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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

#41

Post by swiftcoder »

causalmodels wrote: post #21
anonymous908213 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

> saying that Yegge hasn't built real software is just not true

I mean... I feel like it's somewhat telling that his wikipedia page spends half its words on his abrasive communication style, and the only thing approximating a product mentioned is a (lost) Rails-on-Javascript port, and 25 years spent developing a MUD on the side.

Certainly one doesn't get to stay a staff-level engineer at Google without writing code - but in terms of real, shipping software, Yegge's resume is a bit light for his tenure in BigTech

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

#42

Post by mahogany »

asadm wrote: post #25
anonymous908213 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

no that's not true. I rarely now write a SINGLE line of code both at work or at home. Even simple config switches, I ask codex/gemini to do it. You always have to review overall diff though and go back to agent with broader corrections to do.

> You always have to review overall diff though and go back to agent with broader corrections to do.

This thread is about vibe coding _without_ looking at the code.

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

#43

Post by pdntspa »

jrmg wrote: post #27
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…

This is also my experience. Everything I’ve ever tried to vibe code has ended up with off-by-one errors, logic errors, repeated instances of incorrect assumptions etc. Sometimes they appear to work at first, but, still, they have errors like this in them that are often immediately obvious on code review and would definitely show up in anything more than very light real world use. They _can_ usually be manually tidied…

I worry about people who use this approach where they never look at the code. Vibe-coding IS possible but you have to spent a lot of time in plan mode and be very clear about architecture and the abstractions you want it to use.

I've written two seperate moderately-sized codebases using agentic techniques (oftentimes being very lazy and just blanket approving changes), and I don't encounter logic or off-by-one errors very often if at all. It seems quite good at the basic task of writing working code, but it sucks at architecture and you need occasional code review rounds to keep the codebase tidy and readable. My code reviews with the AI are like 50% DRY and separating concerns

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

#44

Post by radlad »

azan_ wrote: post #40
anonymous908213 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

My partner is a radiologist and I'd love to hear more about what you built. The engineer in me is also curious how much this cost in credits?

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

#45

Post by ramoz »

I ran a similar operation over summer where I treated vibecoding like a war. I was the general. I had recon (planning), and frontmen/infantry making the changes. Bugs and poor design were the enemy. Planning docs were OPORD, we had sit reps, and after action reports - complete e2e workflow. Even had hooks for sounds and sprites. Was fun for a bit but regressed to simpler conceptual and more boring workflows.

Anyways we'll likely always settle on simpler/boring - but the game analogies are fun in the time being. A lot of opportunity to enhance UX around design, planning, and review.

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

#46

Post by mediaman »

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 harumph at it for being Unprofessional and Not Serious and Not Ready For Production.

I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn't.

Maybe it's because we also have suits telling us we have to use neural nets everywhere for everything Or Else, and there's no sense of fun in that.

Maybe it's the natural consequence of large-scale professionalization, and stock option plans and RSUs and levels and sprints and PMs, that today's gray hoodie is just the updated gray suit of the past but with no less dryness of imagination.

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

#47

Post by MrOrelliOReilly »

The author's high-value flowcharts vs Steve Yegge's AI art is enough of a case-in-point for how confusing his posts and repos are. However this is a pervasive problem with AI coding tools. Unsurprisingly, the creators of these tools are also the most bullish about agentic coding, so the source code shows the consequences. Even Claude Code itself seems to experience an unusually high number of regressions or undocumented changes for such a widely used product. I had the same problem when recently trying to understand the details of spec-kit or sprites from their docs. Still, I agree that Gas Town is a very instructive example of what the future of AI coding will look like. I'm confident mature orchestration workflows will arrive in 2026.

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

#48

Post by radlad »

pdntspa wrote: post #43
jrmg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also my experience. Everything I’ve ever tried to vibe code has ended up with off-by-one errors, logic errors, repeated instances of incorrect assumptions etc. Sometimes they appear to work at first, but, still, they have errors like this in them that are often immediately obvious on code review and would definitely show up in anything more than very light real world use. They _can_ usually be manually tidied…

I worry about people who use this approach where they never look at the code. Vibe-coding IS possible but you have to spent a lot of time in plan mode and be very clear about architecture and the abstractions you want it to use. I've written two seperate moderately-sized codebases using agentic techniques (oftentimes being very lazy and just blanket approving changes), and I don't encounter logic or off-by-one errors…

In a recent Yegge interview, he mentions that he often throws away the entire codebase and starts from scratch rather than try to get LLMs to refactor their code for architecture.

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

#49

Post by anonymous908213 »

causalmodels wrote: post #31
anonymous908213 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The 'experiment' isn't the issue. The problem is the entire culture around it. LLM tools are being shoved into everything, LLMs are soaking up trillions in investment, engineers are being told over and over that everything has changed and this garbage is making us obsolete, software quality is decreasing where wide LLM usage is being mandated (eg. Microsoft). Gas Town does not give the vibe of a neutral experiment but rather looks be a full-on delve into AI psychosis with the way Yegge describes it.

To be clear, I think LLMs are useful technology. But the degree of increasing insanity surrounding it is putting people off for obvious reasons.

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

#50

Post by mkl95 »

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…

OP defines herself as a mediocre engineer. She's trying to sell you Slop Town, not engineering principles.
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