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Gas Town: From Clown Show to v1.0

steve-yegge.medium.com

41–50 of 183 posts

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

#41
post #36
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.

Corollary: if the post does have use-cases providing value, this is something yet to be validated and the value is just imagine by the author

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

#42

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 doesn't really answer the question...? You provided a quote from someone who seems to be an AI-boosting influencer who claimed to use it, but where's the output in the form of code we can look at, or in the form of an app someone can use today? I'm not an AI-denier. I use LLMs and agentic coding. They increase my productivity. ...but there is still a very real problem with people claiming that some new way of us…

I don't use LLMs and I never use agentic coding. And I too am interested in an answer to this question.

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

#43
Gas Town really feels not just vibe coded but also vibe designed. I looked into it, to see whether multi agent setups really made a difference, the entire design philosophy feels like it was « let’s add one more layer of agent and surely this time it will work » about 10 times in a row.

So now you have agents of type mayor, polecats, witnesses, deacons, dogs etc plus a slew of Unneeded constructs with incomprehensible names.

In one of the blog post for gas town I remember reading something by the author along the lines of « it’s super inefficient, but because you burn so many tokens, you still get what you want at the end! » clearly this is also the design philosophy behind this project, just (get your ai to) throw more random abstractions and more agent types until you feel like it kinda works, don’t bother asking yourself if they actually contribute anything.

This gave me the very clear feeling that most of the complexity of gas town is absolutely not needed and probably detrimental.

Ended up building my own thing that is 10x simpler, just a simple main agent you talk to, that can dispatch subagents, they all communicate, wake each other up and keep track of work through a simple CLI. No « refinery » or « wasteland » or « molecule » or « convoys » or « deacons » or …

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

#45

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.

I think the main thing he's produced using Gas Town is Gas Town itself.

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

#46

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 doesn't really answer the question...? You provided a quote from someone who seems to be an AI-boosting influencer who claimed to use it, but where's the output in the form of code we can look at, or in the form of an app someone can use today? I'm not an AI-denier. I use LLMs and agentic coding. They increase my productivity. ...but there is still a very real problem with people claiming that some new way of us…

Yeah if this can truly just autonomously make great software, then where is all the new SaaS that is able to undercut incumbents by charging 10-20% of what they are charging?

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

#47

[flagged]

Please don't post personal attacks to HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

Thoughtful critique is of course fine but there's no need to be personal, and it should be something we can learn from.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#48
post #34

An apt name for something doing it's part to spike energy consumption and accelerate the climate crisis.

The climate crisis is primarily a consequence of fossil fuels, not necessarily energy demand. I feel like its a poor conflation, despite it possibly being a truism depending on where the datacentre is based and what power source feeds it.

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

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love this. How did you implement gates? Are they simply tasks Claude itself has to confirm it ran, or are they scripts that run to check that the thing in question actually happened, or do they spawn a separate AI agent to check that the thing happened, or what?

Claude or whatever agent will get a message when it tries to close a task, which tells them which gates are not resolved yet, at which point, the agent will instinctively want to read the task. I did run into an issue where I forgot to add gates to a new project, so Claude did smoosh over by making a blanket gate, I have otherwise never had an issue when I defined what the gate is, Claude usually honors it. I havent…

Who closes the gate? Is it Claude itself after it runs the verification? Who makes sure the verification did in fact run?
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