validate outputs. You are no longer limited by how fast you can build. You are limited by how fast you can think. Interesting: > Kubernetes asks “Is it running?” Gas Town asks…

This seems to be an AI-generated post where the "author" never reveals building any successful product or even tangible project with Gas Town.

It's like Web 4.0 zombo.com

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#33

Post by peddling-brink »

pianopatrick wrote: post #23

I searched on google about the cost of running Gas Town. The Gemini AI response claimed Gas town costs $100 / hour and can spit out 4000 lines of code per hour, so Gas Town costs 2.5 cents per line of code. I tried tracking down where those numbers came from and the sources were a bit sketchy. Can anybody who has used Gas Town confirm those numbers, or report their personal numbers?

Using regular Claude code I can generate 4k lines an hour. Using some bash I can generate 4k lines of code per second.

Lines of code per hour is a bad metric.

Can it solve a problem using production quality code that doesn’t take four times as long to review? That sounds like something I would pay $100 for.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#35

Post by root_axis »

rbtprograms wrote: post #8
mmastrac wrote: post #5

Serious question - there's a lot of fluff talking about Gas Town, but has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting? At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.

you can always fire it up yourself and see what its all about. in my experience it generates a lot of code very quickly, that code is probably only ever supposed to be LLM maintained, not by people.

> you can always fire it up yourself and see what its all about

I imagine it doesn't run very cheaply.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#36

Post by _pdp_ »

mmastrac wrote: post #5

Serious question - there's a lot of fluff talking about Gas Town, but has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting? At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.

If the post does not have any use-cases proving value then perhaps this is something yet to be validated, i.e. the burden on the users, not the creators.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#37

Post by peddling-brink »

solomatov wrote: post #7

Does anyone has any tips for starting with Gastown? I am comfortable with couple of agents running, but not yet comfortable with what Gastown offers.

Set a budget. Fund an openrouter account with the max you can stomach spending on this test and give it a shot.

At least, that’s what I would do, if I had any interest in testing out gastown with my own money. If my employer wants to pay for the testing, that’s another question entirely.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#38

Post by solomatov »

peddling-brink wrote: post #37
solomatov wrote: post #7

Does anyone has any tips for starting with Gastown? I am comfortable with couple of agents running, but not yet comfortable with what Gastown offers.

Set a budget. Fund an openrouter account with the max you can stomach spending on this test and give it a shot. At least, that’s what I would do, if I had any interest in testing out gastown with my own money. If my employer wants to pay for the testing, that’s another question entirely.

I mean not how to do it, it's not that hard, but how to be productive with it.

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#39

Post by drekipus »

rbtprograms wrote: post #8
mmastrac wrote: post #5

Serious question - there's a lot of fluff talking about Gas Town, but has Gas Town shipping something in public that can be evaluated without all of this surrounding hype and blogposting? At this point it should be clear that Gas Town has done something we can evaluate the value of.

you can always fire it up yourself and see what its all about. in my experience it generates a lot of code very quickly, that code is probably only ever supposed to be LLM maintained, not by people.

> that code is probably only ever supposed to be LLM maintained, not by people.

But LLMs are trying to mimic people. So if confusion is the human response, what's to stop the llm from acting confused?

Re: Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

#40

Post by shermantanktop »

blahblaher wrote: post #9
rbtprograms wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you can always fire it up yourself and see what its all about. in my experience it generates a lot of code very quickly, that code is probably only ever supposed to be LLM maintained, not by people.

I don't think the op meant Gas Town itself (if they did, my bad), but what has Yegge done with Gas Town? By now it should have released some amazing thing if Gas Town increases productivity so much.

What has Yegge done with Gas Town? Well for one, he has posted a bunch of blog content about it which has generated chatter like this and increased his geek mindshare.

Just because he's operating in the realm of smart nerds doesn't mean he is immune to the value-inverting effects of social media.

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