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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

#391

Post by [deleted] »

JasonADrury wrote: post #386
victorbjorklund wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people do. There are people who genuinely think crypto is an investment. Yes, smart people knows it is just a grift and that it is just about selling it on to the next person before it crashes. But is it moral to make money on stupid people? Many people lose all their money on gambling even if we always known gambling is a loss.

> There are people who genuinely think crypto is an investment. Sure! Are those people buying bags.fm tokens? Probably not. This isn't even marketed as an investment https://bags.fm but a crowdfunding tool for developers with a casino attached. You don't have to be smart to read the big text on the website.

[deleted]

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

#392

Post by DonHopkins »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #322
wahnfrieden wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

More details on the pump and dump scheme he joined in on promoting and drew money from: https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/22/steve-yegges-gas-town-vib...

MOOLLM has its own official currency -- MOOLAH!

https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/tree/main/skills/economy...

The official currency of MOOLLM is MOOLAH. It uses PROOF OF MILK consensus — udderly legen-dairy interga-lactic shit coin, without the bull.

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

#393

Post by pxtail »

Treegarden wrote: post #369
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…

If your boss is that bad, the correct long-term move is to leave, not to wish technology didn’t advance.

Your boss and other ones who are asleep someday will wake up too.

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

#394

Post by perrygeo »

I get that Gas Town is part tongue-in-cheek, a strawman to move the conversation on Agentic AI forward. And for that I give it credit.

But I think there's a real missed opportunity here. I don't think it goes far enough. Who wants some giant complex system of agents conceived by a human. The agents, their role and relationships, could be dynamically configured according to the task.

What good is removing human judegment from the loop, only to constrain the problem by locking in the architecture a priori. It just doens't make sense. Your entire project hinges on the waterfall-like nature of the agent design! That part feels far too important, but gas town doesn't have much curiousity at all about changing that. These Mayors, and Polecats, and Witnesses, and Deacons ... but one of infinite ways you arrange things. Why should there be just one? Why should there be an up-front design at all? A dynamic, emergent network of agents feels like the real opportunity here.

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

#395

Post by wahnfrieden »

JasonADrury wrote: post #390
jaapz wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like victim blaming to me

It's not a scam, there's no misrepresentation. This very clearly isn't marketed as an investment of any kind https://bags.fm https://apps.apple.com/app/bags-financial-messenger/id647319... The tagline of the app? "Buy & sell memecoins". Transparently advertised as a crowdfunding mechanism using memecoins.

Yegge write a blog post for his readers where he called it an investment and hoped the investors would get “filthy rich”.

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

#396

Post by wahnfrieden »

JasonADrury wrote: post #387
meowface wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you'd be aiding and abetting a pennystock scam.

The difference between bags.fm and pennystock scams is that bags.fm is very obviously not marketed as an investment, but a crowdfunding tool.

Yegge write a blog post for his readers where he called it an investment and hoped the investors would get “filthy rich”.

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

#397

Post by wahnfrieden »

JasonADrury wrote: post #386
victorbjorklund wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people do. There are people who genuinely think crypto is an investment. Yes, smart people knows it is just a grift and that it is just about selling it on to the next person before it crashes. But is it moral to make money on stupid people? Many people lose all their money on gambling even if we always known gambling is a loss.

> There are people who genuinely think crypto is an investment. Sure! Are those people buying bags.fm tokens? Probably not. This isn't even marketed as an investment https://bags.fm but a crowdfunding tool for developers with a casino attached. You don't have to be smart to read the big text on the website.

Yegge write a blog post for his readers where he called it an investment and hoped the investors would get “filthy rich”.

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

#398

Post by storystarling »

jmspring wrote: post #268
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…

I think Steve's idea of an agent coordinator and the general model could make sense. There is a lot of discussion (and even work from Anthropic, OpenAI, etc) around multiagent workflows. Is Gas Town the implementation? I'm not sure. What is interesting is seeing how this paradigm can help improve one's workflow. There is still a lot of guidance and structuring of prompts / claude.md / whichever files that need to be…

I ran into this building a similar workflow with LangGraph. The prompt engineering is definitely a pain, but the real bottleneck with the coordinator model turns out to be the compounding context costs. You end up passing the full state history back and forth, so you are paying for the same tokens repeatedly. Between that and the latency from serial round-trips, it becomes very hard to justify in production.

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

#399

Post by chrisss395 »

Yes to Maggie & Steve's amazingly well written articles...and:

I would love to see Steve consider different command and control structures, and re-consider how work gets done across the development lifecycle. Gas Town's command and control structure read to me like "how a human would think about making software." Even the article admits you need to re-think how you interact in the Gas Town world. It actually may understate this point too much.

Where and how humans interact feels like something that will always be an important consideration, both in a human & AI dominated software development world. At least from where I sit.

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

#400

Post by falcor84 »

usefulposter wrote: post #5

>while Yegge made lots of his own ornate, zoopmorphic [sic] diagrams of Gas Town’s architecture and workflows, they are unhelpful. Primarily because they were made entirely by Gemini’s Nano Banana. And while Nano Banana is state-of-the-art at making diagrams, generative AI systems are still really shit at making illustrative diagrams. They are very hard to decipher, filled with cluttered details, have arrows pointing…

I generally am a fan of polished writing, but I do believe that there's room for quickly fired experimental stuff, and quite enjoyed this piece. With the speed he was going, I wouldn't be surprised if the system architecture actually changed in between subsequent sections of the post. It's not a scientific article, but just a cross-country runner at the top of his game giving us a quick update without breaking his stride, and I'm all here for that.

As Basil Exposition said "I suggest you don’t worry about this sort of thing and just enjoy yourself".

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