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The age of Pump and Dump software

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Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#41

Post by Leynos »

order-matters wrote: post #30
Leynos wrote: post #17

Here's a counterthesis: This is people having fun with a new technology that is far from perfect, is full of unknowns, but is ripe for exploration and discovery. Gas Town itself is a piece of speculative fiction: throwing out a hypothesis as to what might be possible were inference to drastically drop in price. Its supervisor + isolated worker + merge factory approach is an experimental spike into how agentic coding…

is it not also one of the most logical approaches to experiment with first? it's loosely how I've been working with agents as well. I make this point to say, if someone were to try to claim this approach as IP we should expect it to be denied right?

I guess you could say that is perhaps why the suggestion made by the post being replied to doesn't make much sense to me.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#42

Post by noosphr »

Leynos wrote: post #17

Here's a counterthesis: This is people having fun with a new technology that is far from perfect, is full of unknowns, but is ripe for exploration and discovery. Gas Town itself is a piece of speculative fiction: throwing out a hypothesis as to what might be possible were inference to drastically drop in price. Its supervisor + isolated worker + merge factory approach is an experimental spike into how agentic coding…

I fail to see how anyone had fun with cursors Web browser.

Gastown is fun in the same way time cube is.

If it smells like bullshit and looks like bullshit there's little need to eat it to make sure it tastes like bullshit too.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#43

Post by Leynos »

noosphr wrote: post #42
Leynos wrote: post #17

Here's a counterthesis: This is people having fun with a new technology that is far from perfect, is full of unknowns, but is ripe for exploration and discovery. Gas Town itself is a piece of speculative fiction: throwing out a hypothesis as to what might be possible were inference to drastically drop in price. Its supervisor + isolated worker + merge factory approach is an experimental spike into how agentic coding…

I fail to see how anyone had fun with cursors Web browser. Gastown is fun in the same way time cube is. If it smells like bullshit and looks like bullshit there's little need to eat it to make sure it tastes like bullshit too.

You don't think Anysphere did?

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#45

Post by Uehreka »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #32
Leynos wrote: post #17

Here's a counterthesis: This is people having fun with a new technology that is far from perfect, is full of unknowns, but is ripe for exploration and discovery. Gas Town itself is a piece of speculative fiction: throwing out a hypothesis as to what might be possible were inference to drastically drop in price. Its supervisor + isolated worker + merge factory approach is an experimental spike into how agentic coding…

I don't understand why people see basic automation of the SDLC and think to themselves "this dude cracked the orchestration code" as if it's something profound.

I would not call this “basic automation”. I’m also not saying “this dude cracked the orchestration code” (you’re free to be mad at people who are, but I feel like it’s more interesting to engage with the people who aren’t).

I will say that Gas Town is the most maximalist approach I’ve seen to accounting for the myriad flaws of current generation agents, essentially treating them as cattle and seeing if something of worth can be gained from a sort of brute force approach. I think that’s interesting, and I’m glad that someone built a (somewhat) working system to show what happens if you do that, because no one has built something like this (in public) before.

Overall I think it’s way better to think about this as a big gift basket full of ideas. Take the ones you like, regift the almonds to your cousin if you don’t like them. If someone sees me eating Gas Town banana cream truffle and goes “ZOMG, I NEED TO BUY $GAS NOW.” then that’s their problem, as neither Steve Yegge nor I are telling them to do that.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#46

Post by fooker »

justonceokay wrote: post #6

The framing of the title makes me wonder what we as humans will think of software from this time 100s of years from now. Will the future be a complicated, dense ecosystem of interconnected intelligent systems, putting our current complexity to shame? Or in the future will we look at the current time as the Wild West, the time when software moved more swiftly than the law. Where oil was there for anyone with a big eno…

It would be interesting to see if there would be a market for handcrafted/vintage software the way there is one for luxury items like expensive watches.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#47

Post by potsandpans »

noosphr wrote: post #42
Leynos wrote: post #17

Here's a counterthesis: This is people having fun with a new technology that is far from perfect, is full of unknowns, but is ripe for exploration and discovery. Gas Town itself is a piece of speculative fiction: throwing out a hypothesis as to what might be possible were inference to drastically drop in price. Its supervisor + isolated worker + merge factory approach is an experimental spike into how agentic coding…

I fail to see how anyone had fun with cursors Web browser. Gastown is fun in the same way time cube is. If it smells like bullshit and looks like bullshit there's little need to eat it to make sure it tastes like bullshit too.

There's this saying, "you must be great at parties.

Not in a dunk style reply. Just more: you fail to see it.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#48

Post by jerjerjer »

dasil003 wrote: post #8

The “How it works” section is an absolute mess. Each bullet uses a different pronoun, so it’s not clear who the actors actually are and how this all fits together. How are the “crypto bros” who approach the “tech person” related to the “fame hungry tech bro” that vibe-coded the failed app? I’m sure there’s a tremendous long tail of scam attempts these days, but I’d be surprised if crypto scams haven’t already seen th…

> I’d be surprised if crypto scams haven’t already seen their high watermark in terms of actual victims.

NFT was the peak.

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#49

Post by NickNaraghi »

avaer wrote: post #37

Though I won't discuss specifics here, I've personally witnessed several of these scams firsthand from the inside over the last 5 years, to the sum of ~1 billion dollars -- it's not a new phenomenon, but maybe it's going mainstream. But I would argue this is as old as the tides, it's just been accelerated by: 1) effectively unregulated gambling in the form of crypto tokens, 2) AI acceleration that the average person…

Similar history to you. Finding this compelling: https://open.substack.com/pub/omniharmonic/p/a-regenerative-...

Re: The age of Pump and Dump software

#50

Post by Uehreka »

indigodaddy wrote: post #39
Uehreka wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? I’ve been experimenting with Gas Town, I’ve learned a lot of new ideas about coding agent orchestration, I haven’t given Steve Yegge a dime or touched any crypto. How am I being scammed? The article just seems like yet another “look at all the hype around AI coding agents! Since we know AI coding doesn’t work, they must be a scam!” but with a garnish of “crypto is involved in some ancillary way! So watch out!”

Well, accusation then, not indictment

I was more concerned about the “damning” part. I don’t think there’s a lot of solid reasoning in the article to point to any wrongdoing. If Steve Yegge and Pete Steiberger ignored this I wouldn’t blame them.
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